strings
Midnight Blue
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 1:33pm — Nathan
By my own reckoning, Midnight Blue is one of the most successful pieces I have composed. I feel like I achieved everything I set out to accomplish in the piece, in terms of both form and expression. Audience response to Midnight Blue has been enthusiastic, and it is also the piece that earned me my first groupie. And isn't that why anyone goes into music in the first place?
The many splendors of Midnight Blue are the end result of an experiment which took a year and a half to carry out. It began in the spring of 2002, during my studies at Duke with Anthony Kelley. We had examined some compositions which employed additive structures -- forms in which new material is progressively added to a preexisting seed -- paying particular attention to "Call to Prayer" from In This House On This Morning by Wynton Marsalis, and to measures 7-30 of The Yellow Pages by Michael Torke. Although the additive structures in these two works are both clearly audible, they are developed in different ways. In "Call to Prayer," Marsalis starts with a very basic three-note riff, and elongates it, by adding extra notes at the end of the riff, and prepending a sequence of chords leading into the riff. In "The Yellow Pages," Torke starts out with a sparse melody in 16th-notes -- more rests than notes, initially -- and gradually fills in the gaps with more notes in an apparently haphazard fashion over successive repetitions of the two-bar cell. In both of these cases, it is easy to hear how the musical material evolves over time, and I decided I wanted to be a bit more subtle in my presentation of the structure.
The particular structure I chose to use, though clearly related to both Marsalis' and Torke's structures, was most directly inspired by a completely different sort of artist: comics artist, writer, and theorist Scout McCloud. Although he is an accomplished creator of mainstream comics, McCloud is perhaps best known for his works, both written and drawn, exploring the formal possibilities of online comics, employing what he refers to as the "infinite canvas". Though not particularly adventurous artistically, his variable-length strip Original Recipe Carl uses a clear additive structure for narrative purposes: beginning with a very basic two-panel comic, additional panels are inserted, one at a time, at various points in the middle of the strip, until we arrive at the 52-panel story of Carl's demise. While the story is hardly profound, I was intrigued at the way that the reader's perception of time can change through the many iterations of the strip. As more panels are added, impression of the passage of time, both globally -- from the first panel to the last -- and locally -- from one panel to the next -- are constantly revised, and both global and local markers have the potential to stretch or shrink -- or stay the same. In other words, the shape and proportions of the story, even the parts we are already familiar with from previous iterations, are always in flux. In contrast, the additive structures of Marsalis' and Torke's compositions both leave the shape of previous iterations intact; at any point in the evolution of either piece, you could take a highlighter to the score and reveal the seed, or any other preceding stage of the structure, in its original form.
At this point, you can probably guess the sort of musical structure I had in mind to reflect McCloud's narrative structure. I started with a simple musical idea, a 14-note melody that outlines the harmonies of the 12-bar blues form in the most skeletal way. I then inserted notes, a small handful at a time, in between existing notes, so that the skeletal line blossomed into a 35-note melody, now dancing around the blues changes. But unlike The Yellow Pages, where each iteration of the structure is limited to the same 2-bar timeframe, the boundaries of the melody grow with time. At the same time, the durations of individual notes in the melody are free to grow or shrink, to better fit the slowly swinging cadence of the blues.
It took me rather little time to work out how this melody would grow from 14 notes to 35, and even less time to work out chords supporting the melody in the piano. But successively elaborated repetitions of this melody would not be sufficient to carry the piece; I need something more. Look again to the blues tradition for inspiration, I decided that a call-and-response form would allow me to contrast different melodies, and different structures as well. I started sketching a melody for the most noble of instruments, the bass trombone. While the initial melody in the piano had a very narrow compass in both rhythm and register, the bass trombone would be largely free of such constraints. And while the piano's additive structure interpolated notes in every nook and cranny, the bass trombone would be much more straightforward: first two bars of its melody, then four, then eight, and so on. At this point, having written eight bars of melody for the bass trombone, I realized that these eight bars could easily be fit to the first eight bars of the blues form, so I added four more bars to fill out the form.
Now I had a full-blown melody for both the bass trombone and piano, and I was going to progressively build up to both melodies in alternation. But what should I do in between? The bass trombone melody was quite soulful, and could easily stand unaccompanied. But in comparison, the piano melody, even at its most complex stage, was rather weak; it couldn't stand up to the trombone on its own. So maybe I could use it as accompaniment, and write other material for the trombone on top of it. Now, just because I'm using the piano melody as accompaniment doesn't mean it's not important -- think of how a Gospel choir lays down a tune, with a soloist going to town on top. Without the tune, the soloist doesn't have anything to play off of. If I could get that kind of dynamic going in my piece, I'd really be happy.
So, I want to come up with something for the bass trombone to play on top of the piano, but at the same time I want it to be a part of the additive structures I've been building up. I notice that, as the bass trombone's unaccompanied melody goes on, it introduces new pitches not previously heard at key points. While this is not particularly striking on its own -- if you take a close look at this now long-winded description I've been writing, you'll find that each paragraph includes new words I haven't used previously -- it still seemed like something I could use. The bass trombone, when it plays on top of the piano, is at first limited to the very first note of its melody -- D -- and with each additional segment of the unaccompanied melody that it plays, the new pitches that are introduced can be used as well. Thus, the available pitches for the bass trombone to play on top of the piano keep growing: D, then A and C after two bars, B and F after four bars, G, G#, and F# after eight bars, and E and C# after the whole 12-bar melody has been stated in its entirety. And this also suggests an ending for the piece: a cadenza in which Bb and Eb, the two missing notes, finally become available to the trombone. I go nuts writing this cadenza, adding numerous flourishes to the basic 12-bar melody I had already sketched out. Then a cascade of all 12 chromatic pitches, tumbling across the full register of the trombone, and then borrowing the chords from the piano's initial statement-- wait. Chords? I can play some two-note chords on my horn, but the chords I want are fuller and more agile than I can manage with my multiphonic technique. Maybe this isn't a bass trombone piece after all. Maybe it's...*sigh*...a cello piece. Guess I'll have to write something else if I want to be the star.
But, yes. Cello. And piano. I've got the piano part all worked out. I've got the concept of the cello part all down, but the details need to be worked out. I'll start with the full twelve bars of the cello melody, unaccompanied, just to let everyone know where this is headed. This melody ends on D, the same note that it starts on, so I'll treat that as the first bar of the melody for structural purposes, and when the piano comes in with the skeletal form of its melody, the cello is limited to that D. I've allowed myself to use any octave, so it isn't too monotonous, but there's only so much I can do in this context with just Ds. The first stage of the structure is complete. Then the piano lays out again and I write the first 2 bars of the cello melody, with a little elaboration, but there's only so much elaboration I can put into two bars, especially as I want to stick to the pitches in the first two bars of the original melody, of which there are 3. Then the piano comes in, and with 3 notes to pick from, the cello can have a little more fun on top. That's stage two. Then four bars of cello solo, and we're up to five pitches. Piano comes in, cello plays with those five pitches, getting even more intricate.
At this point, I run into a wall. After three iterations of the various processes underlying the piece, and with only five available pitches in the cello part, I'm running up against the limits of what I can hear in my head and write down. Well, the cadenza I have planned for the end is even wilder than what I just wrote, but that's unaccompanied. Whatever I do with the cello part up to that part has to work with the piano part, which in turn is getting more active and more syncopated. It's taken me two or three weeks to get to this point, and it would take more than a year before I could go further. By now I've graduated from Duke, and am beginning my studies at Tufts with John McDonald. My unfinished sketch for this piece -- still unnamed -- was one of the things that got me into the M.A. program, so one of my first projects is to finish the darn thing. Somehow, I manage it. Maybe it's the impetus of having it performed that semester, maybe my mind's ear is sharper now, but some way or another, I pick up where I left off and see it through. I flesh out two more iterations of the process, each one wilder than before. As the pitch inventory of the cello grows, so do my options -- I can arpeggiate chords both "inside" and "outside" the piano harmonies, I can emphasize the blue notes, I can throw in trills and mordants and other classic figurations. And I go absolutely wild with my rhythms -- syncopations within syncopations, or hemiolas against a beat which is only implied in the piano. I want this music to swing and sing, and I go through a lot of effort to meticulously notate the desired rhythmic nuances, so the cello can swing even if the cellist can't. But I was lucky to have a great cellist, Emmanuel Feldman, premiering the piece, and he did a great job with it.
I wound up calling the piece Midnight Blue, for a few reasons. First, the title alludes to the blues form that I love so much, and which forms the backbone of the piece. It also describes the instrumental color of the piece; the combination of cello and the lower register of the piano (the piano never goes higher than the E above middle C, and spends most of its time and octave or two below that) is very dark and rich. And Midnight Blue, especially with the melodic outpourings of the cello, has an emotional urgency which, for some reason, I associate with the middle of the night. Like there's something on your mind keeping you awake at night, and it gets so heavy that you just have to get up, find the highest spot you can, whether it's a mountaintop or the roof of your apartment building, and just shout out loud. That's what Midnight Blue is to me.
Midnight Blue is not a perfect piece. It's got things I'm not entirely happy with. A few days before the premiere, I realized that I broke one of the rules of my additive structure -- that the cello would always be limited to the pitches from the last segment of its melody -- in two or three places, using notes that hadn't been properly introduced yet. If I had caught those "mistakes" while writing the piece, I would have written something else, but it was too late to change anything for the premiere, and, frankly, I couldn't come up with anything that sounded as good using the "right" notes. Even more troubling is the way I go to town with the cello part -- for all that I am suspicious of showy displays of virtuosity, Midnight Blue is the showiest piece I have ever written. Maybe that's part of why it has gone over so well with audiences. But even if it doesn't fully align with my own musical standards, it's still a fine piece, and I'm proud to have my name on it.
Hamming It Up
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 1:23pm — NathanBlues in Natural Time
Wed, 05/14/2008 - 1:14pm — NathanBlues in Natural Time is the second of my Rhythm Etudes for solo violin, which for me are exercises in organizing, perceiving, and generating rhythm. Blues in Natural Time uses a concept which I dubbed, surprisingly enough, "natural time". The idea of natural time came as a response to various temporal signifiers in music which I felt to be overly arbitrary. In particular, I was troubled by the usage of precise numbers of seconds to denote durations in certain pieces. Now, the use of seconds, or metronome markings, or any other precise standard of measuring time is not in itself overly arbitrary: if the composer feels that a particular sonic event should last a particular duration, they should indicate that duration through whatever means they consider most appropriate, and this can include specifying some precise number of seconds. However, I must note that the number of seconds, or minutes, or microfortnights specified is in itself irrelevant to the listener. Nevertheless, in works such as George Crumb's Black Angels, many durational units are chosen for their numerological significance, and there are many notes and rests with indicated durations of 7 or 13 seconds1. Now, I have no problem with incorporating numerological elements into a work, and there are many other audible musical (and linguistic) ways in which the numbers 7 and 13 are reflected in Black Angels. However, to the listener, a note lasting 7 seconds is not 7 of anything. For the most part, durations are only meaningful relative to one another; seven seconds is "some amount of time," while 13 seconds is "a longer amount of time, about twice as long as the first". In fact, due to our usually fuzzy perception of time, the listener may in fact decide that the 13-second note is meant to be exactly twice as long as the 7-second note, even though one of the most fascinating (to me) things about the use of 7 and 13 as recurring elements is that 13 is 1 less than twice 7. Seconds are arbitrary units, and absolute measurements in arbitrary units can't hold meaning in and of themselves.
But nearly all standards of measuring duration that we have are arbitrary. Seconds are arbitrary, and metronome markings rely on the minute, which is also arbitrary. The only non-arbitrary standards of time that we have are either too large or too small to be musically useful: the day and the year2, the decay of various particles, the frequency of various well-defined wavelengths of light3. However, there are at least two common durational signifiers which are musically useful, readily perceivable, and not arbitrarily defined: our heartbeat and breath. Now, these are not standards of measuring time: two people will have different pulse and breathing rates, and even for a single person, both pulse and breathing rate fluctuate greatly over time. But the heartbeat and breath are common to all listeners, and their cadences are easily recognizable to all. While a silence lasting for 7 of the performer's heartbeats may not be clearly perceived as exactly 7 heartbeats to the listener, I think it is a more compelling way of representing the number 7 as a duration. With this in mind, I devised a concept of "natural time", in which shorter musical durations are organized around a quarter-note pulse aligned with the performer's heartbeat, and longer durations are marked by their inhalation and exhalation. In this particular case, the violinist plays long, drone-like notes on one or two strings, bowing and sliding between notes in time to their breath, while playing left-hand pizzicato notes on the open strings in time to their heartbeat. In this way, the two pulses are presented concurrently, though since the number of heartbeats per breath may vary according to the performer and their mood, I have to give the performer some leeway in aligning these two pulses. Since inhalations tend to be quicker than exhalations, and the resting heart rate is approximately five times the resting respiratory rate for adults, I assigned half notes to the inhalations and dotted half notes to the exhalations, but this is only an approximation, and should not be read as an exact correspondence with the quarter-note heartbeat pulse.
Now, music incorporating biometric units of duration is not in itself a new idea; the heartbeat is a natural starting point for determining tempo, and melodies tend to fall into phrases demarcated by breath. Many modern composers, such as Pauline Oliveros, have explicitly used breath as a durational and organizational unit. But I feel that I arrived at my concept of natural time independently, and that it has its own worth. In particular, I was struck by the potentially self-modifying aspect of natural time: the performer's pulse and breathing rate may go up if they have to play particularly fast or strenuous music, and slow down when they have sustained notes. Thus, in Blues in Natural Time, I contrast sections of natural time, featuring slowly-shifting drones and occasional plucked notes, with more active sections of fast rhythmic and melodic activity. I had at one point hoped to have the faster sections defined by subdivisions of the heartbeat, but I found that my particular musical ideas did not fall neatly into heartbeat-length groupings, so I went with more conventional tempo indications for those sections. As a whole, these sections outline a single chorus of a 12-bar blues form, though the concept of "bar" doesn't really apply here. The sections in natural time give a skeletal outline of the harmonic progression of the blues, and the faster sections fill in the gaps with melodic elaborations. Although the exact pace of the natural time is unpredictable from one performance to another, I had a pretty solid idea, based on my own pulse and breathing, of what these sections would sound like. In the premiere performance, violinist Dana Price surprised me by just how calm she was: her natural breath length seemed to be almost 50% longer than mine, so the drones last much longer than I expected. At one point, I considered asking her to breathe faster, but decided against it.
I think the concept of natural time has a lot of potential for exploration. One idea that I would especially like to try out, if I can become proficient with the technology, would be a concerto-like piece where one performer, probably a percussionist, wears a heart monitor which is then electronically processed to generate an audible pulse for the piece. I could then induce a faster pulse by having the monitored performer play complex passages, or even have them running across the stage from one instrument to another, and then give instructions for breathing exercises or brief meditation to slow things down. Or maybe I could try to manipulate the pulse through psychological means -- what would happen if the pulse-performer was listening to an audible pulse which had been processed to be 10% faster than their own? Would that create a positive feedback loop? What if it spirals out of control? What if the performer just can't keep up with themself? What if -- oh, now I'm drifting into an Andy Kaufman performance.
Footnotes
1Another instance of this can be found in A Resurrection Series by Andy Sauerwein. In this piece, which contrasts the corporeal and spiritual aspects of Jesus as depicted in a series of drawings by artist Randall Speck, the intervals between movements are multiples of 3 seconds, successively decreasing from 24 seconds down to 3 seconds, while important structural moments are marked by passages of bell sounds whose durations are multiples of 7 seconds, increasing from 7 seconds up to 49 seconds. In this instance, I do not consider these durations to be as arbitrary, as the persistent patterns allow the durations to be perceived relative to one another, and in proportion. The "3" and "7", both chosen for their theological significance, may not be directly perceived, but it is my understanding that the composer did not mean for them to be literally perceived. What did irritate me, however, was how the patterns were executed in practice. In dress rehearsal and at the premiere, the conductor would precisely count off 27-3n seconds after the end of movement n, and then beat off an empty measure to cue us into the next movement. As a result, the interval of silence between movements was not 27-3n seconds, but longer by an amount which depended on the tempo and meter of the ensuing movement. The overall pattern of decreasing intervals was still present, but the durations were no longer in proportion, and the sense of the number 3, if it was ever present, was in my mind lost.
2Yes, I know that the rotation of the earth and the revolution of the earth around the sun are not fixed standards of duration, but I am looking at the issue from the standpoint of human perception, and the variability of the day and year fall well within the acceptable tolerances to be perceived as standards. In fact, our perception of the length of one day probably has less relative variance than our perception of the length of one second.
3Yes, I know that a second can be defined in terms of any of these standards, and is thus not arbritrary in the sense that, say, the standard kilogram is arbitrary. However, these definitions are not meaningful to the perception of the performer or listener in the moment. Can you even imagine, in the absence of any mechanical contrivances, how to take a full day, and divide it into 86,400 sub-intervals of equal size? Or, worse yet, how to perceive "the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom"? I think it's safe to say that, from a perceptual standpoint, seconds are arbitrary. If you took a (human) listener who had never encountered any form of mechanized or digitized horology, and set your metronome to click at 60 beats per minute, they would probably perceive the beat as something a little slower than a typical heartbeat, which is part of my point.
Recombinant
Mon, 05/12/2008 - 8:41pm — NathanRecombinant is a little musical Frankenstein's monster. To compose this piece, I took a handful of blues "heads", threw them against the wall, and then glued the pieces back together. Or rather, I let fragments of those heads float around in my brain, bumping into one another and sticking together to form a not necessarily cohesive whole. As a result, the piece fluctuates wildly between extremes, from percussive to lyrical, from driving syncopation to free-floating syncopation. There's a lot of syncopation, actually. But it's simple, really; you start with a basic 7/8 pulse, then you lose a 16th note in the middle of the measure and gain it back at the end. Or did you mean measure 56?
Metrical irregularities aside, I was not wholly haphazard in my construction of Recombinant from spare parts. Despite jumping from one thematic idea to another, I maintained the general harmonic outline for the blues throughout the piece. The finer details of the harmonic progression, however, are much more fluid: I might stretch a single chord out of proportion, gloss over the motion between two or three chords, or repeat a two-chord progression simply because I had two different ways of working out the progression, and didn't want to decide between them. Nevertheless, the piece can be audibly divided into four choruses, according to the overall harmonic structure.
Although Recombinant is never lacking in energy, I do try to continually ramp up the intensity over the course of the four choruses, adding in textural, timbral, and registral constrast as the piece goes on. By the time the fourth chorus rolls around, the music is nearly spilling over with exuberance, and very nearly runs aground at the climax. Instead, the cello intervenes with a few low notes, and the trio safely winds down to a halt. Recombinant was originally composed for the Triple Helix piano trio, and the title, borrowed from genetics, alludes to both the method of composition and the origin of the group's name. After a reading by Triple Helix, I decided that portions of the piece needed to be reorchestrated. Nearly all of my own performing experience has been in wind ensembles and bands, so the combination of multiple string instruments is less familiar to my inner ear. Nevertheless, I feel that I succeeded at my primary goal in writing Recombinant, which was to make the violin and cello an equal partner to the piano in terms of percussive force.
