This is a piece for scordatura solo viola that I composed for my 20th-century music class. The performance is by me--it is flawed but communicates the idea well enough.
I submitted the following essay along with the composition:

This piece is made up of eight very short pieces representing eight tetrachords that share a prime form. I have always been drawn to art with a methodical or calculated element, especially in the form of “every possible combination/permutation/arrangement”—e.g. some wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, or Eugen Gomringer’s “Kein Fehler in System”—so as we learned about pitch-class sets I became interested in exploring them in this way. As I discovered, any prime form with n pitch-classes is the prime form for 2n n-chords including itself. These chords can be divided into two groups that are “modes” of the same “scale”—that is, they consist of the same intervals in the same order, but with a different phase or starting point. In the context of an atonal piece these modes may not be distinguishable from each other, as there is no tonic to serve as that starting point. In my piece C is always the starting point or 0, so while the harmony is unconventional, it is not exactly atonal in the way that Webern’s p.c.-set-oriented works are. The modes become distinguishable by the relationship of the pitches to C; though the total intervallic content is the same, the intervals between C and the other members vary for each mode.
The brevity of the pieces was inspired by the various small pieces that we studied this semester. Though my main point of reference was the short atonal movements by the likes of Webern, I also had in mind Kurtag’s “Officium Breve” and Tenney’s postal pieces. The decision to make the pieces short was both practical and artistic. Limiting to myself to just one tetrachord in one transposition for each piece meant that their potential for harmonic interest would probably be exhausted quickly, so I thought it would be best to finish with each chord before its sonority became stale, but I also find a certain charming humility and honesty in short pieces; they present what they have to offer and nothing more, uninterested in extravagance.
The piece is written for solo viola, and its harmonic material is derived from the viola. The original form of the tetrachord, [0278], almost contains the pitches of the four open strings, but the A (9) is substituted with an Ab (8). In fact, the piece is intended to be played with the A string tuned down a semitone, and the first of the eight pieces opens with a rendering of the [0278] set across the open strings in sequence. This has a variety of interesting effects and implications. For one, it connects the piece to others we have discussed the challenge traditional notions of musical skill; even for a highly skilled violist, this piece would at least be difficult to sightread as it disrupts the expected synchronization of the page, the fingers, and the sound. Overall the piece is probably not challenging for most players, but it must be attended to in order to be learned and played. An alternate tuning scheme also exposes the relationship between physical aspects of playing the instrument and the sound of the music that is performed on it; in this piece, some harmonies that would be awkward to perform on a properly-tuned viola become quite natural, thus becoming a more prevalent part of the instrument’s vocabulary. Many of the pitch collections in the piece are rendered much more comfortably under this tuning than they would otherwise be (e.g. the third piece, which is performed only with the third finger and the open strings), so it could be argued that the tuning is an appropriate choice for the piece, even though it is initially unintuitive for players.
I’m pleased with how the piece turned out, though I think that the constraints provided by the premise were ultimately a little too tight. If I were to write another piece like this I would like to devise a method for incorporating multiple modes and transpositions into one piece while still emphasizing the “all permutations” aspect.