Day 16 : ~Re

Day 16 : ~Re

I sat down behind the Vose at 7am.

I close my eyes.

Practice begins.

I checked the position of the bench & felt my hip bones find their balance point at its edge.

Then I anchor the sides of the left & right feet near their respective pedals.

I stack the spine & shoulders.

I breathe in as I reach out across the key surface.  

On the out breath I bring my hands to center & instantly feel the contours of 3 (left = low, white) & 3 (right = high, black)  

I strike the key under the middle finger of my left hand.  D.

I strike the key under the middle finger of my right hand, a key whose tone 500 years of conventional music theory confoundingly can not seem to definitively name.  The best conventional music theory gives us for this tone is two inextricably contextual names: G#/Ab.  Thus my departure from everything that follows, which is most all conventional music theory.

Audiation requires tonal objectification.  Giving tonal building blocks unique labels is the one requirement in order to audiate.  I use a highly consistent modified solfege system mostly for its brevity.  I prefer most of all to thing in terms of the color code which makes the labels even more transparent.     

So when I chose here to audiate I don’t audiate the tritone D, G#/Ab.  How long does it take a musician to even see the tritone using that nomenclature

I simply audiate Re, ~Re.

& from there I can see & feel everything.  Every scale, mode, chord, progression, half step, whole step.  It’s a bit like looking at the map of the New York City subway system, or the directory stand at any large shopping mall.  There a lot of options overall, but whatever you are looking for is never far from wherever you are.  

I play the melody Do, Re, Mi (C, D, E).  I listen to it.  I compare how it sounds to how I audiated it before I played it.

I play the melody ~Do, ~Re, ~Mi (F#/Gb, G#/Ab, A#/Bb <— look how poorly these names work in practice)

I play ~Do, ~Re, ~Mi.  I listed to it.  I compare how it sounds to how Do, Re, Mi, sounded.

I play Do, Re, Me again noticing the sound has forced me back into this previously inhabited tonality.

Then, playing ~Do, ~Re, ~Mi again instantly shatters that tonal reality, by the process of reestablishing the former. 

I do this again & agian. Using breath, rhythm, sustain, una corda.  

It a tonal fire works show.  Tonalities (mental expectations about the music in the room) bursting into being & then colliding with their exact (+,- pi radian) opposites.

The experience is less modulatory & more tonal ballistics - not to mention super fun.  Definitely something that can be used as a demonstration of creating (& destroying) tonal expectations - perhaps even for beginners.

I play Do, Re, Mi again & listen to it.  I play a few melodic patterns using these three tones.  

Then I notice something about my three anti-pentatonic tones.  If I only play ~Do or ~Mi, the tonality of the other three is not entirely erased.  Each one adds just one tritone which only serves to more precisely define the three given pitches (C, D, E) as follows:

(Do + Re + Mi + ~Do)_C = (Fa, Sol, La, Ti)_G

& 

(Do + Re + Mi + ~Mi)_C = (Sol, La, Ti, Fa)_F

I play melodic sequences that demonstrate how the presence of one or the other tritone collapses the possibility into one of the three most closely related key centers.

Playing ~Re is different.  If I audiate C, D, E as Do, Re, Mi the sustained sound of ~Re (the tone a tritone away from ~Re) alone is enough to completely eradicate the feeling that C = Do, D = Re, E = Mi.  

Likewise if I try to audiate the three black key group as Do, Re, Mi, firmly sounding it’s ~Re shatters that tonal expectation set instantly. 

These six tones together of course accumulate into one phase of the whole tone scale.

I roll the whole tone scale in figure eights. 

I can also see how the assumption as to the polarity of the white key tritone ( B & F ) Is what determines which notes are become the pentatonic & which then become the anti-pentatonic.

If B = Ti, F = Fa, 

then 

C = Do

D = Re

E = Mi

G = Sol

A = La

& 

Gb = ~Do

Ab = ~Re

Bb = ~Mi

Db = ~Sol

Eb = ~La

If B = Fa, F = Ti, 

then   

Gb = Do

Ab = Re

Bb = ~Mi

Db = Sol

Eb = La

&

C = ~Do

D = ~Re

E = ~Mi

G = ~Sol

A = ~La

I improvise freely & dynamically safely within the confines of one tonal orientation.  Then I touch the ~Re & listen to it shatter.  Then I lean into the ~Re choice & listen as its associated pentatonic assumes the tonal foreground.  Going back & forth like this, it isn’t long before my anticipatory audiation learns to hear ~Re in context even before I sound it.  

My fingers, hands, wrists & arms have never felt more fluent on the key surface.  After two weeks of mostly silent, mostly blind navigation, my fingers & feet feel wired in to the instrument.  I improvise large two-handed block chord shapes.  I mix different triads 7 interval structures across the two hands.  If my audiation initiates an idea my hands enact it fluently.  Likewise I my hands simply land haphazardly, my ears are just as fluent in contextualizing the resulting sounds.

I can call these shapes Dominant 7ths, Minor 6 chords, diminished triads, etc…. But that is not really necessary as I can simply feel the character of each tone in terms of where it falls on the 12 tone diatonic scale.  A scale which as far as I know nobody else knows about.

For a full understand of how the anti-pentatonic is derived directly from the key surface topography, please review the attached pdf.

End of practice.