Cello Duet was from my Berklee Online Winter Semester, Week 5 in Compositional Voice Development in Film Scoring. The  assignment was to “write a one-minute piece using a chord type, progression, or harmonic idea you’ve never used before.”

I used hexatonic scales that are complements of each other because they have an unfamiliar melodic character, but have many major and minor chords to choose from, and fit well within each other. I began with the scale that starts with a m3 then m2, and with C as tonic (C D# E G Ab B) and its complement (D F Gb A Bb C#), and used one scale per phrase. In the first phrase of the A section, the chord progression was CM AbM CM EM, and for the second phrase DM BbM F#M DM. For the B section I  used the other two transpositions of the hexatonic scale, which are also complements of each other, and I switched from 3|4 to 2|4 and used all minor chords: Ebm Gm Bm Ebm and C#m Am Fm C#m. For the return of the A section, I kept it in 2|4 so that it would have some variation from the beginning, and I also brought the melody up to D instead of A. I really like the contrast of unpredictable melodic movement, but moment to moment consonance and stability.