Recital 4/29/07

Notes and recordings from my first recital. Recordings are all hosted at the Internet Archive, where you can also stream smaller versions of these files.

The Parable of the Sower

The first twenty-one notes of the Bach D minor violin partita are imagined as seeds planted in a row. Each seed sprouts and blooms. Each chord-blossom imagines an inner nature of its seed note, based on the quality, tension and direction of that note as it lies in the original line. The line thickens but maintains its continuity and direction.
The chord-blossoms are in their prime in the middle of the piece; after three or four iterations the line is robust and its shape remains clear. Beyond this point, however, are diminishing returns: as harmonies become intrinsically rich they become extrinsically inert. Each new note perturbs the trajectories of its neighbors. Chords no longer want to lead from one to the next. I lose control of the line. Imagine blossoms, over-ripe, one by one quitting the vine.
But even as this happens a second and opposite process is taking place. Not limited by the same diminishing returns, secondary properties – dynamics, rhythm – define their own line with increasing clarity. These properties create, or rather reveal, a kind of physical momentum that originated in the tonal momentum of Bach’s line – the acceleration of the scale, the traction preparing the leap, the weightless denouement of the leap itself, the resulting tumble. As the tonal logic is gradually peeled away, the physical logic is revealed to be freestanding.
A parable, then, about music history.


Quintet for Solo Clarinet

Angelique Poteat, Clarinet
Emily Dahl, violin
Kaoru Suzuki, violin
Karen Raizen, viola
Jay Tilton, cello

Though notes sound like discrete points and lines, they emanate inaudible, but not imaginary, fields. Their fields of tonal influence interact, producing the distinctive sounds of intervals. They generate fields in our memory which interact in much the same way, producing motivic, thematic, or structural resonances and dissonances. There are fields in a possibility-space that describe the likelihood of future events, which inform our expectation.
The Quintet for Solo Clarinet explores this idea. Imagine that the clarinet is alone. The other sounds are fields emanating from her line – memory trails, harmonic implications both real and imagined, unexplored paths, alternative interpretations and consequences. And though the clarinet generates these forms, they aren’t strictly determined. They often diverge from their source and achieve a brief independence before fading, as if swept away by irrational, chthonic forces.


The Tourist
1. (Emerging)
2. The Tourist
3. (Submerging)

Cynthia Bova, piano
Dan Sedgwick, piano

Imagine that the music we hear is only a slice of a deep, unbroken continuum, surfacing briefly like a whale, a thread in a tapestry, or incompletely like the tip of an iceberg. Or an animal in a zoo – certainly ours is the domesticated form. How does it behave in the wild, untouched by human hands?
The Tourist is the music – well behaved, presentable, a product of my ear (which is to say, bred in captivity). The surrounding movements imagine states prior and subsequent to its brief incarnation, as if it were first congealing, and then dissolving back into the silent, unbroken line.


Selections from the Origins Etudes
1a. Separation
1b. Sedimentation
2b. Cantus Firmus

Francis Liu, violin
Stephanie Nussbaum, violin
Lauren Magnus, viola
Josh Boulton, cello

“To be original is to return to your origin.”
Narcis Bonet

1a. Separation
A study in musical mitosis. An open fifth is pulled apart; smooth pitch (glissandi) becomes striated (semitones); rhythmic streams struggle for independence; dynamics and articulation, initially mapped isomorphically to pitch, diverge. Then a phase change: pitches solidify into three harmonies (major chords separated by whole steps) which are themselves teased out one by one; those chords diverge, rotating independently through the circle of fifths; rhythmic unisons skew. V I cadence – another phase change: I begin to separate myself from the music by surrendering control of first the rhythms, finally the pitches.

1b. Sedimentation
The registral range of the quartet is treated as a space. The middle of this space, around middle C, is fertile and generative. Half and whole steps pour out. Spontaneous and relentless change in this region pressures the line it generates to adapt. Half and whole steps get pushed outward, with the smaller, lighter half steps drifting to the edges.
Sedimentation is a search process. When loose elements (here, scale steps) freely spread throughout a system and settle, their resulting shape is a description of the relevant constraints of that system. Recall how iron filings describe the shape of magnetic fields, or how trees at high altitudes hug a timberline. In the same way, this sedimentation of notes reveals the shape of my range-space: a single bulge to which volume, tone color and tempo conform.

2b. Cantus Firmus
Cantus firmus technique, in which added parts decorate a fixed melody, was used as early as the tenth century. It was the dominant polyphonic practice for the following five hundred years. I borrow two cantus fermi and treat each with rigorous three-voice counterpoint. The added lines it observe strict rules governing linear motion and dissonance treatment, and only seven pitches are permitted – no sharps or flats. But the quartet does not play this. Instead, they present an analysis of it based on an observation about the composite nature of musical lines:
When a line leaps, it is heard as the abandonment of one line and the introduction of another. The abandoned line does not completely disappear. Its final pitch hangs, lingering in our ear and memory until it is resumed, or another voice merges with it. These hanging pitches subtly influence our sense of harmony, and must be controlled carefully. Bach, for example, fastidiously resolves dissonant hanging pitches before final cadences.
In this movement, one line of counterpoint at a time is systematically broken into its composite lines, which pass between the instruments. Hanging pitches are sustained until they are resolved by another voice.


The Parable of the Sown

Lauren Snouffer, soprano
Katina Mitchell, soprano
Ryan Stickney, alto
Meghan Tarkington, alto
Jacob Barton, tenor
Ross Chitwood, bass
Charles McKean, bass
Daniel McNickle, bass

You, in my garden, in my secret soil! In my sowing I was careful, and yet you are not the seed that I remember planting. Your strange and curled crown – your leaves all twisted round – you seem to find me stunned (but I’ve been cold and kind of breathless in the mornings when I’ve slept too long for dreaming you) –
I’m unsure in my garden, in my secret soil, (growing!) for I know that weeds can flower fair (and yet you’re growing!) – and what about this garden I was charged with keeping? Flowers, dreams and weeds are not the same.

I’ll make some space for you –
if you make some space for me.