# Walking by four-note chords



## RamonC (Jun 7, 2018)

Hello everybody.

This is a piece that I just composed:


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https://soundcloud.com/ramon-capsada-blanch%2Fwalking-by-four-note-chords

Thanks for listening!

Ramon

If you want, you can also read the following introductory note to the work:

_Walking by four-note chords. _

This work can be considered a continuation (or a second track of the same album) of one of my previous works "Parsimonious Trichords" (

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https://soundcloud.com/ramon-capsada-blanch%2Fparsimonious-trichords
)
This is the case since in the elaboration of its harmonies I have followed the same line of work but taking one more step in the current work. In the harmony of the two works I have used the _Tonnetz_. This comes from the German term "Tonnetzwerk" which means network of tones. The prototypical case is the one that is formed by the major and minor chords (of three notes) organized in such a way that those that are contiguous only differ by a single note (with only a semitone or tone of difference) and on this network we can go chaining the chords following different itineraries or paths thus defining the harmonic progression. In the work "Parsimonious Trichords" I used this Tonnetz with three-note chords. The present work tries to go a step further and use four-note chords to define the Tonnetz. To achieve this I have applied the ideas developed by Dmitri Tymoczko in his excellent article "The Generalized Tonnetz" (http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/chordspaces.pdf). The objective will be the same: to get a network that organizes the chords (in this case of four notes) in such a way that those that are contiguous continue to be differentiated by a single note. In this case, to achieve this, it is necessary to use 12 chords of dominant seventh, 12 chords of half-diminished seventh, 12 chords of minor seventh and 6 chords of French sixth. To achieve To achieve the harmonic progression, on this network of chords I have defined 7 itineraries (one for each part of the work) of the so-called _Hamiltonians_, which means that they go through all 42 Tonnetz chords once and only once. As can be assumed, the chord succession that is achieved is also very parsimonious in the sense that there is very little variation between a chord and the one that follows it.

The work of creating the Tonnetz of four-note chords and as well as the elaboration of the itineraries I have done it by programming a series of algorithms in Python language.

Regarding the rhythmic aspect of the work, I have used an archetype: the rhythmic "motif of the walker" (half, quarter, quarter) for two reasons: one, which is quite evident, to reinforce the concept of itinerary or path and the other as a small tribute to the recently published book "Paisajes del Romanticismo musical" by the composer and theorist Benet Casablancas since it is one of the many characteristics that he analyzes about the music of the Romantic period.

For all these reasons, the exhaustive title of this work could have been "Walking through the Hamiltonian itineraries of the graph (of minimal variation) of four-note chords." which I have not dared to use for obvious reasons


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