I was mulling over the 26 note scale of the pieces I posted recently. This scale has five bands of closely spaced notes. What if I made pentatonic scales by picking one note from each band? There could be a sequence through these scales that traverses a comma. So that's what I made here, a traversal of the comma 1029:1024 using sixteen pentatonic scales, with a total of sixteen notes among those scales, chosen out of the full 26 note scale. Moving from one scale to the next shifts just one note of the scale. So the piece is a bit like a chord progression, but the full five notes of the pentatonic scale played all together would probably not make a very pleasant chord!
This new piece has 256 measures. The sixteen scale traversal is repeated sixteen times.
The green horizontal arrows represent perfect fifths; the blue vertical arrows represent major thirds.
The red diagonal arrows represent the not very conventional interval 7:4.
The shape of this scale is the same as the starting scale. All the notes have been shifted by 8:7. The next scales shift in the same pattern by another 8:7.
We are again back at the starting shape. A third move of 8:7 will bring us back to the actual starting scale, but the sequence will also have to move by 4:3 to form the traversal of 1029:1024.
This next step is where the 4:3 move begins:
From here, pitch class 66 can be shifted to pitch class 64, which completes the loop back to the starting scale.
This is a diagram of the full set of sixteen notes from all the pentatonic scales here.
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