Lucentum Nocturne

This is another exploration into scales, as part of the Mediterranean Suite.

Lucentum is the Roman name of my city, and means Light or Star... This city is very old. It seems to be founded by the Iberos (¿Iberians?). It was a Phoenician and a Greek colony (named Akra Leuka = White Coast). Afterwards a Roman city (Lucentum), and in 8th century the Arabs entered and stayed for 800 years, they gave the actual name: Alicante (from the Arab names: Ali and Cantara, who were a couple in love that ended in tragedy, of course).

Well, this piece is a sort of nocturno with a tonal part in the beginning and in the ending.

In the middle there is a development using a Lydian - Harmonic scale: first tetrachord is lydian, second one is harmonic.

The generated chords make the mode moderately unstable (the tonic is stable Cmaj7 and there is a good cadential chord Bmin). In this part, what seem chromaticisms are, in fact, diatonic notes to the scale.

Pleasant. Initially I wasn't very sure of the B section, but you carried it through quite nicely. Am I missing something in the notation or do some of your rolled GM7 chords have an F natural in them?

Anyway, a very sweet addition to the suite.

14 hours ago, Monarcheon said:

Pleasant. Initially I wasn't very sure of the B section, but you carried it through quite nicely. Am I missing something in the notation or do some of your rolled GM7 chords have an F natural in them?

Anyway, a very sweet addition to the suite.

 

Thanks!

Working with this kind of scales is hard sometimes. I think there are two problems:

1. The listener doesn't recognize a comfortable "tonality". It's not atonal, and the listener tries to identify the music with the major/minor system. But it doesn' fit, so he or she thinks it's "wrong". So the composer has to deal with it, writing something that, being, odd, is not "ugly".

2. Many times the scale doesn't give stable chords. Always, progression V7 - I (or similar) must be avoided, otherwise it will sound major / minor. When the tonic chord is Cm7(b5), or C7aug..., it's hard to make it stable... But possible.

On the other hand, it's nice working with these exotic modes.

Thanks for the comment on the Gmaj7 chords. I have checked them and they seem to be alright, but I saw one mistake in the Db7/G (which appears only once, OMG). So, I'll go over it again and make some corrections.

Greetings!

As someone who loves music in non conventional scales, I really liked this. Very nice to listen to. 

Thanks Nicola Canada.

There are hundred of scales. But many people use them as improvisatory scales. I mean, scales to play over specific chords.

But my approach is quite different. I use them as harmonic systems by themselves, developing all sort of chords from the scale, and using in the melody only the scale (except passing notes).

The main handicap is staying away from the major/minor sonority.

Very nice man. For some reason it reminded me of the opening scene in Final Fantasy X when Tidus was talking over the piano hahaha.