A Chord Sequence You’ve Never Heard

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: one of the thrills of composing microtonally is the ability toÂ write logical chord progressions and feel virtually certain that no one has ever heard them before. When I was young harmony was a nightmare for me, and for good reason: I’d been taught to use pitch sets like everyone else, which were not conducive to good voice-leading or subtle nuance. Circa 1983 I decided to break a well-trained taboo and go back to triads and sevenths chords, on the grounds that it was insane to deny myself musical materials that had worked so effectively for centuries: like a playwright trying to excise overly familiar human emotions, or common words. I just decided harmony wasn’t going to be a point of innovation for me. This is what other composers seem to hate most about my music; a comment I’ve gotten frequently, with an undercurrent of disapproval, is, “I’ve never heard such complex rhythms with such simple harmonies.” I quit caring. But then when I got into microtones, I became able to squeeze those harmonies up against each other in so many possible permutations that the unlikelihood of any other microtonalist ever having come up with one of my exact progressions before is astronomical. It’s such a relief to write a series of chords that makes sense and actually be surprised by the way they sound, not being reminded of any other music I’ve ever heard. In the chord progression linked above, I couldn’t even tell you what the chords are without looking them up; I just generated a tuning via my usual voice-leading rules, put the notes together, and they came out even better than I expected.Â

Researching 4’33”, I ran across a statement about harmony by Cage which I think bothers me more than anything else he ever said:

I now saw harmony, for which I had never had any natural feeling, as a device to make music impressive, loud and big, in order to enlarge audiences and increase box-office returns. It had been avoided by the Orient, and our earlier Christian society, since they were interested in music not as an aid in the acquisition of money and fame but rather as a handmaiden to pleasure and religion. (“A Composer’s Confessions,” 1948)

Geez, John, just because you had “no ear for harmony,” those of us who do have one aren’t supposed to use it? And if we use harmony to make our music “impressive,” that’s automatically for money and fame rather than pleasure? Isn’t giving pleasure what sometimes tends to bring money and fame? I’ve never read anything else of his that left such a bad taste in my mouth.