{"id":433,"date":"2018-06-02T11:59:52","date_gmt":"2018-06-02T11:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/?p=433"},"modified":"2018-06-02T11:59:52","modified_gmt":"2018-06-02T11:59:52","slug":"the-joy-of-musical-sets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/the-joy-of-musical-sets\/","title":{"rendered":"The joy of (musical) sets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Music<\/a><\/p>\n

I mentioned musical set theory in a previous post<\/a>, and now that I understand it better I\u2019m getting very enthusiastic about it. It\u2019s a really powerful technique for analysing and composing music. The mathematical connection may give the impression that it \u201cdehumanizes\u201d music by imposing mechanistic constraints and artificial rules \u2013 but the exact opposite is true. It\u2019s traditional music theory that forces arbitrary rules and constraints on you \u2013 set theory liberates you from them. It\u2019s a framework for organizing your own creativity \u2013 with no rules whatsoever.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll explain how it works in a moment, but first a few words about my sources. The bible of the subject is Allen Forte\u2019s The Structure of Atonal Music<\/a>, which is divided into two roughly equal parts. The first is packed with useful stuff, although the second part was much too advanced for me. But Forte\u2019s book is really about musical analysis, and what I was interested in was composition. On that front, I found a great little book by Stanley Funicelli called Basic Atonal Counterpoint<\/a> (which is a CreateSpace book, but very professionally done). I also found a lot of practical tips on Frans Absil\u2019s YouTube channel<\/a> \u2013 he also produced the Pitch-Class Set Graphical Toolkit<\/a> you can see on my iPad in the photograph above.<\/p>\n

Musical set theory starts from a few basic observations:<\/p>\n