An attempt to adapt the twelve-tone technique to an electronic track.
A friend challenged me to make use of my Mbira (thumb piano) that I got 10 years ago in San Francisco so that’s in there too.
Not qualified to tell if its really 12-tone but I can say it sounds sweet to me.
Well, I am...wish I was still in academia so I could drag this over to the composition dept at the U of I and put it on for the typical academic serialism wonks and say "YOU CLOWNS ARE DOING IT WRONG!!!" Nice job, sislte!
Thanks guys! Much appreciated.
I used the Buchla Music Easel drum pack made by 101 Things I Do. I love that pack, if I disregard the file names and what they suggest that the sounds supposedly are mimicking.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxrQncJUJ4YDeWwzSWwxdmstV1k/view
If anybody would like to try out the twelve-tone technique but feels that reading music theory is boring there's a simple shortcut.
The whole idea is that you create a row with all the twelve chromatic notes. One of each, so the row will be twelve notes long and has to be performed from start to finish before the next row can start. There are some mathematical variations you are allowed to do. Put your row into this tool and you get all the variations: https://www.musictheory.net/calculators/matrix (from left to right, from right to left, from the top to the bottom or from the bottom to the top).
Besides the aforementioned rules you are allowed to do whatever you want to the row. Instrumentation, rhythm, note length and octave is up to you.
Cool piece, well done! I've dabbled with 12 tone composition from time to time and it can sometimes lead one to create something very cool they wouldn't have though of. I also recommend that if someone comes up with a 12 tone row that is almost perfect except for one or two notes and you can't make it work, go ahead and ignore the rules and fix it! ;-)
Actually, 'cheating' on 12-tone is sort of 'canon'. Webern was the odd one of the original serialists in that he never did any fudging on rows/matrices, while both Berg and eventually Schoenberg himself were known to do so.
There's also another way to do this than the gridded-out matrix method, too. On "Euphony IV" (https://daccrowell.bandcamp.com/album/euphony-iv), I experimented with what I call a 'quantum matrix'. With this piece, there are several voices playing through individual tetrachords, two playing through hexachords, and a few more that were capable of playing all notes in the prime row, with all of the behavior being controlled through a generative system that still weighted the pitch classes equally, that being the key underlying criteria for the method. By doing this, in essence the generative process is accessing ALL points in a given matrix at once, but 'collapsing' the observation when the process sounds a note. The results were actually VERY satisfying; parts of it remind me in some ways of a 'switched-on' variant of the denser parts of Schoenberg's orchestral writing in "Moses und Aron".
Thanks for the insight, guys! I guess I'll have to start cheating.
Lugia: Euphony IV sounds lovely.
It's really interesting how that came out...it shifts like weather changing, which I think Schoenberg really only pulled off once, in the "Farben" movement of the Five Orchestral Pieces. Webern sorta gets there as well, but with his work being more rapidly-shifting and pointillistic, "Euphony IV" is kinda like a Webern record pitched down to -80!
