Tone Row

A few weeks ago Michelle was watching a video online by that girl who does those online videos about Fibonacci numbers and fractal dragons, but this one was about Schoenberg-style tone rows. I was exposed to serailism in college, but never thought it was particularly tuneful or interesting, although I must say the girl did a really haunting Mary Had a Little Lamb based on the idea. Anyway Michelle and I had a good discussion about music theory and composing, and I gave her a few straight triadic ideas to play around with.

Recently I’ve been going updating my web site so the whole thing uses style sheets. This is a long overdue endeavor and I’ve dusted off some old pages I haven’t looked at in a long time. One was about The Perfect Shuffle, so naturally I wrote a tone row based on the perfect shuffle sequence of a twelve-card deck. I kinda always thought all tone rows were more or less the same, but I played this one on the piano and it sounds pretty compelling. It goes like this:

C Db Eb G D F B Bb Ab E A F#

It has the interesting property that the second half of the pattern is the same as the first half, but flipped upside down. It also has the property that the intervals between the notes are pretty varied from narrow to wide. In fact I think just about every interval from a semitone to a Major7 appears once, and a tritone appears twice.

Now I’m thinking about how to use this riff compositionally. One idea is to generate a bunch more patterns based on perfect shuffles of different sized decks, and arrange them into a kind of phase fugue. I wonder how that would be to listen to.

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