2 - Serialism

Serialism

This week's composition is a serialism based piece.
The guides for this piece were as follows

• create a piece of music using atonal row & it’s derivatives (inversion, retrograde & retrograde-inversion) 
• use klangfarbenmelodie (tone-colour melodies)
• no drums, untuned percussion or drum loops
• can use atmospherics and samples

Research into Serialism

"Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of post-tonal thinking (Whittall 2008, 1). Twelve-tone technique orders the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, forming a row or series and providing a unifying basis for a composition's melody, harmony, structural progressions, and variations" (Princeton, 2014)
Serialism is based on a set structure and is restricted thusly:

"Generally, a note used once is not to be used again until all of the 11 others have been used. A prime row is set up, containing each of the 12 notes in turn, in an order chosen by the composer.

• A row may undergo 4 different permutations, as follows:
• prime: the "original" ordering of tones and intervals
• retrograde: with its intervallic structure reversed;
• inversion: with its intervallic structure inverted (up instead of down and vice versa);
• retrograde-inversion: with its intervallic structure simultaneously reversed and inverted.

In addition, any of these 4 permutations may be transposed in pitch to any of the 12 tonal regions; thus there are altogether 48 different rows based on the original." (Tonalsoft, 2014)

Creation of Tonerow & derivatives

I began by creating a randomised 12 tone tone row. I then proceeded to create it's derivatives.

Prime

Inversion

Retrograde

Retrograde Inversion

With all the tone rows created and inputted into Logic Pro I proceeded to create a part using each tone row.

Parts

I began by creating the low end instrument which I would use a string section for and kept it's pitch at the owed end of the spectrum to give a low and overbearing feel to. For this I used Logic's strings plugin and the inversion tone row.

String Plugin

The second instrument to be added was a series of church bells that would be sparsely placed to add to the atmospherics of the piece. for this I used another of Logic's plugins called Digital Basic and the retrograde inversion of the tone row.

Bell Plugin

For the lead melody I opted to use two different instruments to differentiate between sections. The first choice of parts was the whistle sounds. I opted for this as the piece had begun to feel somewhat like Mark Snow's X-Files theme and I wanted to play on this more. The plugin for this was NI's Massive and the tone row used was the Retrograde.

Lead Plugin

For the final part I didn't want to stray too far away from the whistled so I opted for a high pitched "ooh" effect. This was also done using Massive and used the Prime tone row. This created a nice contrast to the whistling melody as the parts were the reverse of each other.

"ooohs" plugin

Ambience

I felt that the piece was lacking an overall glue to unite the pieces together so I opted to add some atmospherics. I chose an eerie patch within NI's Massive that had an evolving feel to it. I had found a twee within the patch that created a ghostly moan within the atmospherics and decided to automate it to appear in the quieter sections of the track.

Ambience Automation

To add even more to this eerie feel I also added a sample of a ghostly voice saying "I am death" that appeared just before the second lead melody was brought in.

Klangfarbenmelodie

To bring in elements of klangfarbenmelodie I used a transition between the lead melody, the bells and the string section. With the overbearing feel of the string section the use of klangfarbenmelodie is often very understated and has to be listened for intently.

Edit Overview

Compositional Narrative

I will admit that I did not enjoy creating this piece. I felt extremely uncomfortable with the restrictions placed upon composition by the nature of serialism. The piece ended up being an expression of my distain towards it. I found myself trying to make sections of the piece as ugly as possible as a way of defacing it, akin to scribbling out a drawing and submitting that as the final piece. Combined with the dark feel that this piece already had - the defacing only seemed to increase the uncomfortableness that this piece portrays. 

A Cold Day In 48169

I gave the piece this name as I felt it would be a cold day in hell before I composed using serialism again - 48169 is the zip-code of Hell, Michigan.

References

Princeton. 2014. Serialism. [ONLINE] Available at:https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Serialism.html. [Accessed 29 May 2014].

Tonalsoft. 2014. 12-tone method / serialism - procedure for music composition. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.tonalsoft.com/enc/s/serial.aspx. [Accessed 29 May 2014].