Composing, like architecture, is largely a matter of knowing what you plan to build. Understanding its function, the size and scope required, the aesthetic demands & limitations of those you’re working for – all these need to be known going in. It would be no more appropriate to write a 45 minute Mahleresque symphony for a grade school orchestra anymore than to attach a hangar to a quaint two-bedroom house.
This is a rather major concern for me, as I gear up to compose a chamber symphony for my graduate thesis. Questions of how long, how dense, how “serious”, how demanding pile atop one another unanswered. So I am devoting a post or three to these questions, as a way to try and work out some idea of what this piece shall be.
My initial attempt to figure out what I’d do was to look through old sketches and random scribblings for inspiration. However, I didn’t really pay any mind to how I would work the material. There is some jazzy stuff, some trilly bird-call stuff, some slow drawn-out harmony stuff, but it wasn’t until today that I noticed the only real connective element in it all. Modes.
Specifically, modes of limited transposition. Modes of artificial devising. Modes of limited usefulness but immediate affect.
Modes have long been an important musical resource for me. My Variations on the Merrimac for accordion is perhaps the most obvious example of this; it is also a teasingly short work – one theme and 7 variations, none more than 24 bars long. The Brass Quintet also had a modal basis, though other compositional parameters play a greater role in that one. For me, the appeal of modality is its ambiguous relationship to tonality. Like tonality, there is a clear sense of “home,” a judicious limitation of pitch material, a sense of order. Unlike tonality, “home” isn’t defined by tonic-dominant relationships, nor are modes so clearly European and utterly bland. If diatonicism is a swimming pool with trained lifeguards on the watch, and atonality a stormy sea, then modality is a little, slightly muddy lake where you can go skinny dipping with your friends.
Unlike your Dorian and Mixolydian varieties, however, modes of limited transposition lean more toward the “big stormy sea” side of the equation. Some are fairly safe (whole tone, “black key” pentatonic, and octatonic), but the ones I’m using these days are a bit more restless.
The first, which I shall call Hex1, is somewhat related to the typical octatonic scale in that both are built of half-step pairs (such as C – C#). However, in the octatonic scale, only one note separates note pairs (thus C-C#, D#-E, etc.) whereas the row I’m using separates pairs with pairs (i.e. C-C#, E-F, G#-A). Essentially, the notes form an augmented triad and the augmented triad a half-step up. Major and minor chords are available, as are leading tones, but Major 2nds are completely unavailable. Thus, melodic lines seem constantly wandering while harmonies are boxed in, immobile.
Hex2, the second of my little modes, is a rather more generous mix of minor 2nds, Major 2nds, and minor 3rds. A typical example of the mode would be G-A-C-C#-D#-F#. Divide the mode in half, and you may notice each group spells out part of a black-key pentatonic scale. Melodically, this mode has the advantage of increased flexibility. However, if one wishes to make tonal allusions, one will notice an absence of major triads, and only two minor chords.
This does not, however, mean that Hex2 is unfit for vertical constructions. Sticking with our mode on G, we note the black key region is a perfect transposition of the white-key region. Furthermore, either of these 3-note collections sounds perfectly consonant on its own. Sounding all six notes at once creates a sense dissonantly-related consonant regions – a simultaneous push and pull is exerted on our ears.
From this point, I posit that we divorce the two 3-note entities from one another, abolishing their modal unity and treating them as independent identities. By moving the two regions up and down the scale, either in oblique or contrary motion, new sonorities of increasing and decreasing dissonance are discovered. Before long, a chordal ostinato could be derived. With luck and patience, a progression with a definite starting and ending point could be developed. And if one or the other 3-note sections was inverted (minor 3rd plus Major 2nd instead of Major 2nd plus minor 3rd), a whole new world of possibilites is discovered!
Of the two modes, I find Hex2 to be the more promising. Hex1 is more intrusive on my consciousness: my improvisations commonly return to that mode. I feel both will play major roles in my next major work, as well as in any minor pieces I tackle along the way.
