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12 Women

by Andy Alston

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1.
Someone Called 04:07
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2.
Locus Solus 04:40
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3.
The Como Riddle 03:35
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4.
Saved By Your Presence 05:30
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5.
Trading Cities 06:11
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6.
She Came From Akron 03:13
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7.
Saved by Your Presence (Radio Edit) 04:20
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I've been saved by your presence I will bathe in your essence And your stay's been a blessing Cause you made that impression If you don't know by now I'm gonna show you how I have strayed from the lesson I have played and been messing That you came's been a pleasure Now it's plain you're a treasure If you don't know by now I'm gonna show you how Shine your light by your window Fine and bright while the wind blows Shine your light by your window Fine and bright while the wind blows You have made world attention Still your name needs no mention That you came was refreshing And you made that impression If you don't know by now I'm gonna show you how

about

​ 12 Women

Every Name Is A Melody

            There are 12 tones in all of Western music. Bach codified this scheme in the form of equal temperament in the 17th century-- all the music spanning from his time to ours has come out of this vocabulary. Just 12 notes have given us this spectacular tapestry.

            The development of music since Bach’s establishment of the equal tempered scale followed a continuous stream of increasing harmonic enrichment. By the early 20th century, forward thinking composers such as Wagner and Debussy pushed melody and harmony to the point where tonality itself became increasingly de-centred and ambiguous. Music of the past had a hierarchy of notes, often ending and starting on the most important note which helped to establish the key and tonal world of a piece. This offered a structural force to unify a piece of music. In Arnold  Shoenberg’s view, the work of modernist composers had fatally undermined this structural logic. His reaction to this conundrum was to a abandon tonality entirely, but put in place an schema based on relationships of a succession of pitches to each other. The way he proceeded in a work was to play all the 12 notes of the chromatic scale once and only once in a particular order called a tone row so that no specific note was emphasised more that another. In his algorithm the tone row was next played backwards, then upside down and finally backwards and upside down. In the early 1920s he exemplified  this framework in his Opus 23 Piano Sonata.       

     When the notes of Schoenberg’s serial composition are matched to the 26 letters of the English alphabet, letters in the form of a name create a melody. There are distinct melodies in each name. . . that speak nothing at all of how awful or gorgeous I might have found these women to be.

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released August 3, 2018

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a alston Glasgow, UK

a alston is a Scottish keyboard multi instrumentalist, thinker and writer who plays with Del Amitri, The Bluebells, Port Sulphur and others. He likes to cook up a different kind of brew through creative collaboration with those living, dead, local and distant talents who can see a world of possibilities worth exploring ... more

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