Well, well, well, second improvisation in a row where something went wrong! The first thing to point out in this improvisation is the title: 12-Tone Cipher. There are of course, two things to unpack here and I’ll start with the first part: 12-Tone. Something I have been practicing lately (meaning the past 4-5 years) is using all 12 chromatic notes in a row before I repeat any of them. To be clear: I am not keeping a strict measurement of intervals or other relationships to determine a tone row so I can transpose is, just simply keeping track of what notes I have and have not played at a given time. It is not a lack of interest in tone rows, more that it would require an enormous amount attention, skill, and practice to do so, something I currently don’t have the time for. (Someday maybe!)
My interest in doing a tone row is to keep things fresh in my improvs. Simply another way to explore timbre but in a way that contrasts the last improvisation which was through an attempt at literally representing a sound. Speaking of the last improvisation, where I accidentally hit a piston, let me address the second half of the title, “Cipher.” A cipher is when you hit a key and the air continues to blow through the pipe even when the key is not depressed. Well, that is what happened! What I was going to do in that moment was to spell out the 12-tone pattern I had come to on a loud reed stop but the Ab and Bb just never stopped.
In the moment, you can probably hear the mashing of all the keys around those pitches as that sometimes will stop a cipher. Since that didn’t work, the next solution was to turn the instrument off. As the organ shut down, I kept holding on the cluster and the effect was exactly what I wanted: this crazy percussive crash followed the power turning on a return to the opening texture. All that is to say, it was an interesting time as the improvisation developed and changed and resulted in something interesting. Enjoy!