possible to arrange them in any order. The same applies for the following 3 pitches, and so on. There are pieces of mine which don’t always use this system. I recently used it two years ago in a film and it worked really well. I’ve used it on several films. And it’s an easy way to move quickly if you need to. Some of your best music is often written quickly. Some of it is written slowly. For example, my Sinfonia n.7 has taken me four years. We have here a system where I’m now going to show you how it works. There are possibilities to revert if you wanted to work 7+7+7+7 and forget about 12. You would be in a totally diatonic situation, which is what happens in Corale II per Margaret for string orchestra. This will take the most diatonic approach. I must say that in the early days, and we’ll hear another example, the most wildly experimental music I’ve written up until now was written with these series. In Corale II per Margaret I tried to find new ways of using the strings. It is a kind of Piccolo Concerto Grosso where there is a string quartet versus the string orchestra. In a performance in the Tonhalle in Switzerland, the quartet was four Stradivarius instruments. This is a different series in which each one of the notes again represents a scale; G is a whole G major scale, and Ab is a whole Ab major scale and so on. This series is built exactly in this way. There is a change of one interval up, two intervals down, three up, one up, two up, and so forth, and the retrograde is the inversion. The form is a sort of Rondò form, but once again these are all phrases of a Corale. Each phrase is determined by the interval difference between the scale: the A material, which is plus one, is always the same when it’s plus one; minus two is B material; and plus three is the C material (Example 11) and then all is mirrored. Obviously if I have plus three or minus three, I’ve got different problems of getting from one tonal center to the next. There is a tiny change at the end of each phrase in order to get the phrase to sound like the same musical material.
Example 11. System of diatonic scales for Corale II for Margaret
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