The Note in Your Pocket (My Travels Through Hexachord Space), for two melody instruments by David Victor Feldman

If a composer wishes to avoid tonality, wishes to avoid the monarchical tyranny of tonic, then a simple (but not sure-fire) recipe consists in working a symmetrical treatment of the totality of pitches (with said totality often going by the name "total chromatic," or more generally "aggregate," but aggregate can also mean a totality of anything). The twelve-tone system treats pitch classes symmetrically by design, and aleatoric methods also prove quite effective. Other tyrants can arise aside from tonics. So if mezzo-forte, or the central octave, or the 16th-note should threaten domination, a composer can also serialize (or randomize) dynamics, tessitura, or duration, etc. In practice, all this fair treatment of possibilities, all this fiat symmetry, can ironically make tyrants out of the relevant aggregates themselves, effectively replacing monarchy, one might say, by obsessive bureaucracy, with the ear experiencing concomitant fatigue (not necessarily a bad thing depending on the composer's artistic goal). In any case the emergence of this irony perhaps explains the briefness for total serialism's vogue. Long ago, atonal composers working more freely discovered the trick of "keeping a note in your pocket" only to pull it out again when you need it to sound fresh---and it will.

This piece plies a latter-day total serialism (but a serialism not anchored in rows) which governs pitch, tessitura, rhythm, dynamics and articulation, but which has the note-in-the-pocket wisdom inscribed in its genetics. The 81 sections survey all 80 hexachord-up-transposition classes (the final section reprising the first, a whole-tone scale), with each section signaled by the entrance of a single pocketed pitch class and less noticeably by the departure of another (so traversing a Hamiltonian circuit through hexachord space). Likewise, a Hamiltonian circuit through time-point "hexachords" (a la Babbitt) characterizes the rhythm. But then each hexachord gets developed by a special type of Hamiltonian circuit through all 20 of its own sub-trichords, with the instantiation of each trichord pulling a note of a shallower pocket.

The spare texture of the present work pays homage to John Cage, specifically works from his Lou Harrison period, to Morton Feldman, specifically his late pattern pieces, to Jo Kondo, specifically his hockets, and to Jonathan Kramer, specifically his process pieces and works with restricted pitch sets.