My research drew on an eclectic range of sources. But the thing that opened the door for me was studying the music of Edgard Varèse. Going back to my time in college in Chicago, I had always been interested in his music. What was fascinating was that he was thinking about musical organization in innovative ways that didn’t emerge from serialism, which was the dominant experimental vocabulary of his time. Varèse didn’t follow the twelve-tone model of Schoenberg and Webern and their acolytes. He went his own way.
Varèse spent a great deal of time thinking about development techniques: ways to build and extend musical structures out of initial configurations. He writes about a technique where he flips the intervals between two notes to create harmonic derivations. In the major/minor world of diatonic harmony, one starts with a given tonal center—G major, say—and then the music proceeds through a set of operations in relation to that, moving to the relative minor, modulating up a half step, creating tension and release by resolving back to that center. But this isn’t what Varèse was after. Neither was he simply doing an inversion, where, for instance, you have a C major triad and you can flip the lowest note in the chord to the top, so that rather than C-E-G you end up with E-G-C and you’re still maintaining that C major tonal center.
The derivations Varèse was experimenting with aren’t the product of diatonic harmony, the product of extensions or substitutions of a given tonal chord. Instead, they were solely a matter of the intervals. He called the variations of this procedure “infolding” and “outfolding.”
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