Study in C

Allegedly, Arnold Schoenberg, the father of twelve tone atonalism, once said, "there is still a lot of good music to be written in the key of C", meaning that you can take a key, a group of notes that represent a tonality and create an interesting piece of music. You can create something that has never bee written before. The key of C is the most prosaic of keys so the challenge to make something interesting in the key of C is significant. 

One day, I  decided to take up the challenge and see what I could compose in the key of C. I came up with this piano piece that I call a Study in C. To me, the thing that makes the piece interesting is that I  feature the tritone, an interval that I was always taught never to use or to use sparingly and only briefly, in passing so that the sound does not linger in the ear. Well, most of what I compose goes against what I was taught, but isn't that always the way? In this piece I use the tritone obsessively. It gives  the piece a driving quality, an obsessive quality. It started out as an idea, a whim, something inspired by this aleged utterance by Arnold Schoenberg. I guess that there still is many good things to write in the key of C. Maybe I will see what I can write for the piano in all of the other keys.

What I like about this piece is the relentless forward motion of the piece. By the end, it has a driving quality that is almost hypnotic. I was very satisfied with the result of this little experiment in the key of C.

Part of my inspiration for this piece comes from the music of Terry Riley, one of the proponents of minimalism. The other part of the inspiration for this piece comes from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier collection, not any one piece in particular but the ethos of the entire collection.

Here is the link for the video on Youtube