The pictures I picked for my “Kaleidoscope” video just had to be of a kaleidoscope because of the name of my composition and the mood. This is a perpetual motion piece of although it is rather slow and quite relaxed. You may find this somewhat hypnotic. But when I get to the octatonic section note the colors change.
I used much brighter colors for the octatonic section featuring a lot of orange and red.
For “Kaleidoscope” I started out first exploring the octatonic scale. This is not the time or the place to go into the structure of octatonic in depth, but in general all you need to know is that it alternates between whole and half tones. You start with either a whole tone or a half tone and then you keep on with that alternating pattern all the way up or down on the piano keyboard.
I will do a video about this in the future.
But the moment you began using the octatonic scale, your sound is unstable, mysterious, unpredictable and in general dark. I was aware that by writing a section of music in pure octatonic it would automatically take on this very dark sound, so I wanted to balance against this dark sound a beginning and ending section that would be lighter and more optimistic.
Because I basically used scale patterns in the right hand for my octatonic section, I decided to use this same idea of scale patterns for the beginning and end sections, and that gave me an ABA form where are the A section would be very simple and easy to listen to. I wanted the largest possible contrast between the more placid A section and the more dramatic octatonic B section. So for my A section I used a combination of Ionian, another name for major, and Lydian, which is a more fantastical version of Ionian.
With that plan in mind, I built the whole piece.
I could have kept the A section all in some key such as C major, but I chose to immediately modulate to D flat major, G flat major, and finally E flat major. Once I got to E flat major I knew what I was going to do with the octatonic section. I used an Eb7 chord which goes perfectly with an octatonic scale in that key, moved to F7, moved to G 7. Then I came down in half tones to F#7 and to F7.
To get back to the A section I morphed from the key of F major at the end of the octatonic section to the key of A major in the repeat of the A section, which is the Trinity change. This allowed me to do the same thing that I did on the first page but landed me back at the end of the page in the key of C major, where I could simply write a short coda using C Lydian and then end with a C maj7 chord.
The reason I called this “Kaleidoscope” is that you never know where you are going next, but each new modulation using morphs get you to a new place that seems logical at the moment. If a. composer uses this kind of constant modulation, the listener probably is unaware if a piece of music finally ends up in the same key that it started in. But ending that way is especially satisfying to the composer because it is elegant and does what many of the greatest composers of the last few centuries have done.