- Hi, I'm Gareth Green and in this video we're
going to be thinking about how we might go about composing
using a five note pitch set. So what do I mean by this? Basically what it says on the tin. You just give yourself five
notes and then you think how can I work a piece
out of these five notes? Now you might say, why
would I want to do that? I mean, there are seven notes
in a major or a minor scale, why don't I work with seven notes? Absolutely fine. Work with seven notes,
use all of the notes of the chromatic scale and
give yourself twelve notes. That's what serial music
is doing, for example. But working with a set of notes is one way in which people go about composing. It really sort of focuses
things a little bit by making you concentrate on
how you might use these notes, how you might construct, say in this case, a group of five notes, how those notes relate to each other and then what can you do with
them to make a piece engaging. For example, you can stick
with the five notes throughout, just keep repeating them, keep presenting them in
different kinds of ways, or you can say, well, I'm
starting with these five notes and then I'm going to
kind of extend beyond them in some ways, so there's some sense of
development from those five notes. And we're going to just
use one short piece written by this Australian
composer, Peter Sculthorpe, who died in 2014. And he was just out to do
some of his composition just using a small pitch set like this. So we'll see how Peter
Sculthorpe goes about this in a piece of music called "Snow" from a collection of three short movements called "Snow, Moon and Flowers." And he uses these five notes. So let's have a look at
Peter Sculthorpe five notes. He's gone for A-flat, G, E, E-flat, C. Now you might sort of think, well, is that some kind of
sound that I know about? It sort of almost feels a
little bit bluesy, doesn't it? That we're going, if we start on C but then we've got a minor third and a major third and then G, which is kind of completing
the C major chord or the C minor chord. So you can immediately see
possibilities for this. You can even see an A-flat
major chord, C, E-flat, A-flat. So there's things you can do with that, but this sort of idea
that you've got tonic and this kind of sort of blues third as well as the major third and then the fifth and then
the semitone above that. I mean, you could do all sorts of things with those five notes that
don't have to be too radical. I mean, just putting down a C major chord. You're doing something
kind of quite bluesy in no time at all with that pitch set. That's not at all what
Peter Sculthorpe is doing in his piece, but I'm just sort of
trying to make the point that you can come up with
a five note pitch set and take it in so many
different directions. But it's quite a fun thing to do. And as a composer, it's quite
a disciplined thing to do and that's not a bad thing. Often when we're composing,
we've got all sorts of ideas and we dart about from
one place to another, and sometimes we just need
to kind of hone in a bit, don't we? Kind of nail it down. So we've got something
that the piece is based on and we're really thinking out how we're going to
develop that ingredient. So the piece has a life and a
kind of evolution of its own. Well, let's see what Peter
Sculthorpe gets up to with this pitch set in
his piece called "Snow." Well, one thing he does is to
kind of dislocate these notes into different octaves and that
can make a huge difference. I mean, if you put them close together. Okay, we've talked about
how that might work. This is what Peter Sculthorpe does. He has the A-flat here, the G is a seventh higher. Then he comes down to the E here, and then he goes E-flat and then he comes back to C. Has a massively different
impact, doesn't it? From just putting those notes
together at close quarters. So it immediately makes the point, just by dislocating things
into different octaves it gets quite interesting. You might do both of those
things within the same piece. So there's nothing to say, you couldn't extend this
idea of A-flat up there, G down there, E, E-flat, C. You could really space out the notes. You can go up, you can go down, you can have some close
together, some wide apart, already, we begin to see lots of options just working with five notes. So, it's not something
that has to box you in, so you're just thinking,
well, what am I going to do? Just repeat these five
notes over and over again. That could be a bit tedious, couldn't it? So there needs to be
some kind of evolution. Actually, what Peter
Sculthorpe does in his piece, is he starts with these five notes and he kind of repeats them but then he allows the five
notes to evolve in some way. And let's see how he does that. Well, first of all, he
takes the five notes in the pitch that, in the kind of octaves that I've just been talking about and he gives it a kind of rhythmic life. So we starts off like this, quite quietly, lots of pedal as well, so
that creates atmosphere, and even though you're
hearing single notes they're all kind of connected by the sustaining pedal going like this. So you see how that starts off, it's kind of fascinating
how he does that, isn't it? Just by giving it a bit of rhythmic life, bit of atmosphere with a sustained pedal, kind of choosing a tempo
that's reasonably slow, and then he marks it
"lontano", sort of distantly. And then you might sort of notice what he's doing with those notes. Because we start off with
the five notes, don't we? So one, two, three, four, five, then he repeats them at the same pitch. one, two, three, four, but you notice we don't hear five. Where did number five go? Disappeared. And the rhythm changed slightly. What does he do next? Here's the third bar, the
third measure, he does this. So we start exactly the same. Now what's he done this time? Well he's taken the first three notes, A-flat, G, E, then he takes the next two notes and transposes them a third higher. So G-flat, E-flat, And then he goes back and he repeats what he
did the second time round. So we've gone back to the
first four notes again missing the fifth note in the same rhythm that he had on the second presentation. So you see what we've had now, we've already had four presentations of it but you see how things kind
of just gradually evolve. So let's put those four
together and see what we think. You see it's full of atmosphere, isn't it? Now you may like that
piece or you might think, oh, it's not really my cup of tea, but there's nothing to say you can't use the same set of notes and do something little bit bluesy as we demonstrated earlier on. So there are all sorts of possibilities. And this is also showing
you through this example by Peter Sculthorpe that you're not stuck
with these five notes. You've got this five note idea
that the piece is based on but actually you can miss out a note. You can transpose a couple of notes, you can change the rhythm,
you can use space in between, you can do things with articulation or with dynamics or the use of the pedal, and then sometimes you might just want to have
a bit of a contrast from it which is exactly what he does
next, because he does this. So that's something that's a
really a little bit independent of these notes. You can find links with them
if you want to search them out like we've got this falling third. Well, that's something that
features in the original thing. The E-flat to C thing,
that's a falling third, and it's a minor third as he's using here. He's got these left hand
chords going in fourths, so there's something slightly different happening there as well. But then after that little
burst, well he kind of comes back to doing something similar again, but he starts to modify the opening notes. So he does this. So that's not quite the
same as the opening, and then he does these chords that he put in the left hand a moment ago, and then he kind of finishes
off that idea again. So the piece goes on and
just evolves slightly but just a handful of measures later, he's kind of back with the same pitch set. With the transposition again
that he had at the beginning. So you see this starts
to sound a bit familiar. And then that's almost
the end of the movement because then he finishes
off with his falling fourth that he used in that
middle bit we talked about, and then he just has a
final chord to finish off using some of the notes of
the five note pitch set. So you see, Peter Sculthorpe
is fairly free with it. He's got a five note pitch set
as a kind of germ of an idea. He repeats it, he reworks it rhythmically, he includes a bit of transposition, he includes a little bit
of contrasting material, returns to it again, so it feels like our old familiar friend on which the whole of this piece is built. And then he really thinks about what he's doing with
other aspects of the music, with the rhythm, dynamics,
articulation, choice of tempo, use of the pedal and so on to create the atmosphere that he wants. It's a compositional idea that
you might want to work with especially if you are the kind of composer who's just kind of darting
around from one idea to the next because you're just full of
all these creative ideas, which is fantastic stuff. But a way of kind of honing it down a bit and also thinking about this piece, just thinking sometimes less is more. You don't have to fill your piece of music with notes everywhere, with
everybody going flat out. Sometimes just having single
notes can be very effective. You can use silence between sound as well just to create extra atmosphere. Anyway, I hope that's going
to be of some inspiration, if you're a composer
thinking I could just do with a sort of new thought, something a little bit
different to work with, maybe just to enhance what I'm doing or maybe to take me in a new direction. Well, if you've enjoyed this video, you might want to go to our
website, www.mmcourses.co.uk, on the homepage, you can click on courses and that will take you to
a whole load of material that is designed to empower musicians. So if you're really wanting to
improve your harmony skills, your theory knowledge, your aural ability, your ability to analyse music, you want to know more about composing, all sorts of things on there that would really assist
you in that cause. So have a look through, see what's there. While you are back on the
homepage, click on Maestros, that's our international
musical community, and we've got three levels of membership, nothing to do with ability. Level one is just a kind
of engagement level, gives you access to a number
of perks, which are quite fun and enable you just to
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new directions as well. Anyway, it's all there. Have a look and see what you can find that would be really helpful to you in the next chapter of
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