13 musicians (in progress)

My main interest in writing this piece for a chamber ensemble is to explore what has been accounted for various sensations evoked by tones of the Western chromatic scale. In this work, the twelve chromatic tones are considered disparate but hierarchically ordered within a predefined tonal system. The contemporary notion of quale in the context of music psychology refers to that subjective and emotional impressions of the physical world that are often associated with sensory experiences involving tone sequences and combinations. A simple example of qualia in music would be a degree of pleasantness or contentment that an individual might experience from a sonority of a tonic major triad at the end of a piece of music, or a surprise form an unexpected tone in a very familiar melody.

In Qualia for 13 musicians, I play with both the account of qulia in the realm of music expectation described by David Huron and the concept of pitch paths put forward by Fred Lerdahl. My aim is to create a musical experience in which the listener would entertain a possibility of hearing all different pitches and their tonal and timbral combinations, that is melodies and harmonies as having individual musical feelings or impressions, assuming their interdependence on a central pitch of reference — a very potent cognitive schema also known as tonality. I am also interested in understanding the pitch distance in terms of spiritual depth. As the notion of our inner self is often experienced as remote or removed from the stability of its inner calm, some tones can also be seen as distanced from a fundamental or center pitch, causing us to hear them as unstable yearning to resolve into a more anchored tone.