Do motives that gain their power from a tonal context work in a mostly-atonal setting?

I’m onto the second straight piece in which I have to confront that question.

The opening bars of Omie Speaks go like this:

(listen here)

See that A-sharp in the first chord and that A-natural in a different voice in the second? (a voice is defined by its left-to-right motion and how high it is) That’s called a cross-relation. It’s actually the same thing that Brahms’s Third Symphony is based on*. Cross-relations are “illegal” according to the conventions of tonal harmony because you can’t tell if you’re in the major or minor version of your key. They simultaneously give the sense of motion, since chromatic motion is always noticeable, and getting stuck, because in traditional tonal practice, the difference between a minor chord and a major chord is one of color rather than function. But that’s why, when they turn up, they’re so effective, and why the Brahms has that off-kilter feeling. (For many of my late teenage years, I was searching for that Brahms symphony I heard on the radio that was in a minor key, but which was neither the first nor the fourth symphony, and being very confused when the other two were always listed as being in D-major and F-major. I got the feeling I must have imagined it until I got my hands on a score of the F-major in college and discovered the A-flat in the second measure…)

Anyway, as it happens, my piece doesn’t use tonal conventions beyond this cross-relation thing. But the cross-relation is very much what makes the opening motive interesting - the tritone in the upper line is OK but not that useful in itself, the bottom line is, horrors, the outline of a major triad, which I often try to avoid - so I decided to work with it anyway. The harmonic movement of choice in the piece involves the displacement of one of the notes, chromatically altered, into another register. But do you hear that in an atonal work? I’m confident that the idea of a rising or descending chromatic scale is hearable, but I’m less sure that the cross-relations mean anything more than that in context.

Now, in Nuevos Misterios, I’ve gotten word from the performers, Flying Forms, that they’re playing some Milhaud along with Bach, Corelli, and Castello on the “tracing the violin and harpsichord literature” program that Nuevos Misterios is going on. And I promised to try to incorporate some things from those composers into the piece. So I saw Milhaud and thought polytonality (when you stick two keys, say F-sharp minor and D major) on top of each other and proceed as though it’s totally normal to hear these smashing noises), and worked out that, with the material I already had, some use of the C and E-flat natural minor scales, smashed together, would work. So here I go - but absent triads or functional harmony, I feel like what I’m really doing is working with is really a 10-note set (c, d-flat, d, e-flat, f, g-flat, g, a-flat, b-flat, b) instead of “polytonality.” But I’m actually very happy with the results in this case. Even though I’m not in functionally tonal idiom (when I say functional harmony, by the way, I mean the idea that some pitches and chords want to lead towards others, which is how Western classical music worked from about 1600 to 1900, and, less strictly, how most pop, rock, and more than a bit of classical still works), using the two scales together opened up swaths of material to be cultivated.

I allowed the notes C and E-flat form their own poles. The minor third between them took on a special melodic significance. I then allowed each to pull notes from either scale, so that I wasn’t exactly in the world of polytonality anymore, but more in these subsets of the 10-note set centered around either C or E-flat.

On top of that, the two notes that don’t appear in either scale, A and E - and any chords based on them - became exceptionally important. They are profoundly differentiated from the 10-note set, you could say “exotic,” and almost become something like a dominant chord (in the sense that the dominant is the “Other” that contrast with the tonic; more traditionally, the dominant is the 5th of a key - in C, G), and by the end they become so important that the chords containing E and A become more like the tonic. (ooh! modulation!).

Those two principles interacted with each other and the preexisting material in unpredictable ways to produce a lot of good stuff. And I have a piece I’m really quite happy with. Which is good, since the first concert’s barely a week away!

Here’s a schedule of events around the premiere.

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*By the way, it’s incredibly awesome that I can link to the score of that, or to