Other Harmony: All-Interval Tetrachords
and Other Homometries

All-Interval Tetrachords and Other Homometries

(...) This phenomenon of the all-interval tetrachords has been ob- served by composers and music theorists since the 1960s, but these chords are rarely used in tonal music or in atonal music, rarely considered to be more than an oddity, and were never the exclusive harmonies of an entire composition until my own Intervals (2013) and La Princesse et les feuilles (2014). I am convinced, however, that there is something very unusual about these chords, and mathematicians also find such situ- ations very interesting. The phenomenon of equal intervallic content is generally known as homometry, and we’ll soon be talking about other homometric pairs later.(...)