While on a train, listening to a very animated conversation
taking place in a language I don’t speak, it occurred to me
that that is what listening to atonal music is to some: a
language they do not recognize, that holds familiar shapes
and contours that help them make sense of what they are
hearing, but in the end the details are unrecognizable.
“Parley” as a title contains this idea: a deliberate misspelling
of the French word ‘parler,’ it is both familiar and yet
‘wrong.’ So, too, the music of this duet: it is loosely based on a
12-tone row, but freely goes off course; it has some
consonances that give hints of tonality, but isn’t really tonal
either.
As in the original conversation, the two voices of this duet at
times try to speak over each other, get excited, ramble, and
then come back to make an emphatic point. The conversation
ended in an amicable agreement, which I’ve represented here
with the same pitch in both voices, two octaves apart.