Composing Phrase by Phrase, 2-4

Ending the First Prelude

Hello and welcome or welcome back to Composing Phrase by Phrase! The past couple weeks have been spent looking at basic approaches to using tone rows for composing. This week, I'm going to wrap up the piano prelude I've been working on. I'll be using the same set notation as last time, if you need a refresher. Otherwise, here's the last few measures.

1.1 mms. 12-15

The first thing to note here is the use of rhythm as a motive. Measures 10 and 11 set up the rhythmic idea used in 12 and 13: a syncopated half-note, a quarter tied to an eighth over the barline, an eighth, and an eighth-rest providing a slight hiccup before the last sustained chord. For clarity:

1.2 rhythmic motive

It's worth noting that this idea of offset syncopations isn't an entirely new idea within the work. Back at the beginning, the main melody rarely changed pitches on the beat. In fact, looking back at it, if we're strict with the time signature, the original melody never changes pitches on the beat. In the second half of the piece, the off-beat rhythms are slightly less off-kilter because of the slower tempo and longer sustain, but it's not coming completely out of nowhere.

Moving on to the chords. The previous two measures used the inverse row form, I(8). The little pizzicato-like figure at the end of measure 11 briefly brought the E-flat into the musical figure. This was done mostly because it sounded right, but partly so that I could stay in the I(8) form while also starting the same rhythmic motif on a new part of the row. I expect this approach is an extremely important idea for achieving both cohesive composition and variation within 12-tone composition. especially if we're maintaining strict row orders for the work.

Now that the row has been offset from the rhythmic motif's first statement, the new chords are I(8): [6,2,0,4] and I(8):[3,11,9,1].

1.3 m.12 chords

The accented chord in measure 13 requires a little more attention. Three of the notes (D,C, and F) round out I(8). One pitch, however, doesn't fit: the E. When looking at the upcoming chords, we will find this E is pulled from I(9). This recalls the "row form modulation" used in the first half of the composition, which also transposed the row up a single half step. See, the first time, I was being lazy. Now that I'm repeating the idea, I'm being clever. Eh? Eh?

1.4 m.13 common-tone row change

The process is different this tine. Previously, we moved from one form to the next by finding overlapping subsets and using those to pivot into the new form. In this case, I'm just sneaking part of the next transposition into a chord with pitches from the previous form. The notation of this chord might be something like... I(8):[10,5,7]+I(9):[9]. I'm curious how actual theorists would notate this. This will suffice for now. Moving on, we round out measure 13 with I(9):[7,3,1,5].

Looking at these chords as sets, the set analysis would be [0,2,4,6], [0,2,4,6] again, [0,2,4,5] at the pivot to I(9), then [0,2,4,6] again in the new transposition. It's worth mentioning how much the voicing and changing pitch content of each chord influences the sense of the chords. Even though three of the four chords use exactly the same set, they don't quite carry the same sound. Highly trained musicians will probably hear the underlying similarity, but I expect it would slip past most ears.

Also worth bringing up is the change in set shape at the introducion of I(9) - it is all the same as the chords surrounding it except for one pitch which is a half-step lower, [0,2,4,6] and [0,2,4,5]. This recalls a similar chord shift in measure 10 which contains [0,2,6,8] and [0,2,6,7]. This is one of those happy accidents I wish I could say I thought up myself. But you know what they say: every time you write a happy accident, an angel grows its afro.

Moving on to measure 14, the first chord is I(9):[4,0,10,2]. The second chord uses a similar approach as above, including a pitch from an upcoming row form in the chord - I(9):[11,6,8,9]+P(1):[1]. For the last bar, the chord P(1):[1,3,7,9,5] is used as a kind of "pre-dominant" chord setting up the final [0,2,4,6] set. The last four notes (G,A,F, and B) are not the next pitches of the P(1) row. As a composer, I simply brought that chord back from measure 13 because it sounded right. I personally think this is what a composer should value most - their sense of aural taste. Not everyone will agree and to them I'll say, fine, meet me in the parking lot. Er, I mean. Agree to disagree.

1.5 mms.14-15 chords

Rhythmically, the last two measures fragment the rhythmic motif used in the second half of the composition. Measure 13 uses only the consequent part of the motif and measure 14 does the same except adds a little more space to allow the cadence to feel more like a completion. The last chord and its voicing sound to me a bit like a musical question mark (in English). I will say that I had Robert Schumann's "Entreating Child" from his Kinderszenen in mind with this ending... although it might be more like Pierrot asking for another tipple, in this case.

But, we've got to cut ol' Pierrot off. That's the end of this little composition for piano! I have more dodecaphonic music coming down the line, though. This was a really good learning experience for me in terms of what kind of things to look out for in composing with tonerows both in terms of what ideas are possible and in how to connect those ideas fluidly. The main thing seems to be finding clever ways of cycling through the row to access different harmonic and melodic possibilities while also looking for interesting ways of overlapping different row forms.

Anyways, I hope you found this as instructive as I did! Hope you drop in again next week as I start a new prelude!