Drowning by Numbers

It’s that time of year: My usual speculative summer project is more or less done, and I’m starting to get serious with a clutch of chamber pieces that have been languishing in my “future” folder for some time. However, I want to try something a bit different with these guys, technique-wise, than I have with my last few pieces. Indulge me as I descend, Orpheus-like, into the underworld of provisionally prescriptive theory in search of my harmonic Euridice.

My usual modus operandi relies heavily on the construction of twenty-four-tone rows made up of double- or triple-combinatorial tetrachords or hexachords. This method offers very high consistency when it comes to interval content, especially when working in a four- or six-voice harmonic framework. Of course, this structure can be subverted in a number of ways; I often offset my tetrachords by one or two positions, for instance, to get chords that don’t have quite the same interval content as the row’s foundational pitch-class set. More recently, I’ve also been employing twenty-four-tone rows made by mutating “seed” sonorities using a kind of reverse pitch-space gravity to fill out an entire twenty-four-tone aggregate. (It goes without saying that there’s no reason you should care about these or any compositional techniques except in the context of successful pieces.)

This new technique, on the other hand, has to do with deforming seed sonorities—diatonic sonorities, in this case—in twenty-four-tone pitch space toward chromatic saturation. In some ways it’s not unlike the second method described above, but it’s divorced from the comforting orbit of a tone row; each of the transitional stages along the continuum of deformation has a distinct pitch-class profile (one may be [0 .5 3.5 7.5], the next [0 1 4.5 8], and so forth) subject to inversion and transposition. To be frank, I have no idea how this new way of working will impact the finished products; it will provide a much broader possibility space, but at what cost?

I’m less worried that the piece will become overly diffuse than that my thinking will become overly diffuse, that I will be overwhelmed with possibilities and the piece will lose focus as a result. In the absence of prescriptive compositional dogma, even a flexible system offers an easy and dangerous substitute for decision making. Unless the fetish quality of a “black box” appeals to your compositional sensibilities, playing “process gatekeeper” is an integral part of post-serial composing, and this means engaging in a constant mediation of technique and poetics. Necessarily, a new technique demands a new kind of mediation—and that’s the kind of thing that only experience can grant, I think.