I invented (discovered?) an exercise around the circle of fourths.

  • It explores pairs of “dissonances” over dominant chords

    • the 13 and the sharp 11
    • the flat 9 and natural 7
  • Tempo: less than 50 bpm (is all I can manage for now)
  • Meter: 4/4.

Left hand

Like the bass and tenor and alto.

  • only dominant 7 chords
  • around the circle of fourths
  • play on each quarter note
  • stride style, very simple
    • alternate root with 3rd and 7th above
    • so we end up with harmony changing every 1/2 measure
  • the only complication is
    • instead of just going around the circle of fourths
    • go up a major third first, and then up a half step
    • in effect including a “passing dominant 7” chord
      • for example, first C7 for 2 beats, then — not F7 — but E7 for 2 bars
      • and then finally F7 for two bars
      • then A7.. etc..

Right hand

Soprano.

  • follow the harmony of the left hand
  • play on each 8th note
  • play descending lines that last 2 bars
  • after each 2nd bar, jump up (a minor 7, incidentally) to the next 13
  • on beat 1 always
    • start with the 13
    • down to the 5, sharp 11, 5
    • (an “enclosure” around the 5)
  • on beat 3 always
    • start with the flat 9 (it will be a 2nd down from the 5 of the preceding chord, forming a smooth line)
    • then 1, natural 7, 1
    • (an enclosure around the 1)
  • after every two bars, jump up a minor 7th interval to the next 13, to regain space
    • this jump is what sounds fateful, Mahlerian, incidentally

Form

  • in this exercise, each of the 12 notes appears as the root twice
    • once in the “13 sharp 11”
    • once in the “flat 9 natural 7” chord
  • given a harmonic rhythm of a half note
    • this is a 12 bar form around the circle of fourths

There are parallels between

  • Bill Evans
    • the root motions follows the first four chords of Someday My Prince Will Come
  • Mahler
    • when the pattern gets going, I don’t know what it is, but something is distinctly Mahlerian, something fateful about the skips up in the right hand
  • Thelonious Monk
    • the authoritative dissonances, particularly something about playing 3, flat 7, 7 (resolving up to the 1) over a dominant 7 chord reminds me of Monk

Where was it that I read.. I think it was in Deryck Cooke’s The Language of Music (1959).. it doesn’t matter where, really. Music is just an arrangement of dissonances. Cooke was the one who completed Mahler’s unfinished 10th symphony.

My recent intuition has been that music is all about isomorphisms — all about establishing rich mappings of an idea across a variety of situations.

The style of this blog post is inspired by the writing style of Pradeep Soundararajan in his book Buddha In Testing: Finding Peace In Chaos.