Deliberate Dissonance

My music teacher wanted me to compose a piece using just six tones (essentially, a mini twelve-tone piece). On the surface, it seemed like something that would be right up my alley, because it’s a type of puzzle. I tried it, but I quickly gave up. It was tedious, and it seemed like an awful lot of work to put into something that was going to sound random and discordant, as all atonal music does. Twelve-tone is written according to a formula, which makes it pretty much the type of music that a computer would write, and a computer could do it much more efficiently than I could. It’s the perfect job for AI, not for me.

But my teacher seemed so disappointed when I didn’t bring him a 6-tone piece that I decided to meet him halfway. I started writing a piece in four parts, each part using the six-tone series as a jumping-off point and deliberately including dissonant sounds. I’m still working on it, but he liked the early versions of the four parts. In fact, after I played the first part for him the first time, he joked that he was going to start addressing me as “frau” (Shoenberg, the composer who developed the twelve-tone technique, famously said, “I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.”).