march (madrigal)

The third of my 12 “madrigals” in just intonation, march, is based upon tones rows that are derived from the partials of the overtone series. The explanation of the tone rows, and how they relate to the kind of just intonation I’m using, is pretty esoteric; so I’ll save that for after the preview text.

As mentioned above, march is based upon a tone row derived from the first 31 partials of the overtone series. I organized the partials in the following order:

13

31

17

23

19

7

25

15

21

11

5

3

9

1

27

29

This created the a tone row of 16 pitches. I then organized a few rows based upon the following pitches: 1/1 (G), 4/3 (C), 8/5 (E-flat), 8/7 (a very sharp A), and 16/9 (F). This led to the creation of a sort of “mini-matrix” of tone rows based upon the pitches mentioned above. Since it’s not a square matrix, I didn’t use the columns to create inverted material; However, I did play around with repeated material, and a few other combinations.

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