One Hundred Two and One Half - suite for piano (not yet)
20090806 at 17:16
One Hundred Two and ½ - Suite for Piano - for 88 keys, 8 fingers, 2 thumbs, 2 feet and 2½ pedals
N.B. “2½ pedals” refers to the damper, the soft pedal, and the grand piano’s sostenuto pedal.
This piece hasn’t gotten beyond the concept phase, but it did already yield some good improvisation.
In addition it helped me think a little differently when trying to work out a musical dialect. There isn’t so much one scale here, it’s more like one scale per chord. So passages that cross chords need to “modulate” to another scale for the duration of the chord.
Due to the symmetrical nature of the octatonic scale, this is not too hard.
There are really only 6 octatonic scales, 3 being different only in whether you start with a half or whole step. The octatonic scale is 4 pairs of [half step, whole step] or [whole step, half step].
As a practical matter, the 6-note sub-classes can be treated as 2 grouips of 3, one for each hand. This technique makes these scales surprisingly easy to play. Also, the scales really become extended harmony chords themselves, and end up blurring the answer to “what is a chord vs. what is a scale?”
You can hear some of that applied to the keyboard in the enclosed audio.