017 - Full Circle 2

This was the final piece in the 2012 Tuna Day collection , #428, and directly followed yesterday’s post. After this piece I stopped for eleven years, resuming in July of 2021.

This piece is 12 tone but not in the classic sense. There isn’t a tone row or any kind of row manipulation. All I did was make sure every two bars I used all 12 chromatic notes. Individual bars do at times have a kind of artificial tonality, which I found interesting.

This uses really primitive ABC drums, and since it isn’t tonal all I did was specify bass notes, which is what the lower case letters over the score indicate. Simple repeated single bass notes that descent chromatically by 1/2 step throughout. Near the end the rhythm slows down to three beats per measure, then two, then one, but the melody maintains it’s inherent 4/4.

Yes, there is a Full Circle 1, but it’s not one of my better efforts so I’m choosing to not post it here. It’s nothing like this piece anyway.

I did orchestrate this as a movement of a larger work for full orchestra, but it was discarded in favor of a different composition for that movement.