Isn’t that quite a word? I love it. Especially as a title. For those of you who aren’t great with Greek Mythology (and/or Final Fantasy XIII), the word/title is drawn from the concept of the Hecatonchires which means “Hundred-Handed Ones”. They were pretty central characters in the battle between the Olympians and the Titans. In fact, were it not for the Hecatonchires, then the Olympians PROBABLY would’ve lost. Or I guess not seeing as how it’s all fiction and like…. anyways, can you then figure out what a Dodecatonchires would be?
If you guessed “The Ten-Handed Ones!” then you’re wrong. But if you guessed “The Twelve-Handed Ones” then you’re absolutely correct! 
In any case, to end the anticipation I’ll just go ahead and say that this is, in fact, a twelve-tone piece. For those of you less familiar with what that means, just to give a brief explanation, it’s basically a serial, atonal piece that uses all twelve pitches as it’s foundation. Rather than diatonic (7 pitches), or octatonic (8), or whole-tone (6), 12-tone pieces, although they can make some pitches more important than others, utilize all 12 in some capacity.
So yeah the impetus for this piece was an assignment given to me in my 20th-Century Styles class to compose a 24-measure twelve-tone piece for any instrumentation. Because I had been wanting to compose either a clarinet quartet or clarinet choir piece for a while now, I went with a clarinet trio (since we have to also make a recording and a trio would just be easier to organize in a week’s time). I composed the entire thing in about an hour and a half two nights ago and really liked what I was able to come up with. It is 100% twelve-tone and I LOVE the fact that it still manages to sound like something I’d write!
It’s very important to me that no matter what I compose, what types of new modes I try, etc, that at the end of the day, it sounds like “Dorian Savohn” and not just “something I wrote cause I had to write something”. But whatever, I just wanted to make this post to introduce the piece which I think will eventually be more than just 24 measures. I think that one “movement” that I’ve already written might only be 24-measures long as a finished product; but I definitely am interested in exploring the idea of having multiple miniature movements all based on the twelve-tone row that I came up with.
