The great French composer and theorist Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) famously spoke of “the charm of impossibilities.” When Messiaen used the phrase, he was usually referring to what he called “modes of limited transposition,” or a distinct set of seven scales which, due to their inbuilt symmetry, can only undergo a limited number of transpositions before folding back into themselves. Each of the modes contains elements with which we’re all familiar—the chromatic pitch-classes of the traditional Western equal-tempered scale—but arranges them in an order that transforms them, transmutates them into something new, something mysterious, something at once extraordinarily simple and yet remarkably complex. Suddenly these pitches we know so well are heard as sounds from another world. They lack the traditionally stabilizing element of a tonic or a key signature, but their adamantine structure makes them stable to the point of immovability.

The Hancock Tower (which is really called “Hancock Place,” but I don’t think anyone’s called in that in a couple of decades) is both impossibly beautiful and impossibly impossible. It’s a Continue reading »