Listening and Composing

Abstract

Long before I was a composer, I was a listener. Listening has always shaped my compositional decisions, and it has always been the primary influence on the evolution of my compositional techniques. The intense investigation of the nature of listening-in particular, trying to compre­ hend how I understand the music that I hear-has most powerfully molded the way that I write music. The music I like to hear is music that surprises and beguiles me. It is music that is unpredictable and volatile, and that resists easy categoriza­ tion. While the immediate features of the music I write intentionally em­ body the above qualities, I am deeply concerned with establishing a subtle, underlying continuity in my works. Specifically, I seek to imbue my com­ positions with a sense of harmonic relatedness. One way in which I achieve this is by imposing limitations on ways in which the pitch materials are organized. In tonal music, the perception of harmonic relatedness is linked to several phenomena: fixed intervallic structures of scales, invariant pitch­ class content within each individual scale, and different harmonic func­ tions of scale degrees and chords in tonal progressions. My music, which is atonal and chromatically saturated, does not maintain the invariant pitch-class content of scales, nor does it exhibit the harmonic functions characteristic of progressions in tonal music.! What my harmony does share with tonal music, however, is interval-class invariance. In tonal music, one can modulate from one key to another and maintain a sense of harmonic relatedness. While some tonal modulations result in little pitch-class duplication between keys, these keys are still harmonically related, due to the invariant interval vector of identical pitch-class set types that comprise their respective diatonic scales. A harmonic relation that results from shared intervallic properties of pitch-class set types informs the harmonic organization of my music. Harmonic relatedness is achieved through the articulation of parametrically defined musical seg­ ments comprised of identical unordered pitch-class set types and their unordered subsets or supersets. My works explore microtonal harmony, using an aggregate that divides the octave into twenty-four equidistant pitch classes. A twenty-four pitch­ class octave, notated in quarter tones, facilitates my use of set-theoretical techniques (adjusted to mod 24).2 Composing for acoustic instruments in