Approaching monthly content

(sort of)

Hokay, it's done: Score and parts for the new, improved version of A field guide to North American car alarms are in the hands of Boston Musica Viva for their May 10 concert in Pickman Hall (see details here), following the usual spiral into madness brought on by parts editing (in which preparing the parts reveals errata in the score, which then bring on additional changes in the parts, rinse, repeat). Also, the opening fanfare, which I had intended to leave unchanged, on closer inspection called out for some teensy changes to reinforce the sense of parallelism among the various instruments swooping, honking, and chirping gestures.

Moving right along = returning to composing my theremin-and-piano extravaganza Tapestry and otter, for the pianist Victoria Tzotzkova. The title derives from Jon Carroll's brilliant and/or wacky description of precision theremin technique, from his review of a concert by Dalit Warshaw: "Her right hand looked as though it were picking lint off a tapestry; her left hand looked as though she were petting an otter.").

I originally imagined the piece as only 10 minutes long, and sketched an arresting introduction (about one minute long), followed by ... um ... an okay sequel (another minute or so), which I now realize belongs in another piece. Specifically, it's not pianistic enough; it's more of a texture for string quartet, or perhaps winds. And as I've played a bit more with improvising theremin melodies over tremolando piano harmonies, I've decided to open up the piece: the target duration is now around 17 minutes or so, with nine sections, ranging from one minute to three minutes in length, alternating free (or seemingly free) rhythm with more regular pulsation. And yes, there will be chimpanzee vocalizations.

Ogblay? Atwhay ogblay?

Yet another stab at reinstating the habit to ... scribble? ... in public (and why, in this day and age, do we still lack of typographic/keyboard equivalent of the word "scribble"?).

Plugging away at the long-deferred tempo fugue that was at least half the raison d'etre for A field guide to North American car alarms. Taking shape, it is, in despite of (or precisely because of?) the decision to rewrite all the pitches ... partly a matter of thinking more carefully about gestures that can be passed around the sextet (and thus, thinking more carefully about how to translate among percussive, woodwind, and bowed-string media), and partly a matter of being more deliberate about setting certain pillars (following some very strict transpositional plans) and then embracing the sheer ad hoc opportunistic possibilities for pitch levels of the countersubject(s).

Okay, that covers the past few weeks. Today's specific mundane epiphanies are:

1) Dagnabbit, notational clarity can be a pain in the @#$. It finally dawned on me that a gesture in which a grace note is sustained (forming a held dyad) requires notation as two voices. It seems pretentious for such a simple gesture, but goshdarnitmakesadifference.

2) On the other hand, I realized I've been creating extra work for myself, overmarking the dynamics of the countersubject. Eliminating the redundancy provides cleaner copy for the players, and (special bonus) Sibelius was overplaying the overmarked dynamics, effectively dropping notes at the end of diminuendos, so now the piece sounds better in crude MIDI playback (longer gestures / better phrasing ... well, duhhh).

3) Not beating myself up about the above, as so much of this seemed okay with only a few phrases occurring simultaneously ... but as the chaos, er, I mean, counterpoint really gets going, it matters more and more. As the whole Gestalt develops, the forest more clearly dictates the requirements of each tree (duhhh redux).

That's enough for one morning; time to break for lunch. Meanwhile, if you haven't already, mark your calendar for Saturday, 10 May.

A moment of clarity

Where to begin ...

The short version is that I seem to be losing interest in the variation-set-tossed-in-a-blender paradigm, and shifting to a desire to develop material more organically and extensively, even to err on the monolithic side of the unity-and-variety balancing act.

The long version is that this past Sunday offered a pause from the frantic rush to meet a deadline (which—full disclosure—I missed), enough for me to realize that certain inchoate misgivings tugging at the back of my brain are spot-on, viz., that I’ve been developing materials for two (or perhaps three) different pieces (each surely shorter than the one I thought I was writing). And that’s not counting the material I initially toyed with and then shelved because of voice-leading problems.

So, on the one hand, I have a lot of work to do (because I'm writing more music than I thought), but on the other, it's a relief to see a simple solution of divide and conquer. The bottom line is that I now seem to be working with four (or five) different short pieces for theremin and two slide guitars:

1. A staccato, micro-chromatically ascending theme, which seems to represent a hybrid of the main riff from King Crimson's “Larks' tongues in aspic” (1973) and the staccato theme from Ennio Morricone‘s soundtrack for The Untouchables (1987). This is the item with which I painted myself into a voice-leading corner, thanks to the nature of the sonorities (a 4/3 perfect fourth plus a series of tritones ... e.g., 11/8, 7/5, 10/7, 16/11).

The way out: I recently bought myself a proper deck (as opposed to a desktop widget) of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards, and one consultation turned up the suggestion “Discard an axiom.” In this case, I think I need to discard the pitch a fourth below (or above) the tritones, and replace it with another that offers more attractive options for voice-leading (maybe a harmonic seventh).

2. A series of canons deriving from Blind Willie Johnston’s “Dark was the night, cold was the ground” (1927). I previously thought that the imitative canonic treatments of the “long-tempo” melody needed faster, motoric sections for contrast ... but now those contrasts seem too arbitrary.

The way out: The piece will be shorter than I thought (something like seven minutes’ duration, not thirteen), and it needs to develop more organically, sprouting increasingly ornate variants. The central portion of the piece won’t be literally slower in tempo, but rather, will seem that way when the dendritic tangle of melodies achieves harmonic saturation. Perhaps the slide guitars use e-bows throughout.

3. A glissandissimo exploration of portamento: starting with short durations and narrow intervals, and gradually expanding to create something along the lines of Percy Grainger's free music, or some of Jean-Claude Risset’s classic electroacoustic compositions.

The way out: This is the idea I’ve worked with the least (and by “least,” I mean “not at all, not yet”). Hardest part will be figuring out how to stay oriented as the thereminist, needing to find my pitches amid the continuously shifting slide guitar lines.

4. (& 5.?) Rhythmic passages in which one guitar arpeggiates “power chords” of a perfect fourth (or fifth) plus an octave, while one (or both) of the other instruments play a sustained melody (perhaps while the other oscillates between two other pitches). I like what I've written so far; I just don't believe that it belongs with the “Dark was the night” material.

The way out: Here there are also some problems with voice-leading, but they result from trying to fit an arbitrary set of chromatic Urlinien. So I need to step back and find some harmonic successions that I like, and then generate a new set of Urlinien that supply appropriate contexts.

So, instead of a single patchwork that lasts 13 minutes, the above outlines a set of short pieces with a total duration between 20 and 30 minutes, and after writing those I can start climbing out of my (self-imposed) pit of nested interruptions:

1. Return to the theremin-and-wind-ensemble extravaganza described in the previous posts.

2. Complete my solo piece for unspecified percussion. There was nothing wrong with it when I put it aside; it was just driving me crazy that I couldn’t hear the piece outside my imagination.

3. Return to revising my apes-and-monkeys string quartet, Simiaminimae.

4. Complete my long-deferred bleeding-trunk, A field guide to North American car alarms.

[Pardon: it's been so long, I can't recall how to create links that will jump directly to those entries in my online works list.]

Oh, yes: Somewhere in there, I need to revise the solo part to Hundenschnarchenwiegenlied (2010) so that I can play it without having a heart attack. In line with the sentiments expressed above, the solution probably lies in jettisoning the Brahms lullaby ... or at least, in letting go of specific pitches, and letting the player simply articulate contours, with much more, much slower portamento, quasi russare (an instruction that appeared in the original score, but which probably needs to be written-out in the notation ... and so, the next version might abandon traditional staves in favor of a simple pitch/time grid).

(The problem is that projecting any sense of the melodic integrity of each layer requires separating them by register ... but in 12-ET, this means the composite spans three full octaves, which makes for treacherous melodic leaps ... and right now, I’d rather not contemplate the solution of, say, mapping them onto 31-ET so that they span only two octaves, or narrower.)

P.S. Colored text above is meant to compensate for lack of indenting (does Blogger really not allow the latter without jumping through HTML hoops?)

P.S.S. Can you believe that Blogger's editing window flags Simiaminimae and Hundenschnarchenwiegenlied as possible misspellings?!?

If at first you don’t succeed ...

Sure enough, after my previous post, the next page of manuscript began to bog down in a big way, suggesting that my provisional modus operandi was not, in fact, sustainable. So I went back to the drawing board, and have now revised my framework to more thoroughly scatter what's happening at the start of the piece, and let it coalesce more gradually into a semblance of orderly musical form.

In practical terms, this means painstakingly converting strings of random digits into musical bits. It's a tedious slog indeed, but it does generate a more convincing rendition of chaos than my previous, less rigorous method of throwing notes onto staves.

Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!

No, I haven't converted to totalitarianism, the Taliban, and/or Tea Party. Rather, while polishing the first long page of short score (or at least, a nominal first draft of it), I found myself erasing some freely added harmony tones, and replacing them with tones from the quasi-Urlinien.
 
Said action immediately reminded me of the ants' lament on the space shuttle (a little more than one minute into this clip):
 

 
The funny part is that when I teach composition, I encourage (nay, bludgeon) my students to create some sort of large-scale plan for the piece, so that they're never stuck wondering what comes next. I always cheerfully emphasize that if, in the act of executing the plan, one discovers more interesting implications within the material at hand, one can always deviate from the script (and then adjust it accordingly). In this case, I did just the opposite. I leave it to others to decide whether this illustrates a propensity for formalism, formality, formicity, etc.

[ ... ]

The Pollock-esque approach of randomly throwing harmonies and motives onto a blank canvas beautifully suits a work schedule dominated by other obligations. As the canvas approaches the approximately half-empty/half-full state, I realize there's a decision I hadn't thought through previously, viz., What's the longest duration of silence I'll incorporate into the piece? ... and for that matter, What's the longest duration for an unembellished chord?
In prior works, I've routinely included silences of five seconds or shorter, and occasionally ten seconds or so. As for sustained chords ... now that you mention it, when was the last time I wrote one (say, longer than five seconds), and left it unadorned by micropolyphony, hocket, polyrhythmic punctuation, etc.?
 
P.S. [5:55 pm] What I neglected to type on my phone earlier is that all along, I’ve expected the piece to include copious pauses that would allow the players to regroup, catch their breath, collect their wits, empty spit from their instruments, etc. ... but in the act of composing, I haven’t explicitly placed any of these. I’ve half a mind to make a first pass without any, and then go back and randomly place the fermatas. [insert benevolently diabolical laughter here]
   

Our story thus far

I’m currently working on an extravaganza for theremin and wind ensemble, to be titled Aether/Ore. The planning started last spring, and (thanks to a busy teaching schedule) stretched out over the summer. My original idea was to try something like unto a good ol’ 1960s Moment-Form, because I’d written several pieces during the Aughts that turned out a bit more predictable than I intended, particularly with regard to the lengths of contrasting subsections. For inspiration, I turned to images of fractal basins of attraction, e.g.,

 

 

A nifty feature of such a pattern is that if you zoom in on the boundary between two colors, you discover a small zone of the third color ... f’rinstance, in the image above, if you zoom in on the boundary between a red zone and a yellow zone, you find some blue ... but then if you zoom in closer on the boundary between the blue and the yellow, you discover a bit of red ... and if you zoom in between that red and the yellow, you find more blue ... etc., ad infinitum.

   

The horrible part of trying to realize this idea in sound is that early this fall, when I started to convert miscellaneous spreadsheet data into pitches and rhythms, I discovered almost instantly that I was writing something that student ensembles wouldn't stand a chance of performing! So, back to the drawing board ...

   

The good news is that the revised process has been going much faster. In the interest of keeping things simple, I’ve been indulging in multiple “sins” that I normally, Puritanically avoid, e.g.,

     1. moving chords relentlessly in parallel,

     2. favoring a regular rock backbeat,

     3. favoring homophonic textures (i.e., limiting contrapuntal interest), and

     4. sketching in short score.

   

The first three liberties derive directly from the Ore part of the title (referring to heavy-metal and proto-heavy-metal styles). And to achieve a more convincing state of quasi-randomness, I’ve been using lists of genuinely random numbers to determine when motives occur in the piece. The resulting process has left me slightly in the dark about the overall form, as the sketch pages start blank and then gradually accumulate patches of dots and lines in unpredictable fashion. Right now, I think I’m about 40% of the way along ... which is to say, some pages are half full and half blank, while others are one-third full and two-thirds blank. So the overall Gestalt is starting to take shape, but there’s still plenty of room to surprise me.

   

Initially, I worried that the random numbers might distribute the material too evenly, but already there are several pile-ups where two things might be happening at once. In light of item 3 above, these might become passages of rapid alternation ... or if they do manifest a textural pile-up, I won’t attempt any treacherous polyrhythmic tricks. If nothing else, I need to make sure that I won’t trip myself up with regard to finding my marks in the solo theremin part (on which count I’m firmly resolved never again to shoot myself in the foot).