The Hexadic System is an approach to composition devised by guitarist Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, Rangda, Comets on Fire). While Ben keeps his own Hexadic resource page, I wanted to use this page to gather together some of my work with the system, which is spread across a few different sites. I highly recommend Ben’s Hexadic System book and card deck, along with the two albums of music – all available here. Fingers crossed there will be a third album, too!
Exploring the Hexadic System was the first of my blogs, mainly concentrating on the ‘triadic movements’ game, detailed in the book.
Tradition and Innovation: Speculative Music and the Hexadic System explores more closely the system’s intellectual links to speculative music and esoteric philosophy.
Thinking in Script: Mechanisms and Logic – this is quite a technical text, written for a book on computer-assisted composition. I use a computer model of the Hexadic System to demonstrate the transferral of a complex compositional system into a scripting language.
My page on Ben’s site gives a bit more detail about how I adapted his system for keyboard music.
Finally, you can listen to and download Sorath, a collection of my own Hexadic pieces, here:
And the title track of Hawthonn’s Sea-Spiral Spirit uses the triadic game in its opening and closing sections:
Hexadic figure, squares and sigils for the ‘Sorath’ study.
