Composing with Tone Rows 2

Hello and welcome or welcome back to Composing Phrase by Phrase! I've started a series of mini-projects this time around, looking at how you might use tone rows to compose music. Last week, I set up the very basic basics - what a tone row is, making a melody from the row, creating simple harmony from the row. From that, I composed a phrase of music for piano using a row as a melody and using adjacent dyads to create a harmony for that melody.

There's a few directions we could go from here. The most simple step is to recognize that simply moving from dyad to dyad (or triad or tetrad or whatever) can feel a little jarring. It's like writing a tonal song with harmony built entirely from root position triads. It's fine, nothing's stopping you from doing that, but if you try to write anything longer than a 3 minute pop tune with that approach, it's all going to feel very... samey.

We can take a page from tonal harmony to help expand on the simple approach used last week - the idea of common tones. If you go to music school, chances are you're going to write voice leading exercises. This practice is largely about making harmonies sound as rich as possible, with as smooth a connection between each chord as possible for the sake of a choir's intonation (particularly if you have amateur singers).

A tonal progression with decent voice leading might look like this:

1.1 Tonal Voice Leading

Below is an example of using common tones in a tone row. Dyads are used for the sake of clarity.

1.2 Tone Row Common Tones

At this point, a huge number of possibilities opens up to the composer. One could maintain a single tone as a drone while a subset of the row plays out. One has great freedom in deciding which pitch is held in common between each chord. On top of this, a composer needn't stick to dyads or triads, but could use a mixture of chord densities for dramatic effect.

It's all a bit much, really. Figuring out a means of whittling down the massive possibilities is the primary concern of a composer using tone rows. I mean, that's honestly true of any music, it just seems much more obvious when working with dodecaphonic music.

With that in mind, I'm going to continue with the prelude introduced last week. Here's a short fragment of the next phrase. To review, pitches in rows are counted from 0-11 (you might also see the letters e and t used, but this is a different approach where each chromatic pitch is assigned its own number, regardless of row form, rather than assigning a number to the order pitches appear in a particular row form).

1.3 Prelude 1, mms. 6-7

In this case, the use of a "common tone" in these dyads creates something analogous to a suspension in modal or tonal music. That's not something that will happen with every tone row. It's an outgrowth of this tone row containing a sequence of seconds and thirds within it. You may also notice one of the pitches from the row enters a little earlier than is strictly should. Oops. Oh well.

Now. Eventually, you're going to go through a row and think to yourself, "Man, I wish I could do something slightly different." Which is crazy, because there's already a billion things you can do with a row, but it will come up faster than you might expect. What do?

Well, good news! You can perform some simple transformations to the row to give you access to a bunch of new possibilities. The easiest is to transpose the row. Just keep the intervals but begin from a different pitch. Here's the row used in this prelude along with a transposition, for demonstrations.

1.4 Row and transposition

To me, the question of "when" to use a different row form is a little less important than the "how." At least, it is now, since I'm not writing long form works yet. Again, I'm going to take a page from tonal harmony, this time looking at the process of modulation. In tonal music, if a composer wants to modulate from one key to another, the next most obvious thing to do after just plopping the music into the new key is to use a pivot chord. This is a chord which is shared by both the starting and target keys, but takes a different function in each.

So, if a composer wants to get from C major to G major, they might use an Amin chord as a pivot point. In C major, the Amin chord (vi) would typically set up Dmin (ii) as a predominant for Gmaj (V). In G major, the Amin is the ii, acting as a predominant for Dmaj (V) which would lead towards Gmaj (I). Here's what it looks like stripped of anything musically interesting.

1.5 Modulation from C to G major

In dodecaphonic music, you will find similar opportunities to pitvot from one row form to another. It will frequently occur that two row forms will share the same subset of pitches in the same order. These pitches can be taken as a pivot point connecting one row form to the next. Looking at 1.4 above, the prime 0 row shares B-flat, A-flat, and D with prime 1. Here's what I ended up coming up with.

1.6 Prelude, mms. 8-9

Had I been a little more careful, the order could have matched, as well, but I think it's probably ok to consider small groups of pitches as their own harmonic set (which doesn't care about order, just the interval relationships).

Regardless, I did what I did and used those three pitches to move from Prime 0 to Prime 1. I chose Prime 1 for two reasons. First, by pivoting with these particular pitches, it sets up a repetition of the C/E dyad but follows it with a different dyad (D-flat/F instead of D/F-sharp). Second, it was the row right below the first row in the matrix, so... Yeah. Here's the same two bars with the row and row counting for clarity.

1.7 mms. 7-8 with P(1)

And here's a link to the video again. It's short enough I don't think I need to do timestamps for this. Thanks for reading!