The Octatonic Etude

It’s hard to dance when you haven’t decided to waltz or tango

Students tell me what they want to work on the most is notation. They come with experience creating with sound on computers but are less practiced in notating their music on paper or in software. Notation stands in their way to composing freely, they say, like hieroglyphs to understanding ancient writing. And they are right. Notation is a form of literacy, which, like reading and writing, opens up a world of possibilities. James Joyce didn’t recount Ulysses sitting at the kitchen table, I tell them; he wrote it.

It’s a tricky thing to get students scoring their compositions, slow and awkward at first when they already experience fluency and control on their laptops. The last thing I want to do as a teacher is to stand in the way of that creative freedom. What to do? To get them started, I devised an etude, a composition with training wheels. I call it a guided composition, a bit like a guided meditation. The student makes all the decisions – except one; they must use an octatonic scale.

What’s an octatonic scale, they ask? It’s an eight-note scale, created by alternating whole steps and half steps. This has distinct harmonic possibilities but also irksome deficits. Specifically, there is no possibility to make a dominant chord, which makes conventional tonal voice-leading difficult. As they can’t use stock chord progressions such as I IV V I, they abandon trying to force the scale to obey what they understood to be the rules of harmony and instead must listen to their music.

Now that the student has the scale, the decision-making process begins. What’s the next step? Compose! But there are a few critical decisions to make before notes are on the page – all of which are easy and fun. What about form? It’s hard to begin to dance when you haven’t decided whether to waltz or tango. This decision gives rhythm and meter – a waltz is in three, and a tango is in four, and both have distinctive accentual rhythmic patterns. The size of the ensemble? It’s a duet or a trio – quartets are complicated, and solo instrumental pieces are best left to Italian Modernists. I sneak in another decision here by saying no harmonizing instruments. They may have had piano lessons or know a few guitar chords, but most have never composed for orchestral instruments. Clarinet and cello or flute, viola, and bassoon? The student begins to hear tone colors, and they consider instrumental combinations. These instrument choices bring timbre, range, and characteristic idiom. These boundaries create a clearer picture as the student imagines a performance.

Now our imaginary players are seated; the next step is to figure out the octatonic scale's harmonic possibilities. The octatonic scale is distinctive in that there are only three unique versions. No matter which chromatic pitch they start on, there are only three scales, unlike the 12 major or minor scales. The scale gives only four major and four minor triads, which, while rich in harmonic potential, leads the student to think of chords as connected sonorities rather than learned stock chord progressions. In other words, they use their ears to explore.

As the rules dissolve, curiosity takes over as they sit at the keyboard and play various chord combinations as if hearing music for the first time. Now they realize they need more material

such as a motif or cell. A motif is a 3-5 note figure, as in Beethoven’s 5th Symphony’s opening measures. This motif is the building block, like a cell in an organism, of the composition.

When the student begins to discover motivic ideas from the octatonic scale, they realize to their surprise that their ideas are not neutral. Like a cell, a motif may be a building-block, but it is not generic. As a cell has the information to become organs, skin, or hair, a musical motif comes complete with musically meaningful information such as tempo, dynamics, accents, articulation, phrasing, and expressive melodic intervals. They unpack musical intention in the form of
specific musical intervals, dynamics, expression, articulation, and phrasing from their playing, all of which are beginning to shape the composition’s character. Again, they are listening to their music at both their fingertips and in their imaginations.

As they begin to compose, students discover that much of the work has been done. There is an ensemble, a genre, a tempo, rhythmic character, harmonies, and the beginning of melodic shapes. Progressing with the composition – which essentially means putting together ingredients, is about curiosity as much as it is invention. And curiosity has a dispassionate quality to it which aids composition. Judgment is suspended, allowing for creative flow. The piece begins to compose itself, and the students can observe the process as much as they are making it happen.

Each successive step brings the material into focus. The student experiences a creative process as a series of decisions, which reveals several useful things. Creative choices may be arbitrary, but they are still generative in that once a student makes a decision, they are free to move forward. Besides experiencing a creative decision-making process, the value of the etude is that students sees that accepting and excluding material is achieved through curiosity, not critical self- judgment. And that leads to the real lesson – when you get stuck, it’s because you haven’t made a decision. That decision could be as fundamental as a form. It’s hard to be creative if you haven’t decided to compose a waltz or a tango. How often do we think we are stuck when we haven’t decided on the dance?