I'm starting a new piece, picking up on ideas I abandoned almost a decade ago.
When my mentor Steven Stucky (1949–2016) died, I had recently purchased a resonator guitar (National M1, with a squareneck wooden body and "biscuit" resonators). My immediate response was to start sketching a memorial piece that would adapt Josquin des Prez's Nymphes des bois (a.k.a. Déploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem) for solo slide guitar ... or maybe slide guitar and voice, with the text adapted to a more modern, bluesy idiom? Alas, I felt creatively boxed in by the challenges of maintaining good voice-leading on slide guitar.
This coming June, there will be a concert at Cornell to mark the 10-year anniversary of Steve's death, with works by some of his students from the 1990s. Because I've worked so slowly (and scarcely composed at all in recent years), my works list is small, with no works fitting the available instrumentation. So, I was inspired to revisit the Josquin-via-slide-guitar nexus, but as a trio with violin and 'cello. Voice-leading obstacles magically evaporate!
Full disclosure: I haven't actually found those sketches from 2016; I think I may have sent them along to my archive at Old Dominion University. But I remembered clearly that I'd settled on exploring a hexatonic open tuning < E2, A2, C3, F3, Ab3, Db4 >, and that I could achieve a nice paraphrase of the Nymphes de Bois roster of composers ("Josquin, Brumel, Pirchon, Compere") by moving the slide stepwise down strings 3 and 4 for the lower voices, with the upper voice alternating between strings 1 and 2.
The reason for the title is that before last week, I had a plan to write the piece in seven movements, with each movement paraphrasing a different detail of the Josquin. The plan called for paraphrasing the opening phrase "Nymphes des bois, déesses des fontaines" (shown below) and the guitar's open tuning above nudged me toward how to warp (ever-so-gently) Josquin's melody and transpose it ... starting in the 'cello, answered in the guitar, answered in the violin ... but that would last about 12 seconds, and then ... what?!?!?
The "?!?!?" denotes mild panic over the fact that my more detailed plan requires this music to span 144 seconds. I'm in a good mood today because while I was waiting during a service appointment for our car, I began to implement another detail of the current plan, which is to present that melodic material in the form of "interlocking mobiles, legato." (Interlocking mobiles was a central technique in the late Sir Harrison Birtwistle's (1934–2022) output. Mind you, I had no specific idea what that would mean when I decided that; it was just a necessary contrast to other textures in other movements.
So, it turns out that if you subdivide those two opening phrases from Josquin in to four phraselets ("Nym-phes," "des bois," "dé-es-ses," and "des fontaines") and then allow them to occur in any sequence, that gives 24 permutations ... and because "interlocking" among the three instruments, then each complete set comprises 12 phraselets ... and to cut to the chase, by assigning each phraselet three possible duration segments (one of which corresponds to Josquin's original, with the other two as variations), at the tempo of 72 bpm (also arbitrarily decided in the detailed plan), each complete statement in only one instrument lasts between 14.167 and 18.333 seconds ... and so, each complete statement with all three instruments lasts between 42.5 and 55 seconds. So, I just need around two-and-a-half statements (which, thanks to the various degrees of variation, will sound very similar, but not identical) to fill those 144 seconds.
Yes, I knew perfectly well that I was aping Birtwistle ... and when I realized that I had gone from "?!?!?" to "!!!!!" in one sitting, I recalled his remark to the effect that "ideas are ten a penny," but then you need a method for proliferating them. After I visit random.org to permute the orderings along the various dimensions above, it'll be a straightforward matter to transcribe the results, and then figure out how other elements (from other movements) interact with them.
[please excuse the lack of illustrations; I'll add them later]
