Persons of Note: 12 note row

After my research into John Cage, I think one of the most interesting aspects of his work is the way that he composes pieces. He was inspired by his teacher Schoenberg, who composed things using a 12 note row technique that he developed. John Cage himself used something similar, but it was called 25 tone row. I wanted to take inspiration for this in my own method of composing images for this project.

Instead of using the 25 tone row I decided to start with 12, because I thought at this point it would be more manageable for testing and development.

To do this, I printed out some images (such as a photo of John Cage, some of his music etc) and divided them into 12 x 12 squares, numbered them and cut them out.

To create a 12 note row grid, you have to write out the numbers 1 - 12 (or 0 - 11) in a random order. This goes in the top row of the grid, and then along the other side you have to write the inverse of that number. When doing this with music it is done in notes, but since I'm creating an image not a piece of music I decided to do numbers.

After this, you have to transpose the notes along one side into the key of the other. This is where I struggled to apply the technique with numbers, so for the purpose of creating images I just used a website that automatically generates a 12 note row in numbers when you input the first row.

These are the results from using this technique.

I like the chance aspect of this approach, but the resulting images don't really look like anything. I think maybe they would look better if I was using my own images so I think I might make some monoprints and use those. Before that though, I'm going to experiment with other chance methods of composition and maybe change the shapes I'm cutting my images up into.