About this work:
Since the advent of equal temperament, transposition has become one of the most common aspects of Western music. But although the word transposition has come to imply moving a piece of music up or down from one key to another, usually to accommodate the range of a singer, its implications could be much greater. In medieval times, tunes would sometimes be transposed from one mode to another, which highlighted different contours in the melody. And, obviously, before equal temperament, a change in key inevitably meant a change in the relationships between the pitches of a scale.
Of course, music can theoretically be “transposed” in other ways too. A slow instantly-recognizable popular tune might sound completely unfamiliar played very fast, and vice versa. Similar transformations occur when something that is familiarly loud is played soft, or something soft loud. Perhaps the most jarring transformations occur when rhythms are altered. When I was in high school, as a prank, I would sometimes turn everything I played at the piano—from Mozart and Chopin to songs by Gershwin and Cole Porter—into waltzes. It was irritating to a lot of people perhaps in the same way that Elvis Presley’s de-waltzing of Bill Monroe’s classic “Blue Moon of Kentucky” must have been to its very first listeners.
In 2002, I created a solo harpsichord piece for Rebecca Pechefsky called is 5. The entire piece was about the number 5: every measure contained five beats and within every measure only five pitches could be used. The resulting poly-pentatonic quintuple-metered music was a noticeable contrast to the diatonic, duple or triple metered Baroque music that surrounded is 5 on the concert program in which it premiered.
Rebecca's performance of is 5 made me wonder just how much of is 5’s musical essence was the result of its being based on 5s. What would happen if the entire piece were based on something else instead like, for the sake of argument, 7s? Septuple meters are as uncommon in Western music as quintuples, but whereas people locked in a duple meter groove might perceive of quintuple meter as adding an extra beat that doesn’t belong, a septimal meter might come across as dropping a beat. Of course, whereas 5-note scales are automatically perceived as conjuring some kind of orientalist exotica in the West (despite an abundance of very unoriental folk songs from Ireland, Peru, the American South, and elsewhere that are pentatonic), 7-note scales are the norm in Western classical tonal music. Yet, for some reason, the 7-note scales presented this way, sound equally exotic. The gamelan music of Indonesia, an ongoing influence on my own compositions, uses both 5-tone (slendro) and 7-tone (pelog) scales, and music created in one scale is sometimes “transposed” into the other, albeit on a different level than what has been attempted here. And thus was born is 7, another composition for solo harpsichord that essentially was a recomposition of is 5 in which every measure adds 2 beats and 2 additional pitches. is 7 is not quite a completely new piece, but it is also not is 5.
In is 5, a total of ten harmonic areas are traversed, each governed exclusively by the pitches of a pentatonic scale determined by the possible pitch content (but not the pitch order) of the name "rEBECCA pEChEFsky." These ten harmonic areas are in a total of five keys, namely E, C, F, B and A (with E as the tonal center of the whole piece occurring 4 times) and on each of these keys a different type of pentatonic scale is built, so that the music is not only always changing keys, it is also always changing modes. Since is 7 adds two more pitches to each mode, while these same 10 harmonic areas apply, E now becomes the key of E major which occurs four times, leaving six other harmonic areas for a total of seven possible modes which don’t always conform to standard Western modes:
E Ionian (major):
E F# G# A B C# D#
C Mixolydian:
C D E F G A Bb
C Mixolydian with flatted 2nd:
C Db E F G A Bb
C Mixolydian with augmented 5th:
C D E F G A Bb
F Lydian
F G A B C D E
B Aeolian (natural minor)
B C# D E F# G A
A Lydian with flatted 7th:
A B C# D# E F# G
is 7 is much more difficult than is 5, since despite 5s not being commonplace, they are completely natural. (We do have 5 fingers on each hand after all.) Anything involving 7s, on the other hand, despite the commonality of 7-note scales, is dextrally quite unnatural.
is 7 was premiered by keyboardist Trudy Chan at the Cornelia Street Café in New York City's Greenwich Village on July 16, 2005 and played again by her on February 24, 2008 in a concert at the Cornish School of the Arts' PONCHO Concert Hall in Seattle, the place where John Cage first prepared a piano back in the 1930s.
In December 2007, I created a final piece using this material called is 11 which (you guessed it) contains 11 beats per measure and 11 pitches, a chromatic scale missing one note. There are a total of 12 such 11-note aggregates possible, but since I wanted to maintain the series’ E tonality I avoided the aggregate eschewing E. The piece travels through each of these 11 harmonic areas, one more than is 5 and is 7. So in a real This is Spinal Tap sense, this is composition that really "goes to eleven." All three of these pieces can be performed separately, or together as a bizarre collection of variations called depending on what the meaning of is is. To obtain either a hard copy or a PDF of the score for depending on what the meaning of is is, please visit www.blackteamusic.com.