Freedom through self-constraint: some musical applications

Whilst travelling in South Africa a couple of years ago, I was introduced by family friends to a late middle aged woman, the mother of a musician and a bit of a hippy with a deep interest in jazz, with whom it was assumed I would have much in common, and in the ensuing conversation she breathlessly proclaimed that there were an infinite number of chords. Of course, I immediately disagreed and told her that there were in fact exactly 222 prime form pitch class sets 1 or, by another method of calculation, 8178 possible chords within one octave 2 (not discounting transpositionally equivalent chords), and that even if one were to follow through this method for all eight octaves of a piano, before taking into account the aural imperceptibly of the difference between many of these chords, there was most certainly a finite number of them. That she found my response objectionable is not surprising; she saw the confines of the musical world I described as literally confining. On the other hand, as a composer, I find it particularly appealing that there are a limited number of notes and chords to work with; it’s precisely what allows me to compose with them. The confusion comes, I think, from the equation of finite parametric limitations with the expressive power of music or more broadly speaking, the equation of freedom with infinite choice.