“He saw his mills rising in the darkness, as a black silhouette against a breathing glow. The glow was the color of burning gold, and ‘Rearden Steel’ stood written across the sky in the cool, white fire of crystal. He looked at the long silhouette, the curves of blast furnaces standing like triumphal arches, the smokestacks rising like a solemn colonnade along an avenue of honor in an imperial city, the bridges hanging like garlands, the cranes saluting like lances, the smoke waving slowly like flags. The sight broke the stillness within him and he smiled in greeting. It was a smile of happiness, of love, of dedication.”
–Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (988)
This quote is from the chapter “The Concerto of Deliverance”, and it describes Hank Rearden’s long-range view of his mills as he races towards them. As he gets closer, he sees that the “burning gold” glow is actually the glow of flames set by an angry mob. This brief wistful musing is therefore removed from the harsh reality that Hank discovers upon closer inspection of the scene in front of him. I started sketching a piece for string orchestra that explores this concept of blissful distance. There are restive, mechanical sixteenth notes that hocket between various sections of the ensemble, but their impact is softened by muted natural harmonics. This texture will become more angular and complex, but I’m planning on keeping the entire ensemble muted throughout the piece – even when it gets loud!
One thing I should mention is that these Atlas Shrugged pieces all use the same 12-tone row, but each in a different transposition. The Immovable Moversis in F#, The Face without Pain or Fear or Guiltis in C, and The Concerto of Deliverance is gonna be in A. Maybe I’ll get around to all twelve transpositions eventually
Finished up the piece already! Here’s a score excerpt. The ending sort of synthesizes the two sides of what I talk about below – check out the last bit with even quarter notes in the winds against the piano’s “rational” rhythmic material from the beginning. The winds also add a few “wrong” notes to the piano’s predetermined harmonic progression. Check out the preface quote too!
Been a while since my last update! Had a busy but very rewarding first quarter at UChicago and took a little break from writing, but I’m finally back into it.
Last year I wrote The Immovable Movers, a short piece for chamber ensemble that takes its title from a chapter of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Its perpetual running sixteenth notes and unnatural melodies (that result from a strictly mathematical plan for pitch and rhythm) are meant to depict the mechanical industrialism of the book – the main character, Dagny Taggart, is a railroad executive. These robotic melodies, however, are also related to Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, which advocates a purely rational and logical approach to all human endeavors.
Music like this might be appropriate to depicting the mechanics of a train, but does it work for human emotion? One of the inherent tensions in Rand’s work is between the rationalism of the characters’ philosophy, which stresses individualism and self-interest, and their own emotional conflicts. Perhaps the best example of this is the love affair between Dagny Taggart and the married Hank Rearden (a steel mogul and inventor). This story is complicated by Francisco D’Anconia, Dagny’s childhood friend and first fling. Hank and Dagny do not hide their affair, neither from public moral scrutiny nor from Hank’s vindictive wife Lillian. But despite their unabashed honesty and thinly veiled struggle, they refuse to submit to one another emotionally. There are obvious parallels with Rand’s life here, as she unapologetically engaged in a 20-year-long affair with Nathaniel Branden, her former student, all while still married to her husband Frank O’Connor. (There’s even a 1999 movie based on it!)
In Atlas, the chapter entitled “The Face without Pain or Fear or Guilt” finds Dagny, Hank and Francisco in heated and emotional argument over the situations their personal and professional lives have put them in. I chose this as the title for a piece where I would try to depict this Objectivist emotional struggle in musical terms. Like in The Immovable Movers, pitch and rhythm are under serial control. But I chose a less restrictive method: rather than prescribe absolutely every pitch and duration, I assigned each measure a duration and pitch set and wrote within the small blank spaces I had created. I hope that this interaction between intuitive and prescriptive music expresses the conflict of reason and emotion that is present in Atlas.
But The Face without Pain or Fear or Guilt might actually take sides in this conflict. As expressive tension increases the rhythmic scheme becomes increasingly complicated (although pitch does not), and the eventual result is an obliteration of the old schemes at the piece’s climax. It scales back from this using an entirely intuitive (and much more tonal) pitch language and simple rhythmic structure. The erratic counterpoint also disappears.
Guess that’s all for now – more when I finish the piece!
“Taibhse” is a Gaelic word meaning “ghost” or “phantom”. This piece, created with Csound, explores interactions between three distinct instruments, all of which take pure sine waves as their source material. The first is a combination amplitude- and frequency-modulation instrument with vowel formant filters and a complex combination of reverb, delay and rapid panning. The results from this instrument are extremely diverse; they range from stable AM and FM sounds to highly unpredictable bell tones. The second instrument, the source of a wind-like whistling, comes from randomized granular synthesis. The third creates a somewhat abrasive buzzing by generating a Gaussian distribution of upper partials over the sine wave source. These three instruments combine to form a veiled, haunting and enigmatic sound world.
I just completed “Orbits”, the viola and piano piece I described in my previous post. Check out a score sample here!
The tempo sequence (in beats per minute) is 100-120-80. The transitions for the first two are:
100 to 120: eighth note quintuplets become eighths (page 3)
120 to 80: dotted quarters become quarters (pages 8 and 17)
There’s no transition between 80 and 100 for two reasons: the abrupt shift restarts the tempo rotation, and the stuff at quarter = 80 is extremely slow (it’s “deep space” music), so a transition would be harder to define anyway.
It was also a lot of fun seeing how you can fake acceleration and deceleration without actually changing the tempo. I guess it makes sense that I did this, since gravitional pull is measured in acceleration, and leaving gravity out of a piece about the effects of passing space objects wouldn’t make much sense!
I was watching some astronomy show on the Discovery Channel recently, and suddenly a bunch of ideas popped into my mind for a viola and piano piece I’m working on. First was the obvious: slow, expansive lines and open, sonorous harmonies from a distance. That was the easy part.
The show was actually about the end of the universe – it detailed about five different apocalypses, each more cataclysmic than the last. (It was some serious drama.) At any rate, seeing a bunch of orbiting space objects somehow got me thinking about Nancarrow again. The interactions between varying tempi in his player piano studies are fascinating, but so much of what he does requires the mechanical precision of a player piano roll. (Here’s a handout from the presentation I gave on Nancarrow’s music for Bob Morris‘ Compositional Practices class at Eastman last spring. Check out the crazy tempo relationship on page 20!!)
At any rate, what if the orbiting space objects were different tempos, each with their own character and material? And what if they overlapped, just as the gravity of one object affects another? I could phase one tempo in as another fades out, and if I repeat this process a few times, I’d have an intuitive approximation of orbiting space objects. And I could use simple fractional tempo relationships, which would be easy to both hear and play.
Identity is a work of questioning, circuitous introspection marked by irresolvable conflicts between opposing musical elements. Tensions between triadic tonality and serialized atonality have a single governing 12-tone row as their framework, while incredibly dense, diffuse orchestral textures are pitted against moments of clarity. In addition, the rhythmically unclear conflicts with the mechanical. But with its tortuous, episodic presentation of ideas, Identity can offer no solutions to these conflicts. The result is a highly dramatic and intensely personal work. At the opening, the unusual, diffuse sound of heavily divided strings forms a hazy backdrop to isolated percussive gestures. As this texture approaches controlled chaos, a harsh rhythmic inflexibility emerges. Out of this incessant cacophony emerge the strings, finally united on one pitch. As the mechanical music slowly relents, three muted solo violins surface and elide into a slow string chorale. The string texture expands incrementally as it intensifies, eventually reaching ultimate division as a soft, dissonant cloud. The tonal cataclysm that follows is violently cut off, and Identity closes with nothing but a fading string haze.
Any given sentence in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a puzzle with its own internal network of possible meanings, which may or may not “make sense” in the context of anything else in the work. There are two ways of understanding Joyce’s language; we can either meticulously extract the meaning of each sentence from annotation guides, or we can experience Joyce’s “book of the dark” as a stream of fuzzy allusions that would make perfect sense in an altered state of consciousness. This concept of “dream logic” is the basis of Finnegan’s Logic. The work is in five movements; the first and third are for the acoustic ensemble alone, while the second and fourth (“Sequences I and II”) are for electronic playback alone. The final movement features both the ensemble and some subtle electronic playback.
The first movement (“Prelude”) is an introductory downward cascade of strange instrumental sounds. The second movement spatializes four voices whispering unintelligible text. The third movement is a highly distorted Irish jig; its dance rhythm is routinely interrupted by cross-rhythms and errant inserted upbeats. The fourth movement further garbles the voices heard in the second movement and subjects them to varying degrees of filtering and frequency shifting. The final movement (“Epilogue”) features fragments of quasi-Celtic melodies in the strings and winds. As these deteriorate, the prerecorded voices reappear, nearly comprehensible this time. What follows is essentially the first movement in reverse; the filigree wind gestures ascend to the high violin note that began the work. The first few bars of Finnegan’s Logic are repeated but are cut off suddenly, just as the final sentence of Finnegans Wake (“A way a lone a last a loved a long the”) connects to the very first (“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…”).
Finnegan’s Logic was premiered by the Eastman Composers Sinfonietta with Jonathan Girard conducting on March 19, 2009.
