In 1921 Arnold Schoenberg discovered a new way to look at melody...intervallically. That means that a note is not just a note, but is related to the previous note and the note that follows, and that its quality is determined, not solely by being itself, but also by being in relation to the other notes around it.
Schoenberg, personally, was rather an angry man and while he could have taken this discovery about intervals and chosen pure and strong, or pretty and sweet, intervals, he choose the most dissonant and difficult ones.
These intervals are called seconds (Secundal harmonies) and the tritone. The tritone is so disturbing that medieval monks used to call it “The Interval of the Devil”.
But Schoenberg was not satisfied with just being difficult musically. He also wanted to make sure that all the pretty music that had proceeded him, since a little before J.S. Bach, would be completely absent from his music so he invented a musical system where you had to play all the possible 12 notes in the scale before you could play them again. That destroyed an organizing principle called “Tonality” that had been around for around 400 years.
For three years of my life I worked in person, on the phone and in the mail, with one of Schoenberg’s students who became even more famous than him, a man named John Cage (See John Cage Stories Tab on this site). He was even more destructive than Schoenberg and destroyed Schoenberg’s new atonal system and replaced it with absolutely random notes.
After 40 years of thinking about what was appealing to me, musically, I emerged with those three central ideas: Secundal, random generated, twelve tone row music and for eight months I wrote twenty four two-minute Dances called the “Anger Dance Suite”.
Rhythms in 12 Tone Music
In the early 1980s I founded the very first Rock ‘n’ Roll school in America…The Atlanta School of Rock. I was also leading a three piece Chicago Blues group with two African-American men and a digital drum machine that Prince had made popular at the time.
I played Schoenberg for the lead singer one night. He said simply “Neurotic white man music”. This was 40 years before “Black Lives Matter”, but his point was well taken. 12 tone music’s weakness is its rhythm.
To solve this musical problem I have put these six atonal themes in distinctly discernible rhythms. This infuses the music with a physicality, vivacity and a sensuality that makes the music more openly invitational to listeners.
Improvising
Atonal Music
12 tone music, when it came out 100 years ago, was wildly unpopular. Besides being so dissonant in its practice that nobody liked it, there was no way that musicians who were not of the most educated, elite class of readers could ever begin to approach the music. But, eight months ago (11/8/20) I created a way that would make this music approachable to any intelligent, disciplined player:
The 24 Dances in the “Anger Dance Suite” are 62.5% improvisational making "Unstructured Events, Without Goals“, possible, musically.
As of this writing, July 28, 2021 we have had twenty one rehearsals.
I want to thank Scott Sterling, to whom I have dedicated "The Anger Dance Suite", Opus 1.
The following three one minute videos are three different improvisations on the following Theme #1.
