A Study in Contour, for viola (1975) by David Victor Feldman published on 2015-04-20T04:55:13Z Given four distinct pitches (not pitch classes!), you will have available 24 distinct orders to perform them in. Even without any ear training, most any listener can easily distinguish, say, highest - next_to_lowest - lowest - next_to_highest from lowest - next_to_lowest - next_to_highest - highest. This makes for the basis of a highly audible, psycho-acoustically available variant of serialism. As such, the present piece is based on a sort of abstract 24 tone cyclic row, abstract because, the row lacks the usual information concerning precise pitch content. Instead the row structure specifies only, for each note, whether it sits lower or higher relative to the three notes before it and after it in the cycle. The existence of such a row that exhausts exactly the 24 contour possibilities is a mathematically non-trivial fact. Less than two minutes at full tempo, the piece might service as a virtuosic concert encore. The distinction between these 24 order Genre viola