harmolodics

Peter Schat's Tone Clock in jazz and improvised music, by Theo Hoogstins. chapter 4

Harmonies

Due to the fact that every hour contains only its own intervals, the complementary triads and tetrads sound very consistent in combination with each other. Every hour represents its own color, and the complete instrument of the tone clock provides a palette of twelve different harmonic colors.
Melodies and twelve tone sequences are very well supported by these harmonies, and although there is no recognizable tone center, a very transparent openness can be derived from this way of composing. An example of this is the composition "La Riviere Souterraine", which is an impression on an underground river in France.

Listen to music sample with RealPlayer G2 1'59"

It starts of with a lonely trumpet, reflecting the silence, and grows in volume and orchestration to an explosion of sound, of which the echo's repeatedly come back. The echo's slowly die and the silence returns in the cave. Analyzing this composition with the tone clock, we see in bar 26 a bass figure in E^minor and the horns play the three complementary chords from the eleventh hour: A_flat^minor F#^minor B_flat^major

Then a series of eight complementary triads from the eighth hour follows. In bar 21 till 26 the melody is a twelve tone sequence, harmonized with tetrads of the seventh hour. Three of these tetrads are also complementary and placed in the module look like this:

To see by which hour these tetrads are steered, we first have to put the chords all in the same position.

We now see that these tetrads are steered by the twelfth hour, the open notes demonstrate the movement of the chords. All of the four triads of the twelfth hour are represented in this steering. If we look at the first note of every one of these triads and put them in a sequence we get the steering on the "second level", which is the steering of the steering groups. These notes are: C-B-D-F. We saw earlier that the twelfth hour was only steered by the first hour. It can however be steered by other hours, but this always results in the same four triads. If we change the last note in this sequence into the closest one, we get C-B-D-D_flat, which is the BACH motive transposed with a whole tone. In "La Riviere Souterraine" I have chosen for free improvisation, with this restriction that the musicians get the instruction to use the composed material as basis for the improvisation, which leads to very surprising results, especially in the piano solo by Jan Jongbloed on the CD "Ear Opener". It is also possible to improvise on harmonic structures, derived from the tone clock. To obtain a jazzy sound, I like to use tetrads instead of triads, so it is necessary to translate the tone clock into jazz harmonies. To obtain this I developed a system comparable to Ornette Coleman's Harmolodics. The basic idea behind this is that three complementary tetrads also create a complete twelve tone structure. I found a lot of combinations, which can be derived from different hours. A few examples:
Derived from the eleventh hour:

Derived from the twelfth hour:

Derived from the sixth hour:

The Phare of Biarritz is a tune in which I used the twelfth hour tetrads:

Listen to music sample with RealPlayer G2 0'21"

And in the next example, the twelfth hour triads are extracted from the tetrads:

The twelfth hour variation can also be heard in the alto solo and the bass solo in "2soon2die"; the eleventh hour variation in the bass solo on "Onweer", and the C-melody sax solo in the same composition is based on the sixth hour variation. Both tunes can be found on the CD "Ear Opener" by the Theo Hoogstins Octet.