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.

One of the reasons I love the Discovery Channel!