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“Orbits” with Amy Briggs, piano
Saturday, Nov 13, 8:00pm
Fulton Recital Hall
University of Chicago
1010 E 59th St, 4th floor

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Orbits is a work about musical gravity.  The viola and piano behave like planetary objects engaged in a gravitational tug-of-war; they pull one another into different tempos and areas of musical material.  The first conflict of the work occurs when the piano first enters, decidedly out of time with the viola, which is quickly drawn into the piano’s new tempo.  After a brief period of unity this rhythmic conflict returns, escalating this time and culminating in the first climax of the work.  What follows is a slow, sparse meditation, devoid of rhythmic tension, that invokes the weightlessness of outer space.  The instruments rotate through this sequence of musical material twice more.  The work ends with both instruments vanishing into the distance; the piano’s soft chords become increasingly sparse until nothing remains but resonance, while the viola, hushed by a mute, ascends so high that pitch gives way to the hiss of the bow hair.

Orbits was written in the summer of 2009.  Special thanks to Amy Briggs for the hard work and dedication she brought to this performance.

“The silhouette of a conveyor belt moved against the strips of fire in the sky, raising coal to the top of a distant tower, as if an inexhaustible number of small black buckets rode out of the earth in a diagonal line across the sunset.  The harsh, distant clatter kept going through the rattle of the chains which a young man in blue overalls was fastening over the machinery, securing it to the flatcars lined on the siding of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company of Connecticut.” (269)

“The earth went flowing under the hood of the car.  Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin’s hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees.  The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky.  Among the colors of a picture post card, the car’s hood looked like the work of a jewler, with the sun sparkling on its chromium steel, and its black enamel reflecting the sky.”  (279)

“A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town.  Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained.  The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars.  It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning.  The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town.  A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.” (283)

–Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

These are just a few of the images in Atlas‘ ninth chapter, “The Sacred and the Profane”.   Directly juxtaposing these images creates a set of stark contrasts.  In my just-completed string quartet, titled after this chapter, I attempt to capture a journey through contrasting and diverse images like these.  There are sweeping melodies, brief hints of rustic fiddling, sputtering polyrhythmic textures that mimic machinery, and desolate soundscapes that invoke ruins not unlike those described above.  The ending section of the work synthesizes elements of the preceding images into a “sacred” whole: the violins “mechanize” textures from the piece’s opening by playing them pizzicato and col legno, while the viola and cello turn the unsettling chorales heard previously into rich, sonorous consonance.  This apotheosis is short-lived; it quickly evaporates as filigree gestures ascend into the stratosphere, leaving behind violin harmonics that rapidly fade away.

(Note the very enthusiastic audience member near the end.) Many thanks to Michael Maccaferi, Matt Albert and Lisa Kaplan for their great work!

There are multiple narrative threads that converge in the penultimate chapter of Atlas Shrugged.  One finds Dr. Robert Stadler trying to recover the weapon he invented from those who would misuse it.  Another finds Dagny Taggart slowly detaching herself from the battle she has waged against those who have tried to undermine her railroad company.  The last finds John Galt being tortured by his captors, who try to force him to save the world from its imminent demise.  This headlong dramatic motion towards the end of the book is the motive force behind The Generator. I chose to reference the convergence of narrative threads by rotating through multiple sections of contrasting musical material.

The piece rotates through three evocative and contrasting sections.  The tempo of each section is related to the others by simple ratio, and this allows for “metric modulations” between each section.  This technique, first used extensively by Elliott Carter in his String Quartet No. 1 (1950-1951), takes one rhythmic value and defines it as another.  (For instance, redefining a quarter note as a dotted eighth will change the tempo by a ratio of 4:3.)  But this isn’t the only rhythmic complexity – these tempos actually occur simultaneously in a few places, such as the ending, where each instrument plays in a different tempo and creates a sort of controlled chaos.  But The Generator is fundamentally a virtuosic showpiece – although it’s somewhat systematic with these techniques, it’s more concerned with using them as the means to an expressive end.

Score excerpt here!

andrewmcmanusmusic

–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 Movers is in F#, The Face without Pain or Fear or Guilt is in C, and The Concerto of Deliverance is gonna be in A.  Maybe I’ll get around to all twelve transpositions eventually

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 was composed in the Eastman Computer Music Center in Rochester, NY in the fall of 2008.

Listen here: (44.1K mp3)