Dan Jenkins

Cereal Bars

Cereal bars are a thing nowadays. Little crumby ingots of appley goodness or revitalising strawberry sawdust to satisfy those nibbly moments in your day. This piece has nothing to do with any of that, but it’s the right title for this piece. This is 99 bars of serial music. Serialism is a genre which strikes hesitation into the hearts of most music lovers, myself certainly included, and strikes directly at that common criticism of modern techniques: is this music or maths? The apprehension is just; in western music, how can a strict 12-note row be a tune? We just don’t deal in tunes with chromatics so closely packed together, and tunes are very important to me. But as I say, I faced the wall of serialism. So what I’ve tried to do is make a single twelve note sequence acceptable and, hopefully by the end of the work, recognisable by the audience.