Desolation Row
I read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles book the week it came out; it was impossible to put down. Anyway, I’ve been studying 12-tone row composition lately, and happened to remember this post from Alex Ross’s excellent blog:
Alex’s post refers to this passage from the book: “If you’re using the [diatonic] scale, and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms”.
I also kind of wondered what Bob meant when I read that in his book
So, I came up with this version of a 12-tone row based on Bob’s comments and Alex’s blog post:
Note that you can’t follow the pattern (as I interpret it, anyway) exactly. Otherwise you would want to put a B as the 10th tone, but B has already been used as the 3rd tone.