Peter Schat's Tone Clock in jazz and improvised music,  by Theo Hoogstins.  chapter 5
    Oda a Walt Whitman

    To show how I derive tetrads from the tone clock triads and how steering on more levels can be achieved, I will show how I created the harmonic structure of "Ode to Walt Whitman", based on a poem by Garcia Lorca.
    Oda A Walt Whitman
    I took triads from the fourth hour steered by the eighth hour, and distributed the notes from the third chord over the other three:

    These chords I used in the first group of six chords. For the second group I made another distribution and then changed the steering:

    This gave the following result:

    The tetrads ate steered by the eighth hour. On the second level the groups of three tetrads are steered through the twelve tone field by the third hour. I continued this steering for two more groups (1-3-1-3-1) resulting in six groups of three tetrads.

    Now I have two triads of the third hour on the second level. Then we steer these groups again through the twelve tone field by the ninth hour, thus adding the six remaining complementary triads of the third hour to the second level steering:

    The steering on the third level is a symmetrical tetrad of the seventh hour, so the next step is to steer this tetrad on the fourth level through the twelve tone field by the twelfth hour.

    This results in a harmonic structure of a 108 chords. Now the composer must go to work to convert this theoretically built structure into music, because it is always the composer, and never the method, who makes the music. Elswhere on this page you can see a part of the result. I hope it has become clear that the tone clock is merely a harmony system in the chromatic scale, and not a composition method, allthough steering on more levels is a more methodical procedure. The posibilities of it for composing and analysing are unlimited and more and more composers find it a useful tool.