Composing Phrase by Phrase the 2nd

Get Set...

Hello and welcome back to Composing Phrase by Phrase! This past couple weeks it's been more like "Composing Measure by Measure," but I've been using tone rows to compose and those get involved pretty quickly. I've been focusing, as much as possible, on the basics of what's possible with this approach. Making a melody from the row, making dyads for harmonization, different voices performing the row offset from each other... Today, I'm going more into harmony again.

There's an important distinction between writing melodies from tone rows and writing harmony from them. With melody, the order is fixed by default. With harmony, all that really matters is that the pitches of whichever subset are present all at the same-ish time or so. So, a composer has a great deal of flexibility along a couple of axes - the voicing (the notes' order from top to bottom, the spacing between them, and which ones are doubled by another voice) and the register (how high or low the pitches are placed).

Analyzing this stuff can get complicated in a hurry. I'll be using two approaches at the same time. One will be the tone row analysis to locate the pitches in whichever row form is being used. The other will be set notation, which is a way to generalize collections of pitches that aren't just tonal triads. I'm sure there's an established way of doing both in academic settings, but it's been a while since I've been in a classroom, so I'm going to use my own.

For rows, I'll write the first letter of the row form next to the transposition in parentheses followed by the particular pitches in brackets. I'm also going to switch from just numbering the ordering (which, while simple for demonstration, is also imprecise) to numbering the actual pitches from 0-11 separated by commas. I think 0 is supposed to be C, but since I calculated my row matrix from G, that's what it's going to be 0 here. Sorry for any confusion, I'll look it up later.

For sets, they will simply be bracketed. Just like tonal triads have a closed root position, sets have a default ordering in which the pitches are stacked with the smallest intervals between them possible. For my purposes, the bottom note is then labelled 0 and the intervals are given a number based on the number of half-steps that pitch is from the bottom note. I know this is not typical, but I have reasons for doing it this way. Mostly, it's to clearly see how closely related any two sets are.

Oooooookaaaaaay. Let's look at the next couple of measures in question.

mms. 10-11

The new section kicks off with two sustained chords. Their pitches are drawn from the inverse row at the 8th transposition (in this case, Eb, a minor sixth above G). Their row analysis will give the pitches from bottom up. They are I(8):[6,0,2,8] and I(8):[3,9,11,4]. These are not, however, the chords' "root" position.

normalized chords

Now that they are condensed, their set notation would be [0,2,6,8] and [0,2,6,7]. From this notation, it's easier to see that the two chords are fairly closely related. Their basic "shape" is only off by a half-step. The ear can certainly hear that distinction. The first has an open, spacey kind of sound while the second has a tighter, sharper quality to it.

Speaking of ears, the voicing has an impact on how we hear the chords in question. The first chord is voiced as two tritones separated by a major second. The second places a tritone at the bottom and a perfect fourth at the top, separated again by a major second. These open voicings give both of them a broader quality and (I think) actually help emphasize their similarity compared to the two normalized chords. If you agree, it's likely because dissonances are softened by distance. A minor second has a more pungent sound to my ears compared to a major seventh, even though they are both technically the same pitches.

Moving on! After that, it gets more simple again. Two dyads in the right hand, I(8):[1,10];[5,7], carry the melody forward. At the end of measure 11, the left hand echoes the I(8):[5,7] dyad with a quick, pizzicato-like figure which wraps the music back around to E-flat (8).

Ok, that was kind of a lot for very little. This was mostly to help set things up for future analysis. Next week's post will wrap up the first prelude and then we're on to another written from a different tone row! Thanks for reading and I hope you learned a little to aid your own compositions down the line!