This is 1 piece in my Dream Sequence meta-work, consisting of a series of large-scale works. (Also including Dream Mornings for orchestra — completed but never performed, Le Grand Guignol for orchestra with 5 conductors — and Radio Dish, which I am now (2022) working on.)

A lot of my music, especially from the past 10 years, uses a variant of Stockhausen’s Formula technique,  basically laying out a voice-leading structure that guides the large-scale form of a work.  I also worked in a number of pieces with random segments of 12-tone rows, joining them together like pulverized fractal molecules.

The rows which underlay most of the Dream Sequence cycle are as follows:

Very symmetrical, late Webern / early Babbitt -style row, consisting of 4  013 trichords, arranged in old-school combinatorial hexachords:

A:   1 3 0    5 2 4    10 8 11    6 9 7

Another Babbitt-style row with the 023457 hexachord:

B:    6 2 11   4 3 1    7 8 10    5 9 0

I developed these materials when I was 16 or 17, still in the thrall of Babbitt’s theories of combinatoriality;  when I came to write this piece in 2013, they seemed rather boring. So this led me to the idea that one interesting thing one could do with these very symmetrical, repetitive materials was to juxtapose inverted, retrograded and retrograde-inverted fragments of them with each other.  Unexpected interval successions would then result at the juxtapositions.  Including  ‘aggregate-defying’ repetitions and lots of other interesting messiness.

Thus in the sketch below,  ‘9 4 7 5 11 1 4 10′  (the row at the top) is a juxtaposition of 2 fragments, from 2 rows:

A’:    8 6 9 4 7 5 11 1 10 3 0 2

A”:     7 5 8 3 6 4  10 0 9 2 11 1

Or this, the next row down,

11 10 4 6 7 2 5  2 3 10  4 5 7 1

comes from B rows:

B’:  3 0  8  1 11 10 4 6 7 2 5 9

B”:  11  8  4  9  7  6  0 2 3 10 1 5

B”’:  3  11  8  1  0  10 4 5 7 2  6  9

B””:   2 6 9 4 5 7 1 0 10 3 11 8

Below, then, is an initial sketch, showing the first chord of the piece, on the left, (which is essentially prolonged by the entire first movement, a ‘constrained improvisation’ on, in, and around the harmony), leading via these derived rows to the final chord of the 2nd movement:

And here is the above plan, written out (using Open Music) .   Note the ascending scales in 19-edo and 17-edo to spice things up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here is audio of the whole formula:

You can listen here to the complete work, and here to the 2nd movement ‘Les Noces’ variant—the 2nd movement is where the ‘formula’ is composed out.  (I intend to make some thorough revisions to the piece, especially this 2nd movements, on its next performance. In the meantime, I think the 3rd movement is possible the most succesful.)

There are many other aspects to the piece, of course.  I will add to this blog post as I have time.