Available to stream and buy now on Bandcamp, should be on all other streaming services in a few days. Listen to the whole thing using this player and check out some sleeve notes below.

In this final installment we look at some chords and harmonic ideas from the Moonlight and Bridge chords, focusing on the most exotic sounds we found last time.

In the previous post I introduced what I'm calling the Bridge Chord and the Moonlight Chord. In the process I made lists of their hypermodes as if it was obvious why I was doing that; in this post we'll peer a bit deeper into the waters we've disturbed and see what we can make out.

For years I've been playing major seventh chords in a cycle of major thirds as a kind of "atonal major tonality". I talked about that here and in other places on this blog. But lately I've been trying major sixths as well, and they produce something similar but different. In fact it's the negative image of something very familiar.

This post began with this work by Alan Theisen, where he figures out all the ways to combine four triads (major, minor, diminished or augmented) to exactly cover all twelve notes.

It ended up somewhere very different, but let's start there.

I recently went through an exercise of writing a lot of tunes using Suvarnangi or, more accurately, a mode of Suvarnangi. This scale seems very lumpy and dissonant when you just run it up and down so here I'll break down how I think of it and some of the secrets it contains. Because as with any seven-note scale, what seems like nothing much turns out to contain a whole universe when we stick it under the microscope.

It was 96 because 100 isn't divisible by 12 and I don't know whether you actually should or not but I do have things to say about what was good about it for me.

Forte's set number 6-z6 can be played as C-C#-D-F-F#-G, which doesn't look like much. I found it today while trying to capture a bit of Sorabji's style and got some nice vocabulary ideas from it on the theme of intervals moving in contrary motion.

The all-but-six (ABS) chords are Forte 6-1, 6-8, 6-14 and 6-32. They're all six-note chords that contain every interval except the tritone. Of these, I think 6-8 and 6-14 are particularly promising.