Write the ‘wrong’ notes

I enjoy listening to music by Charles Ives, Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, and I’ve recently started listening to Stan Kenton’s music. Basically I enjoy atonal music a lot and I’m especially interested in music that often sounds like chaos.

Now I’m not just interested in it because I like the sound of chaos, but because I’ve written music that sounds like chaos. It’s much harder than you’d think.

It’s not just about writing a bunch of random notes and random rhythms. Counter-intuitively that’ll end up sounding too controlled. That won’t sound chaotic enough.

Some things will eventually line up and some of the dissonance and chaos you’re trying to create will be gone.

So you need to choose the exact ‘wrong’ notes to be able to write a piece of music that sounds chaotic.

In order to do that you need to know the ‘right’ notes … and you need to avoid them.

You also need to choose rhythms that don’t match up, which is often hard to play and hard to write. It might mean that you write polyrhythms, or creatively use 16th notes and triplets. Often just a 3:2 polyrhythm will create a chaotic texture if the notes are chosen correctly.

Philip Glass’s piece “Mad Rush” uses a 3:2 polyrhythm quite often.

But if you chose the right ‘wrong’ notes and the right ‘wrong’ rhythms, you’ll have a chaotic texture like Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata.

ISJ