(Bi)Modal Total Serialist Piece

[Tatsu]

Chahapatadawa http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=12101318

Working Procedure
For this Non-12-Tone Serial piece I placed consonants of a person’s name around a circle with 12 positions for the 12 pitches of a one octave chromatic scale and possibly 12 events in a 12/8 rhythmic matrix. I also placed around the circle in a logical order all of the following ideas that would fit;

Intervals from shortest to widest,

ratios like 3:2 etc..,

note durations from shortest to longest,

articulations,

dynamics from quiet to loud,

time signatures,

starting positions,

chord voicings,

chord qualities,

embellishments,

chord inversions,

tempos from slowest to fastest,

melodic silhouettes,

accent placements,

instruments,

number of chords in a progression,

linear progressions and their starting chords,

functional progressions,

motive schemes like aaab,

second schemes like cbbc

Two chord repeating progressions,

Large scale variation techniques like melodic retrograde or unequal augmentation/diminution,

Small scale variation techniques like subtract from the middle of a phrase,
Rhythmic motives,

Esoteric modes,

Non 3rd voicings,

I didn’t end up using all of these ideas however.

Ideas Incorporated
I used the letters in the person’s name to determine a series of intervals that had been placed in order in the chart. The series I ended up with was P5, M2, P4, M2, P4, m6. I also got the pitches DGD#GD#Bb. I used both of these to create the melodies.

The ratios for the intervals ended up being 3:2, 8:7, 4:3, 8:7, 4:3, 5:8. So, for example the second section initially has measures alternating between 8/8 and 7/8 and later 7/8 and 8/8. At the end of each section I created a polyrhythm of the two.

Note durations resulted in a dotted eighth note, a half note, a quarter note, a half, a quarter, and a half tied to a dotted eighth. I used this rhythm to construct some melodic phrases out of the pitches and intervals.

I also had some rhythmic motifs no longer than a beat which combined to make a rhythmic phrase useful for combining with the pitches or intervals. These two different rhythms helped to create variety between phrases.

The different starting positions for phrases further helped to create variety between sections. I took liberties with a section’s second phrase to make it start in a different place in the bar than the first phrase to avoid boredom.

The first section got triads in second inversion. The third section got triads with added 6ths. And the fourth section got chords with 11 pitches 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 in the Mark II keyboard and 1 3 5 7 in the electric guitar.

The number of chords in a progression was also set at 3, 8, 4, 8, 11 for each section respectively. Instruments which get the melody in each section occur in this order; Mark II Keyboard, Bass, Rhythm Guitar, Bass, Rhythm Guitar and Synth.

The chords of the first section are first based on D Dorian #4, then on D Melodic minor b5. The second section gets G Aeolian #4 and G Melodic minor #4#5. The third section gets D Lydian Dominant #5 and D Melodic minor #5. The last section got Bb Harmonic Minor b5.

Another thing I used was to not only alter the phrases I had created using melodic retrograde and unequal augmentation/diminution (for the first section), inversion and rhythmic interversion {moving the front to the back and the back to the front} (for the second section), melodic retrograde inversion and rhythmic displacement (for the third section), plus isomelody and an even rhythm (for the fourth section) to create variation in the order of pitches and rhythms in the melody for each section but also used these same techniques to create bass parts.

The letters in the name also decided the tempos for each section 65 bpm, 95bpm, 73 bpm, 95 bpm, 73 bpm, & 116 bpm.

Last up, the type of accompaniment was decided; block chords, ostinato, block chords, ostinato, block chords, chords in a repeating rhythm.

Concepts Not Explored
I didn’t use the motive schemes like aaab etc.. .because the two existing rhythmic rows seemed to be enough when I was composing. In retrospect the first section could have used a little more variety because of its length. I also didn’t use the suggested tetrachords or embellishments since things were working out fine without them and I hadn’t create a way to decide where to put the embellishments.

I didn’t use the articulations or dynamics on each note because those are the first things that get lost in performance and raise the difficulty to the limit of human ability.

I also didn’t try to include substitutions for the ii V I, vibratos or bends.

Artistic License
Decisions that were not left up to this serial procedure were the rhythm of the high hat and ride which I composed to avoid the attacks where both the melody and bass guitar were already attacking.

The bass drum is two bars of the high hat’s rhythm played backwards.

The snare is placed as close to beats 2 & 4 if the bar were in 4/4 which it frequently wasn’t and only on the nearest resultant position created by either the bass or high hat.

The rhythm of the keyboard in the last section follows the high hat. The extremely dissonant clusters are the ostinato created by turning the drum notation vertically and playing it on the Mark II keyboard. I could just as easily have made the clusters diatonic to the key.

Concluding Remarks
Any relationship the melody has to the chords is entirely accidental but areas of tension, although not resolved formally, at least become resolved acceptably to my surprise. Actually there isn’t that much dissonance considering.

All of this is a fairly extreme example of lateral thinking/abstraction. Another example might be the FREQUENCY of letters in the alphabet could be correlated to the frequency that pitches, intervals and rhythmic patterns have in music. I’ve tried that one before too but the results were not as good as this.

Observatons
I don’t like the second inversion triads in the beginning so much. When the bass was given the melody, something I never would normally have done, the Mark II player’s left hand adequately took over the role of bassist.

When giving the melody to the rhythm guitar, something I rarely do, I gave the rhythm guitar’s job to the distorted electric guitar which created a nice enough effect that I think I’ll use it again sometime.
One parameter I hadn’t thought of was if sections abruptly change tempo and keys or if they gradually could make those changes.

The area where the bass has the melody, I’m supposed to use inversion or rhythmic interversion and there’s a spot where I’ve given the inversion to the left hand of the Mark II functioning as bassist which turned out to have an interesting effect.

Reasons
I’m married but the name I used is of a beautiful young lady I have an eye out for. Show me a man who can’t paint a woman and I’ll show you a man who isn’t an artist.

Incidentally Paul Klee has several serial works which could be considered visual representations of what I’ve done here.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt ... wCw&itbs=1

Serialism was partly the result of Post World War II distrust of what people were calling the decadent German chromatics of Romanticism because the nationalism, racism towards the Jewish people and the imperialist expansionism that came from Romantic ideas during World War II deeply affected people. Nationalism is a very dangerous romantic notion. Many people don’t know but Shenkerian analysis had been developed to identify music appropriate for the Third Reich.

Also, the frustration which late romantic composers had with an increasing atonality and chromaticism lead inevitably to 12-Tone music. But Total Serialism was the promise of a new utopia. However, the new found freedom also had its own severe limitations initially, so the ideas were further developed to get away from a strict order to rows of pitches, intervals rhythms etc… Other musically meaningful ideas were incorporated. The need to religiously stick to a series was reduced in importance but not abandoned.

Later Developments
Ideas such as set theory, group theory, operators and parameterization were taken up by composers such as Witold Lutoslavski (my Korean composition professor was an expert on him), Elliot Carter, and Iannis Xenakis and this really did give composers new freedoms they’d never had before.

It was initially thought that serialist ideas were incompatible with jazz but Lutoslavski had an idea about chord strands where an ordering of voices in a chord might be permuted in various musically meaningful ways for subsequent voicings of other chords as had originally been applied to tone rows which could also be utilized by the improvising jazz musician particularly keyboardists. Private experimenters have explored the possibilities of Lutoslavski’s chord strands but remained out of many musician’s and composer’s awareness until a recent publication brought it to light again.

The Future
My next project will be something based on set theory, etc… before finally moving on to Post-minimalism etc...

If you'd like to know more about serialism have a look at the book that inspired me to compose this piece:
http://www.books.google.co.id/books?...page&q&f=false

[samdbgt]

I don’t think the dynamics need to be changed from quite to load. This can cause an external interference that might result in the quality of the sound. But, if the frequency and the harmonics are altered to match the loud dynamics maybe it’ll work. This is just my personal view.