88CET #15: Let's Get Musical

I thought I sent this one out a couple days ago, but it seems to have gotten
lost in the ether somewhere. Forgive me if you've already seen it.

Until now in this series of postings, I've dealt mostly with nuts and bolts
of 88CET: basic resources, notation systems, and pragmatic considerations of
mere existence in a nonoctave world. Now it's time to start moving a bit closer
to actual composition.

First of all, as I'll explain in later postings, you actually can produce
traditional harmony in 88CET, despite its utterly alien nature. But for now,
I'll concentrate on the underlying considerations of composition in 88CET's more
native nontraditional domain, differ from those of traditional composition.

Some underlying premises of composition don't change at all. The
compositional technique of inventing a melody and harmonizing it certainly still
makes sense. The harmonies end up different, but that basic approach still
works fine. Chorale-style block chords still make sense. The various species
of counterpoint still have perfectly good meaning in 88CET. Many of the basic
concepts of form, such as architectonic (hierarchical) structure and open vs.
closed form, still apply, but some of the more sophisticated ideas have more
complicated ramifications.

Tonality, Phrasing, and Cadences

Not surprisingly, chord sonorities are very different. You can't, within the
realm of nontraditional harmony anyway, pull an authentic cadence from Western
Culture's standard bag of tricks, to create the impression of finality, or the
deceptive cadence to create a surprise.

The obvious question to ask then, is how this affects phrasing. Can you
create a sense of finality or harmonic surprise through other means? If not,
then can you present the sensation of partial and complete rest harmonically, or
are you always in a harmonic limboland?

One fact is certain - people do have tonal memory - they can tell when they
hear a pitch repeated. Tonality does not have to be reinforced harmonically or
contrapuntally by tendency-tone resolution for your audience to sense a return
to an original pitch. I was surprised to discover that you can create the
sensation of a tonal center in absence of pitch classes. Beginning and ending a
rhythmically complete phrase on the same note creates a clear sense of return
(certainly at least, in the absence of other factors deliberately confusing this
sensation). Ending the phrase on the same chord voicing adds to this effect,
even if tendency-tone resolution doesn't reinforce it. Tonality can revolve
around a single pitch rather than an entire pitch class.

Similarly, ending a well-formed phrase on a different pitch from where it
begins will create a sense of modulation. But that sense of modulation will
only be a weak one, as will a merely melodically reinforced tonality. Releasing
harmonic tension at phrase endings strengthens a sense of tonality enormously.
Obviously I'm not saying anything new here.

Perhaps to some of you, the idea that I would concern myself with tonality in
a totally new domain like 88CET, seems pointless. Tonality certainly isn't any
sort of requirement, but it's certainly not pointless. It's a powerful tool.
In either case, exploring harmonic tension and progression is valuable.

So are there dissonant-to-consonant resolutions in nontraditional 88CET
harmony that can serve this purpose? Next time.


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