cells
- Amanda Riddell
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- Nov 6, 2023
- 1 min read
That's what I was taught to call the little fragments of music. Vamps is what most musicians use, but this is the avant-garde classical version of that. Here's how I see it: a lot of vamps are cells, but cells aren't just accompaniment material; it's anything that can be spun out into the main motivic structure.
So, a cell can be a rhythm - as in the case of These Words Are Meant For Someone and the insistent iamb pulse in the piano - or it can be a small fragment of a melody, ie the head or tail or something like that. Or it can be a timbral thing, ie hocketing or klangfarbenmelodie. I improvise around cells rather than around tunes when I do my things like Chamber of Colours V. This isn't all that uncommon: Henry Threadgill pioneered that approach.