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!