Pianist Randall Hodgkinson performs SIX AND A HALF PIANO PIECES, Op. 8, by Gary Lloyd Noland. Brief cameo appearance by the composer at the end of #6 (Proverb). Titles of pieces are: 1) Allegro, 2) Kirchnerism, 3) Sinfonia, 4)Allemande, 5) Canon, 6) Proverb, 6 1/2)Aaeeetta Garrlicca!!! This set of pieces was recorded at the home of Paul Matisse (grandson of Henri Matisse and stepson of Marcel Duchamp) in Groton, MA, just outside of Boston in November, 1987.

SIX AND A HALF PIANO PIECES, Op. 8 (1986)

OM-EИ (2011/2023)
for solo piano

This piece was my first experiment using the twelve-tone technique (also known as dodecaphony), an influential compositional approach that rose to great prominence throughout the twentieth century but has largely been set aside by modern composers. By only using all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale (all the notes within an octave) in a fixed order and not repeating any pitches before the full list has been expended, practitioners of the technique attempted to forge new musical grammars and cast off the hierarchies of common-practice harmonic syntax they had inherited from centuries of composers that came before. This often-rigid ordering of pitches in “tone rows” still provided room for permutation (and therefore, intellectual complexity), through presenting rows in reverse, inverting the intervals within (making all upward movement go down, for example), or transposing the row to start on a different pitch but still proceeding through the same order of intervals. The rules of counterpoint, tonal centres, and conventional chord relationships that defined Western art music from the Baroque period to that point were intentionally being cast aside, the culturally accumulated standards of consonance and dissonance being flattened. This initial framework spawned many streams of compositional practice from the mid-century on, known widely now as “serialism.”

The prompt that generated this specific piece was to write a short solo work for piano using said twelve-tone technique. We were permitted to choose our own tone row and employ its permutations how we saw fit. My personal intent was to explore how a conventional tune (often birthed from a traditional harmonic framework) could still be expressed within the twelve-tone idiom. From my limited understanding of what was possible in this system at the time, I set forth interweaving rows – some inverted, transposed, and/or presented in retrograde – with the goal of perserving a traditional melody throughout and allowing new harmonies to emerge from this tapestry. As with the turbulence I experienced with my preceding microtonal violin piece, my challenges to bring this idea to fruition resulted in what was ostensibly just a plan for the arrangement of the tone rows, without much attention to other musical dimensions. The main criticism I received on my submitted draft was that I used a very restricted range of the instrument. It was left as mostly a sketch, and I never made it to the class where we got to hear these compositions read through by an actual pianist. 

On revisiting this piece recently, I finally fleshed out the texture and character that I had always intended, indicated primarily by my original marking of a “moderate rag” tempo and style. With the familiar tune still present throughout, the composition has become a bit of a piano showpiece, perhaps a fun encore to a recital. 

As for my relationship to twelve-tone composition: like many, I now appreciate that its framework for organizing pitch and the manipulations used to elaborate within that system suffer from being opaque to perception by the listener, especially those not versed in the theoretical underpinnings of the style or the particular work at hand. Most people cannot identify that a tone row has been repeated – let alone in reverse or with its intervals flipped upside down – and the complexity of how these processes are then superimposed and woven together cannot be casually appreciated without that foundation, especially on first hearing (assuming a listener might grant a second). Expect an upcoming follow-up that will explore this a little further. With that in mind, the sonic palette that twelve-tone composition can create remains fruitful and still free of the trappings of classical harmony that permeate much of modern music today – it is yet another tool of expression, to be kept in the back pocket for when the need arises.

OM–EИ (2011/2023)

OM-EИ (2011/2023)
for chamber ensemble (flute, E-flat clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, percussion, banjo, violin, contrabass)

This composition is a reimagining of an earlier twelve-tone piece for solo piano (based itself on a traditional tune), instead using the diverse colours of a ragtime orchestra-type of ensemble to reinforce the syntax of the serial harmonic language. Here, the timbres of the different instruments help highlight the individual tone rows that weave together to form the pitch information of the piece, in hopes that these processes might become more transparent to the listener (beyond a certain superficial point, I am skeptical).

Version Notes:  This playback demo was created using MuseScore 4 and the Muse Sounds, MS Basic, and SINEfactory Dynamo libraries.

OM-EИ (2011/2023) for ensemble

The aggregate contains six tritones, 0-6, 1-7, etc.
In 1-out-of-64 rows, the PCs of each tritone sound in just that order.
Then perhaps also the time-point gap between PCs 0 and 6 is smaller than the gap between 1 and 7, etc.  

This piece is made up all of the 957 rows that meet all these requirements.

Specifying the gaps between the tritones, one has a kind of jigsaw puzzle: to find a row with exactly those tritone time gaps.  

Sometimes such a puzzle has no solutions (for example when the sum of the gaps is odd).  

With gaps 1-2-3-4-5-7 one finds 38 solutions, the most, and these begin the piece; with gaps 1-3-5-7-9-11 one finds 1 solution, the least if not zero, and that row ends the piece.  Between, all the rows occur organized according to which puzzle they solve, the puzzles ordered so that the number of solutions weakly decreases.

With each statement, each tritone gets its own octave.

If one has the ear for it, one can attend to these details, or else just take in the energy of it all.  I would like this to looking at a descriptive picture either as a visit to a virtual 3D place (e.g. a fictive city street, mountainside room) or as a decorated planar region, typically bounded by a rectangle.  When musicians talk about "movement" and "line" and "implications," that's happening the musical equivalent of virtual space.  In reality, notes and sounds find all their places by compositional fiat and don't actually generate or cause one another.

The cover image more or less encodes the score.

Rational Exuberance (Not Your Grandparents' Twelve-Tone Music VI), for organ and piano

There are 362,797,056 ways to partition a three octave span into three aggregates.  Once you do so, reading each aggregate from low to high, you get three 12-tone rows.  If you further require that those rows feature at least 7 distinct interval classes, the 362,797,056 possibilities reduce to just 46.  One of those 46 possibilities plays the role here of a passacaglia-like chord progression.  

There are 144 ways to have three triads sit within the aggregate without any overlap.  Remarkably, one can cycle through those possibilities so that each step turns up just one new triad.  Such a cycle provides the figuration for the variations. 

The overall effect produces a counterpoint between two opposing notions of harmonic rhythm, one based on the cycle of aggregates, and one based on the the featured triads.

A Friendly Accord between Aggregates and Triads, for guitar

Another thing written for Music Theory, we had been shown Webern's Passacaglia a bit before we were assigned twelve tone, so my idea was to make Webern's piece, but twelve tone. However, I was going through a dark time mentally and so the email sent to the Professor reads as follows: "This went from making Webern's Passacaglia but 12-tone to throwing the mental state I've had for a week and a half onto Sibelius. Hope you like it!" I don't think I'm ever touching twelve tone ever again. 

A Discordant Mind - 12 Tone Passacaglia

12 tone WIP

This is an unfinished collection of tracks, mostly demos of unpolished grooves, progressive disco, and contemptuously classical, a few since released as singles, that I had planned to have completed by my Dad's birthday in 2022, then 2023, then 2024, but life keeps on getting in the way, so I'm releasing this "as is" lest it becomes a lost ark in my discography. 

Listen or don't.

Apostolatus (   *   )

Zappacrite: IV (unfinshed)

Zappacrite: I-III

Hoodtrap x Schoenberg Prelude from Suite for Piano, Op.25

Composer, mathematician, visual artist. 
Seeks collaboration with performers and choreographers.

Please don't spam this account!

Composer from Missouri, makes mostly classical orchestral, but starting to try other things

Resides in Portland, Oregon. Grew up in Berkeley, CA. Born in Seattle.  PhD, Harvard. “Gary Noland is one of the great composers of the 21st century.”—JACK RUMMEL, KGNU 88.5 FM, Boulder CO, “...iconoclastic, stylistic potpourri standards of giddy humor, no holds barred soup to nuts and high spirits.”—ROBERT LEVIN, pianist, musicologist, composer, "...a fleet-fingered, ebullient performer ... bright, witty and engaging.”—CHRISTIAN CAREY, SPLENDID MAGAZINE, “...distinctive, inventive ... subversive ... You can hardly be indifferent to Noland’s music and so I would urge you to try it.” —ROGER BLACKBURN, MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL, “...set in a dizzying harmonic language that loops uncontrollably through a wide-ranging gamut of possible and impossible tonalities ... The general effect is like watching wet paintings of 19th Century musical memorabilia drip into frazzled 21st Century oblivion...” —ALLEN GIMBEL, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, “Mr. Noland writes as a ‘time traveler’ in styles long abandoned by most composers as well as styles so new as to not have been imagined but by him. This he accomplishes naturally, convincingly, with originality and true passion. His command of all musical languages and his ability to traverse musical time is nothing less than remarkable. Listen!”—DONALD MARTINO, Pulitzer Prize winning composer, “...mind-bending spiraling of focus which is truly breathtaking ... spectacular...”—CHARLES AMIRKHANIAN, composer, sound poet & radio producer, “I'm amazed at your harmonic skill. Haven't seen or heard anything like it from any one else—except yours truly—certainly not from your generation. It falls somewhere between Strauss and Mahler. Especially like how you are able to slip in and out from the tonal to the atonal—or near atonal...”—GEORGE ROCHBERG, American composer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, “...court jester to the classical establishment...”—PAYTON MACDONALD, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, “...florid and juicy...” —RICHARD BUELL, THE BOSTON GLOBE, “...an incredible aural web ... a great ostinato of American kitsch. Sul pont never sounded so good.”—RUSSELL STEINBERG, composer, conductor of the LOS ANGELES YOUTH ORCHESTRA, “...I am bowled over by the expertise of your music: you use certain elements from the 19th century and from jazz, etc., and just at the moment when I am about to say, OK, what else is new?, you do a number of things, such as speeding up, becoming wildly dissonant, modulating to a distant continent, stopping completely and throwing some kind of total surprise ... you seem to know exactly when to do what and how much. I don’t know anybody else who can do it!” —ANDREW IMBRIE, American composer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, “... remarkable stuff...”
—MAX MORATH, American ragtime pianist, composer, actor & author, “...a loony composer from Oregon...” —MAX SHEA, WMUA 91.1FM, Amherst, MA, “Gary Noland is one of those 21st Century composers seeking to forge a new aesthetic based on older models that do not traffic in serialism or minimalism ... Zany waltzes, ragtime riffs, chorales, toccatas, and much else romp and tear through these depictions of superheroes and villains from his ‘chamber novels’; other pieces spoof serial music ... to grand operas ... and Jewish guilt.” —JACK SULLIVAN, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, “...Paranoid Ravel...”—ALEX DUNN, KZSU FM90.3, Stanford, CA, “...It’s a romantic romp, rhythmically robust yet melodically flirting with the nostalgia of cabaret, minus the sleazy diminution of spilled drinks and smelly ashtrays. Its elegance recalls Elgar, and the serious sides, a synthesis of those strange bedfellows Schubert and Ives. Composers hate it when their music reminds you of someone else’s, but writing within a tradition, Noland has incorporated divergent styles that, woven together, work. Cosmopolitan without snobbery, it’s intelligent, pleasurable and convincing.” —ROCKY LEPLIN, THE BERKELEY VOICE

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Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist, composer and music educator with diverse roots in classical, jazz and contemporary art music, as well as street performance and musical theatre. Frequently juggling a unique array of saxophones, bassoons, and clarinets (even cello) within a single performance, he has performed alongside ensembles from across southern British Columbia, including the Victoria Symphony, Theatre Under the Stars Vancouver, and as a founding member of the BT Williams Quartet. Whitehorne earned a Bachelor of Music from the University of Victoria in 2018 and currently pursues academic research into music, language, and the brain, as part of graduate studies in psychology. As a composer, his output includes works for solo musicians, chamber ensemble and larger forces. Whitehorne has often been heard in an eclectic mix of venues around Victoria, from the Royal Theatre to the Inner Harbour causeway, passionate about sharing fresh, engaging music with new audiences.

New tracks tagged #Twelve-Tone