Composing Phrase by Phrase

A Second Prelude

Hello and welcome or welcome back to Composing Phrase by Phrase! It's time for more tone rows, yay! Gave the random tone row generator a spin and this is what I got:

1.1 Prime Row P(0):[G#,A,F#,B,C#,D,C,E,A#,F,G,D#]

Something I wanted to work on more after the last composition was to expand on the use of common tones between chords. In the previous prelude, I mostly stuck to using a single common tone connecting chords in a progression. For this one, I took the opposite approach - keep as many tones in common as possible and change only a single note. I didn't want, however, sustained drones. Not because that wouldn't be cool, it could be, but because it seemed a little too obvious for a challenge.

With that in mind, here are the first two chords of the new prelude.

1.2 mms.1-2

The chords are P(0):[G#,A,C#,F#,B] and P(0):[A,F#,B,D,C#]. The only note that changes between the two chords is the G# to a D. However, the voicings are quite different. Notes that are held in common don't stay where they were in the voicing. Instead, they are displaced by an octave. Here's how all the common tones moved.

1.3 mms.1-2 Octave Displacements

Sharp ears will likely hear the similarity between the two chords, but the feel of each is still quite different. Of note is the stepwise movement in the top and bottom notes. I'll come back to that in a bit. For now, let's just take a look at the sets in use and see if that tells us anything interesting. In measure 1, we've got, actually, the first five notes of an F# minor scale: F#, G#, A, B, and C#. In numbers, this would be {0,2,3,5,7}. For the second chord, it's mostly the same except for a gap in the middle and a slightly wider range: {0,3,5,7,8}. At the moment, this only really makes clear how closely similar the two chords are. I'll keep that in mind when we look at the next two measures.

1.4 mms.3-4

The first two chords use all the notes of the first hexachord of the prime row. That seemed to me to be a good place to break from the "all common tone" approach and set up the rest of the row. There's still a B used as a common tone between measures 2 and 3, again displaced by an octave from the middle of the chord. This makes me think it might be interesting to do a full progression of chords where the octave displacements cycle the notes through the chords, dropping out once they reach either the bass or the soprano or something. Might be neat.

Anyways, the chords are P(0):[B,C,F,A#,E,G] and P(0):[B,A,D#,G#,F#]. The addition of the G in measure 3 was to help give the melody at the top of the chords a sense of direction and rhythmic movement. Speaking of...

1.4 mms.1-4

Generally, the most important parts of a chord are the soprano and the bass, mostly because those are the most audible points. Inner voices are important, too, for color and for cohesion, but they tend to be secondary elements of the audible texture. I remember having a hell of a time trying to pick out inner voices during ear training class, anyways, and I doubt I'm alone in that. In any event, let's take a look at what the outer extremes are doing.

1.5 mms.1-4 soprano and bass voices

The bass is moving up by step before settling on the B in measures 3 and 4. This kind of bass movement is extremely common in tonal progressions and I'm happy to say this was not a happy accident, but a planned one. Or, rather, I saw the opportunity to do it and I took it. The soprano voice does have stepwise motion, as well, but it contains some small melodic hops that give the line a bit more arc. Interestingly, if we look only at these two parts of the chords, there's no reason to think we aren't in B minor or something.

Moving on, there are three inner voices for each chord. It could be pretty dense because of that, but there are two things that help keep it from sounding too clumpy. First, the music is played fairly high in the piano's register. This part of the keyboard has a nice clarity too it without demanding much effort on the part of the pianist. Second, all of the chords use an open spacing. There are no minor or major seconds used in the chord voicings. I opted instead for sevenths and ninths. There are also lots of stacked fourths, which have a pleasing static brightness to them. It's no accident Joe Hisaishi uses quartal harmonies a lot when accompanying Ghibli's beautiful cloudscapes and sky-dominated environments. Between those two elements, the chords have a nice openness to them despite being made almost entirely of scalar(ish) pentachords.

As far as voice leading is concerned, here's how I would think of the inner voices:

1.6 Inner Voices

There's a slippery bit between measures 3 and 4. From the rhythmic motive, it seems like the C in measure 3 moves to the D# in measure 4. I wouldn't fault someone for orchestrating that movement. If I look with a theoretical eye, though, it seems to me more like the C moves to the A. This creates an outline of an F#dim chord the returns to where it started: A, F#, C, A. Similarly, the next voice up would have its own clear unified motive starting with a whole-step down, jumping a tritone, then another whole-step down: C#, B, F, D#.

Of the three inner voices, that makes the third a bit more flighty, descending a major third, leaping a minor sixth, then descending a major second: F#, D, Bb, Ab (G#). Nevertheless, there's a good approximation of tonal voice leading principles here, where leaps are usually followed by steps in the opposite direction.

This combination of familiar processes (tonal voice leading) with less familiar harmonic content (dodecaphonic source material) creates to my ear an interesting quality just shy of being uncanny. It's a little bit like the moment one recognizes oneself in someone who previously seemed entirely foreign. But maybe that's just me.

Anyways, that's all for today! Here's the prelude in its entirety, both for your listening pleasure and in case you want to take a crack at analyzing it yourself. Either way, thanks for reading and listening!