Privileged Pattern

In music a privileged pattern is a motive, figure, or chord which is repeated and transposed so that the transpositions form a recognizable pattern. The pattern of transposition may be either by a repeated interval, an interval cycle, or a stepwise line of whole tones and semitones. The pattern is said to be privileged because it requires no context and is a precompositional technique. (Wilson 1992, p.39-40)

Famous quotes containing the words privileged and/or pattern:

    It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: “youth” is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.
    Philippe Ariés (20th century)

    In this lucid and flexible pattern only one thing remained always stationary, but this fallacy went unnoticed by Martha. The blind spot was the victim. The victim showed no signs of life before being deprived of it. If anything, the corpse which had to be moved and handled before burial seemed more active than its biological predecessor.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)