MAPPING MUSIC

Author: thomasclarkumich

  • 3. Sketching Places

    Ann Arbor, 1969 —

    From the beginning of my study of trombone, I was an avid player. In high school, I took lessons with top U.Mich. trombone students in Ann Arbor. Playing in high school band and the Michigan Youth Symphony, I also started my own little brass group, the Streetcorner Brass, to play on the snowy sidewalks of downtown Howell at Christmas. Adding drums, we began to play my arrangements of Tijuana Brass tunes and rock ‘n roll at youth dances.

    Brass

    At college in Ann Arbor, I played bass trombone in the University Philharmonia and Symphony orchestras, and the trombone choir.

    Goliard Brass

    I also joined the Plymouth Symphony and a part-time professional sextet, the Goliard Brass. We played for weddings, in churches, and Ann Arbor coffee shops. A sample of our repertoire:

    Giovanni Gabrieli – Canzona XIII

    Morley Calvert – Suite from the Monteregian Hills

    Where’s Waldo? (one of three beards)
    with dancer Risa Friedman

    As trombonist for the U. Mich. Contemporary Directions ensemble, I performed more avant garde works, such as this challenging brass piece:

    Gunther Schuller – Music for Brass Quintet

    My youthful composing had been mostly for piano and trombone. Brass chamber music compositions naturally followed in my student and early professor times.

    • NIGHT SONGS — trombone. TC-21 (1969) Borik Press
    • TRILOGY — brass quintet. TC-23 (1970)
    • ISOSTRATA — 2 trp., 2 tbn., tuba, perc. TC-35 (1977) Seesaw Music
    • ICESCAPE — brass quintet. TC-39 (1980)
    • MUCHA’S LIGHT — Brass quintet. TC-73 (1996)
    • KLADNO SKETCHES — Brass septet. TC-100 (2019)

    Kladno

    Kladno is a Czech city in the Central Bohemian Region 25 kilometers northwest of Prague. In the middle of the 19th century, the discovery of coal there led to the establishment of one of the great ironworks and then steel mills in all of Europe.

    Kladno is near Lidice, the village destroyed by the Gestapo in 1942. Of the Lidice men who were all shot in the atrocity, many had walked to Kladno each day to work in the coal mine or the Poldi steel works.

    Kladno Sketches

    Clark 2019 (TC-100)

    Zámek – peaceful gardens

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    The city remains a thriving place with a population of 70,000, a large church, municipal building, state library and archives, monuments, theaters, museums, and beautiful parks. The Czech people have always been hard working, they love gardens, especially roses, and they love beer in the fine pilsner style they created.

    Poldi – ironworks

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    Poldi has thrived and survived for more than 100 years, through two world wars and occupations of the country, but the factory finally closed and most of the buildings are now abandoned.

    Svobody – Freedom plaza

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    Suffering under so much occupation and oppression throughout their history in the center of Europe, Czechs especially value “svobody” – freedom.

    ___________

    Chicago

    Beyond brass, more chamber music scores inspired by places . . .

    Chicago Sketches

    Clark 2019 (TC-96)

    Fermi Lab

    December 1942

    Henry Moore sculpture on the University of Chicago campus, commemorating the site of the experimental pile that launched the atomic age

    Navy Pier

    March 2014

    A winter visit to the Lake Michigan shore

    Buckingham Fountain

    August 1976

    A pilgrimage to Grant Park with new family four months before the wedding

    Leelanau

    The “Great Lake State,” Michigan is two enormous peninsulas surrounded by Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Huron. Actually, there are many smaller peninsulas extending out into the lakes. The Leelanau Peninsula (north of the venerable Interlochen music camp where I spent many summers) extends about 30 miles from the northwestern corner of the mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula into Lake Michigan.

    Algonquian-speaking tribes occupied this area prior to European colonization. The land is now home to lighthouses, wineries, ski slopes, inland lakes, and coastal dunes and beaches.

    Leelanau Sketches

    Clark 2022 (TC-117)

    Shining Water

    The changing patterns of sunlight sparkling on water always fascinates me, particularly on Lake Michigan looking west from the Leelanau Peninsula.

    Ice Caves

    On the Leelanau Peninsula’s western shore, the Lake Michigan surf sometimes whips up and freezes in mid-air, forming weird ice caverns and ice dunes.

    Ojibwe legend tells of a fierce forest fire on the western shore of Lake Michigan, forcing a mother bear and her two cubs into the water to swim to the opposite shore. After many miles of swimming, the exhausted cubs drowned. When the mother bear reached the eastern shore, she waited on top of a high bluff in hopes that her cubs would finally appear. Moved by the mother bear’s determination and faith, the Great Spirit created two islands to commemorate the cubs, and the winds buried the sleeping bear under the sands of the dunes, where she still waits.

    Sleeping Bear Dunes

    The main dune is enormous, a mountain of sand rising dramatically above the shore of Lake Michigan. The bear’s bluff atop this majestic mass of earth is a serene vista of radiant sun, windblown sand and waves.

    Autumn on M22

    A scenic autumn drive around the peninsula on Highway M22 is a glory of light sifting down through a canopy of colored leaves. The 75-mile drive from Empire on M22 winds northeast to Northport then south around the east side of the peninsula along Grand Traverse Bay to Traverse City.

    Compared to brass, my list of chamber music pieces for strings is more recent but longer.

    Highlands

    There are many Highlands in my life. I am part Scottish, though my great grandparents are from Glasgow, not the Highlands. I do enjoy its single-malt whiskeys, though, and I went to Howell High School, the “Highlanders.” And I now live in the Texas Hill Country.

    Then there is Českomoravská vrchovina . . .

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    Býkovice below Velký Blaník massif

    I first visited what was then still Czechoslovakia in 1991. The Bohemian-Moravian Highlands are between the two main regions of what is now the Czech Republic. The ancient town of Tabor and the legendary Blaník mountains are two points of scenic and historical interest. Highlands Sketches sound paints climbing the mountain’s rugged slope, a thunderstorm of dissonant accents, and the quiet harmonic progression of an autumn dusk.

    Highlands Sketches

    Clark 2023 (TC-137)

    Massif

    “Velký Blaník”

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    Storm

    “bouřka”

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    Dusk

    “soumrak”

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  • 2. Musique Française

    Ann Arbor, 1968 —

    Having begun composing in 1963, I started formal composition study in 1968 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. American composer Eugene Kurtz, based in Paris but filling in that semester at Michigan, was assigned to teach the new freshman. A proponent of modern French music, his compositional models included Debussy and Ravel.

    Sonatine

    Kurtz assigned me to immerse myself in deep study of their music, in particular Ravel’s Sonatine (1905).

    Ravel: Sonatine

    Judith Valerie Engel on YouTube

    Fifty years later in my career as a more experimental composer, my compositional style began to mellow toward a gentler Impressionistic approach and a lush, bright harmonic language reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel.

    Homage to Ravel, my new Sonatine is spun from a single harmonic progression, seven chords each stacking a Perfect Fifth interval high above another.

    This material (what Schoenberg would call a Grundgestalt) generates melodic lines and many arpeggiation patterns, in successive variations of changing register, intensity, and rhythmic pace.

    Sonatine

    Clark 2025 (TC-155)

    Nocturnes

    In 1907, French composer Claude Debussy wrote, “I am more and more convinced that music, by its very nature, is something that cannot be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms”. Color, light, and texture were also the hallmarks of a new style of painting developed by French artists — Impressionism.

    At the threshold of the 20th century on 15 December 1899, Debussy completed the first of his Impressionist masterpieces for orchestra, Trois Nocturnes. He avoided labeling it “symphony” or “tone poem” by calling the movements “three symphonic sketches”. The first sketch of Nocturnes is subtitled “Nuages,” premiered on 9 December 1900 in Paris.

    Debussy’s biography describes the genesis of the piece while crossing the Pont de la Concorde in Paris in stormy weather. The composer’s notes say, “‘Nuages’ renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white.”

    Debussy: Trois Nocturnes

    Vienna Philharmonic on Youtube

    Adopting the French language and musical style recognizes the early French explorers of the Great Lakes region of North America. The first decades of my life began there in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (the “mitten”). It has its own smaller Leelanau Peninsula in the northwest corner (the mitten’s “little finger”) near Interlochen’s National Music Camp, where I spent many summers. Nearby Grand Traverse Bay has its own even smaller Old Mission peninsula, where I loved to visit its lighthouse. The Leelanau has a grand lighthouse at its northern tip and a scenic drive, state highway M21, winding for 64 miles all the way around the peninsula’s shoreline, through forests and past the Great Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes.

    In 1984 my piece titled PENINSULA for piano and sound synthesis was a more experimental work that traced a map of the Leelanau and its landmarks to determine by their spatial coordinates the timing and pitches of sound constellations.

    Moving forward from that mapping phase of my compositions, my Impressionistic phase produced the sound sculpture Leelanau Sketches in 2022. Some of its musical material reappears now in five symphonic sketches, Belle Péninsule. Here is the fourth movement, which quotes Debussy’s “Nuages.”

    Belle Péninsule

    IV. “Nuages blanc“

    Clark 2024 (TC-147)

    La Mer

    Debussy’s completed his second composition of three symphonic sketches for orchestra, La Mer, in 1905. It is a monumental work of Impressionist sound-painted textures and a textbook model of lush, beautiful orchestration. The three sketches are titled:

    “De l’aube à midi sur la mer”

    “From dawn to midday on the sea”

    Jeux de vagues”

    “Play of the Waves”

    “Dialogue du vent et de la mer”

    “Dialogue of the wind and the sea”

    Debussy: La Mer

    Orchestre national de France

    My homage to La Mer, Sea Sketches, sound-paints waves, deep currents, wind, and sun-sparkling surfaces, employing swelling sound colors and post-modern cyclic techniques in a pan-diatonic tonal setting. The end briefly quotes the opening arpeggio of Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lin” (“The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”) from Book I of his Préludes for piano (1909-1910).

    Sea Sketches

    Clark 2023 (TC-132)

    ________

  • 1. Forest Paths

    Howell, 1967 —

    In 1967 I was already earnestly composing for piano, trombone (my own instrument), even for orchestra. Living beside the Shiawassee River’s glacial-moraine beginnings in rural Livingston County Michigan, my best pastime was hiking along the creek’s forested banks. I was already going to Ann Arbor for trombone lessons and Youth Symphony rehearsals.

    In fall 1967, after my 18th birthday, I moved to Ann Arbor and enrolled at the University of Michigan. Though not yet a music major, I began playing bass trombone in the university orchestras. For 8 years, Ann Arbor with beautiful Huron River running through it was my forested Michigan home.

    The year before I was born, John Cage wrote a gentle, beautiful piece for piano, one simple enough that my 1967 piano skill could have handled. It also expressed my own urge to amble along freely improvised paths of musical exploration.

    John Cage – Dream (1948)– Damian Alejandro, piano

    At age 17, I never dreamed that I would meet John 24 years later (in Denton Texas of all places), a gentle soul who loved mushrooms. And I had yet to discover this piece or any John Cage music. But I was also writing simple and (I thought) beautiful piano music.

    Two pieces for piano that expressed my attitude of wonder while wandering in the woods were updated fifty years later with my 2023 editing skills. “Mystic Breeze” and “Light” were my 12th and 18th completed TC compositions. “Riverbank” is from a 1967 sketch of an “interlude” for trombone and piano.

    They make a nice set of three, revealing that before formal study my compositional explorations were already discovering more exotic harmonies and rhapsodic forms resembling Debussy’s Impressionism and even the post-tonal possibilities of 12-tone rows.

    ARBOR SKETCHES

    Clark 1967 (TC-12/18)

    • 1. Breeze
    • 2. Riverbank
    • 3. Light

    Brno

    Twenty-four years later in 1991, I was invited to perform at the 26th Brno International Music Festival. It would lead me on a path of musical and cultural exploration that has filled my life since with beauty. (I had also married a beautiful Czech-American woman in 1976.)

    Brno is the capital of the Moravian province of what was then Czechoslovakia. Brno was the home city of the great 20th-century Moravian composer, Leoš Janáček. After visiting his home and school in Brno and his summer home in Hukvaldy, I began to study his music.

    Two things captured my interest. Like Bartok, he embraced and collected the folk music of his homeland. He also exalted in nature, walking around the wooded hills of Hukvaldy’s castle ruins, and collected his own transcriptions of bird calls.

    While there on the first visit, I was commissioned to compose a ballet for the local dance theatre company. Inspired by Janáček’s birds, I began to write my own music for what would become the ballet, PTACí (“Birds”).

    Lesní cesty

    In a music store in Brno, I also discovered his marvelous 1911 set of piano pieces, the title of which translates “On the Overgrown Path.” On a return trip, I was able to visit the Moravian Music Archives in Brno to examine his original hand-written manuscript of the pieces.

    Excerpted from Series I:

    • No. 5, They Chattered Like Swallows
    • No. 6, Words Fail!
    • No. 7, Good Night!
    • No. 8, Unutterable Anguish
    • No. 9, In Tears
    • No. 10, The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!

    Po zarostlém chodníčku – – – Josef Páleníček, piano

  • Paths of Light

    a composer’s journal –

    retrospectively logging places, events, ideas, and sounds of a life of composing.

    Each chapter remembers a time and place in my career, and explores a particular compositional design approach derived from my study of 20th-century masterworks. Audio clips offer listening to all pieces cited, both the masterworks and my later compositions inspired by them. Take some time to listen as well as read! – TC

    LINK TO CHAPTER

    CONTENTS

    LINK TO CHAPTER

    Read it all:

    a composer’s journal

  • Book of Canons

    My compositional fascination with musical canons began in the early 1970s with study (at the University of Michigan) of Ockeghem’s 15th-century polyphony, the 10 canons in Bach’s 18th-century The Musical Offering, and Webern’s 20th-century Symphonie Op.21. As a young professor in the 1980s teaching 16th-century counterpoint at what was then North Texas State University (now UNT), I used canon as a challenging contrapuntal writing assignment. In 1985, a wind ensemble piece, Parallel Horizons (Homage to Schoenberg), was my first formal composition constructed by canon. In Dark Matter, other contrapuntal writing surrounds an extended canon. Now canon pervades much of my 21st-century writing, a challenging yet stimulating and gratifying approach to texture and continuity of material.

    The definition of this ancient form of Rumpelstiltskin magic, spinning complex counterpoint out of a single melodic line:

    CANON
    A leading line is echoed after some delay by one or more answering lines of identical rhythmic values and melodic shape (possibly transposed)

    For a collection of 21st-century examples – 14 studies in 3-voice canon – go to my BOOK OF CANONS in the appendices. For pedagogical demonstration purposes, the subject of each is shown, with indications for when and at what pitch level each answer will occur.

    Read more at Mapping the Music Universe: COUNTERPOINT.

  • Timing of Awe

    In his book When (Riverhead Books, 2018) Daniel H. Pink writes, “I believe that timing is everything. . . . The experience of awe changes our perception of time. When we experience awe, time slows down. It expands. We feel like we have more of it. And that sensation lifts our well-being.” He quotes researchers Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker in Psychological Science 23 No. 10 (2012): “Experiences of awe bring people into the present moment, and being in the present moment underlies awe’s capacity to adjust time perception.”

    Read more about time at Time perception

  • Mapping the Music Universe – preview

    Mapping the Music Universe is written for the literate musician, including college music students through music scholars, and anyone who is intellectually curious about how music works, especially in the 20th-21st-century modern and “post-modern” eras.

    Purpose

    The mapping project is a comprehensive catalog of patterns and processes, meant to provide simple tools for understanding modern music. This is not a theoretical treatise but a practical guide for all educated or educating musicians and the intellectually curious, requiring only basic music literacy. For me as a composer, it is also an exploration of how some of the less travelled conceptual paths lead to interesting creative possibilities. Sample composed etudes will give examples to connect the abstractions back to our musical imaginations.

    In 1989 I co-authored a composition textbook with Larry Austin, Learning to Compose: Modes, Materials, and Models of Musical Invention. We felt it was conceptually ground-breaking. My next book, ARRAYS, was an aural skills workbook covering basic modal, tonal, and “post-tonal” music of the Renaissance through the Twentieth Century. They were intended as college-level textbooks, ARRAYS basic and Learning to Compose quite advanced — maybe too advanced to succeed as a textbook, turning out to be more of a technical monograph than a basic guide. Mapping the Music Universe draws in part on the ideas and approaches of both these now out-of-print publications.

    The three parts progress logically from fundamental — time and periodicity — to pitch space, then to larger structures — texture and form. They can be read in this sequence or separately in any order. Likewise, within each part, the various topics are presented in a progressive order, but jumping in at any point is not to be discouraged. As terms are defined, they are set off to the right. Figures include musical examples, sample etude compositions, tables, and graphic illustrations of patterns and their relationships.

    Read full Introduction . . .

    Mapping the Music Universe by Thomas S. Clark . . . CONTENTS

    .

  • GALAXIES: Musical Structure and Relativity

    Pursuing a grand cosmic metaphor, think about the levels of structure scientists study in our physical universe. They have dived deep below the atom’s structure of electrons spinning around a nucleus of protons and electrons to discover subatomic particles like the meson and boson. On the other extreme of scale, they have gathered observations to speculate about the shape of the entire expanding universe. We understand the structure of our planet, of our solar system, and our Milky Way galaxy.

    Texture

    Painting engages techniques to create texture, rising to broad descriptions of style that actually describe structure: impressionism, cubism, pointillism. Musically, macro-structure is thought of as texture and form. Texture has been treated in broad descriptive categories: monody, homophony, polyphony, counterpoint, and more recently, sound mass, each focusing on the number of distinct parts, voices, or layers and how they interrelate. At the risk of invoking too many different metaphors, I like to think of the musical texture as a fabric.

    Other topics

    • Counterpoint
    • Rhythmic alignment
    • Canon
    • Farben
    • Symmetry
    • Pointillism
    • Repetition
    • Multi-phase ostinato
    • Sound mass
    • Hauptstimme
    • Density
    • Relativity

    To read more, request a password from tc24@txstate.edu

    Mapping the Music Universe by Thomas S. Clark . . . CONTENTS

  • CONSTELLATIONS: Pitch Space, Arrays, Tonality

    Introduction

    Galileo revolutionized astronomy, in part by using a new tool: the telescope. Schoenberg revolutionized harmony by evolving an existing concept, the chromatic scale, into a new tool: the 12-tone scale. (He also devised the compositional tool of the 12-tone row — but that’s another story.) Allen Forte took Schoenberg’s ideas to another level of abstraction: defining Pitch Class and applying basic math to the 12-tone universe. Christman focused on intervallic essence of pitch patterns: defining the “successive interval array.” I am merely another explorer using their maps but choosing my own creative path. In doing so, I will define some of my own terms, while adapting and clarifying some established terms that fit what I’m thinking and expressing.

    Topics

    • Tuning
    • Constellations
    • Interval Arrays
    • Scales
    • Scale prototypes
    • Scale patterns and set classes
    • Harmonic complexity
    • Constellation streams
    • Constreams and 12-tone sets
    • Progressive alterations of arrays
    • Clusters
    • Cells – melodic molecules
    • Cell class

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    Mapping the Music Universe by Thomas S. Clark . . . CONTENTS

  • STARS: Time points, periodicity, perception

    We start with time. Everything in music involves time, is of time, sound events occurring in our perceived flow of time. Sound itself is periodic, a repetition of compression waves in air (or water).

    Repetition of an event or series of events, establishing a frequency of repetition and the period or cycle length of the elapsed time duration from each event’s starting time point (moment) to the starting point (moment) of its repetition.

    We perceive the frequency of the waves as pitch if they are faster than 20 per second and slower than about 4,000. Frequency is typically measured in cycles per second, called Hertz.

    Non-periodic waves faster than about 20 Hz are perceived as noise. Events or time cycles slower than 20 Hz are perceived as pulses, tempo, rhythm, phrase structure, etc. At these slower sub-sonic event speeds, it is more convenient to identify the duration of the cycle, its period, than the frequency.

    Periodicity, this repetitive aspect of sound events in time, gives us a dimension to map all the possibilities, from extremely fast to almost frozen slowness, and from simple, highly regular repetitions to a very complex succession of variants.

    Topics

    • Defining time
    • Time perception
    • Periodicity
    • Meter
    • Definitions
    • Stress and accent
    • Rhythmic molecules
    • Harmonic rhythm
    • Beyond meter
    • Prime numbers

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    Mapping the Music Universe by Thomas S. Clark . . . CONTENTS