I was a student of Josef Shmid who was both one of the conductors of the Berlin State Opera House and an original and dedicated pupil of Alban Berg.  This is a clue to the musical decisions I have made and musical concepts I continue to live with.

I grew up with the phrase “emancipation of the dissonance” invading the entire fabric of my musical and philosophical thought.  It was the battle cry of all the revolutionary 12-tone composers of the post-Schonberg era. This phrase had profound meaning to me then, and it has much more profound meaning for me today.  Many thousands of combinations of notes have been written with this phrase as a starting point, and many musical dilemmas have been resolved with this phrase as the arbiter.

One of those dilemmas arose about 20 years ago when I felt that I was forced to make a decision about whether I would spend the major part of my life writing music rooted in a 13-tone scale, 19-tone scale, or 24-tone scale.  Mainly because of the phrase “emancipating the dissonance”  I decided on the 24-tone scale, accepting all the musical consequences that resulted from that decision.  For example, I knew I was compounding the compromises of equal temperament and also compounding the abuses of the overtone series.  But the positives overwhelmed the negatives.  It was the only way to expand Schonberg’s concepts of harmony. Moreover, it was possible to write for conventional instruments, which made it easier to have the works performed.  There is tremendous resistance, of course, from musicians who are asked to learn new fingerings, or to pay heir instruments in ways different from those they have been practicing and using all of their professional lives.  But that resistance was easier for me to deal with than building my own instruments and having performances limited to a small number of people willing to learn to play them. 

The musical tools I evolved seem very simple, but that simplicity is the result of a lot of experimentation, a lot of compositions thrown into the trash and a lot of aimless walking in the street, trying to resolve problems that seemed insoluble.

In every composition I write, there are generally two major unifying factors: one theme is built on quarter tones, and the other is built on a 12-tone row.  The 12-tone idea usually evolved out of some accompanying motif and becomes the transitional material, in much the same way that Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven used the scales as transitions between their themes.  The reasons is that since quarter-tone fingerings are very awkward for instrumentalists, 12-tone writing provides the virtuosity to allow the composition to reach new heights by combining the two idioms.

The harmonic principles I work with are also very simple.  They are derived from Schonberg’s concepts of not repeating a mote until all the tones of the scale have been expressed.  Schonberg tried to follow a prescribed order for  the expression of his tones, both horizontally and vertically.  I do not.  For me, the coherence of a piece comes from the repetition and development of the themes rather than from a succession of individual tones.  But I do try to make each chord totally different from the others, bringing coherence by repeating certain patterns of chords.

My voicing of chords, which determines the texture and individuality of the piece, is also derived from the early contemporary masters.  It is rare to find, in the later works of Schonberg and Webern, a chord that does not have as at least one minor second or minor ninth.  Their purpose was to destroy any semblance to a recognizable chord that was used in the system of tonality.  I have expanded that principal by building chords that have a least one quarter-tone dissonance interval.  Actually I try to create chords and combinations of the 24-tones that I have at my disposal , which have no resemblance to the 12-tone chords used by the preceding masters.  The concept is motivated by “Emancipating the dissonance.”