MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: Ann Arbor

  • 4. Sound Painting

    Interlochen, 1973 —

    Gunther Schuller composed Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee in 1959 after leaving the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra horn section. Commissioned for the Minneapolis Symphony, it portrays musical analogs for seven works by Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879-1940). Schuller wrote, “Each of the seven pieces bears a slightly different relationship to the original Klee picture from which it stems. Some relate to the actual design, shape, or color scheme of the painting, while others take the general mode of the picture or its title as a point of departure.”

    • “Antique Harmonies”
    • “Abstract Trio”
    • “Little Blue Devil”
    • “The Twittering Machine”
    • “Arab Village”
    • “An Eerie Moment”
    • “Pastorale”

    Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee

    Radio Philharmonic of Hannover

    LISTEN › YouTube

    Landscapes

    1976 Interlochen with Leslie Bassett

    As a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 1973, I composed my second orchestra piece. The title, Animated Landscapes, was inspired by John Cage’s famous Imaginary Landscapes No. 4, which we performed as I was an ensemble member of Contemporary Directions.

    The idea of animating an otherwise static sound mass, devoid of progressive harmony, was a quintessential feature of what I came to think of as the Midwestern Style of 1960s and 1970s large ensemble music. Successful models included prize winning pieces such as (my teacher) Leslie Bassett’s Variations for Orchestra (1966), Donald Erb’s The Seventh Trumpet (1969), and Joseph Schwantner’s …and the mountains rising nowhere (1977) and Aftertones of Infinity (1979).

    Animated Landscapes

    Clark 1971 (TC-25)

    U.Mich. Symphony Orchestra

    So many great American landscape artists of the 19th century painted fascinating panoramic scenes. One of my favorites, who captured the grandeur of Western, mountainous landscapes, was Albert Bierstadt:

    Albert Bierstadt: Passing Storm over the Sierra Nevadas (1870) – San Antonio Museum of Art

    You can see stark contrasts in brightness and in sense of motion between the mirror-smooth water and roiling clouds. Even the word “passing” in the title suggests change, a necessary ingredient of an analog musical landscape.

    While not trying to actually map the physical composition of any painting, my musical inspiration came from considering this painting’s features of background, foreground, and highlights of strong visual focus. Musical gestures started with distant swelling sonorities, which as they crescendo feel like they are emerging forward toward us. After deciding to name the piece Passing Storm after the Bierstadt, however, I realized I had no storm in the music, just gentle sprinkles. Thus was created a stronger sonic rendering of the sprinkles to provide a more aggressive introduction. The following four minutes overlaps sound masses animated in time, contrasting dark vs. bright sounds, loud vs. soft, and timeless sustained sound vs. busy points of “light.”

    Animated Landscape No. 4

    Passing Storm

    Clark 2022 (TC-129)

    Mucha’s Light

    I first traveled to the Moravian region of Czechoslovakia in 1991 to conduct my own music at the 26th International Music Festival in Brno. While there, I visited the South Moravian town of Moravský Krumlov. Its castle served as a museum gallery for the epic paintings, Slovanská Epopej, of Alfons Mucha. Better known as the father of art nouveau through his many famous Paris posters, Mucha was deeply interested in Slavic culture and history. The 20 paintings, each a monumental canvas hung as a tapestry, vividly depict both historical and mythical scenes.

    Mucha’s Light: Ancient Images is dedicated to Miroslav Marada, the Moravian gentleman who first showed the paintings to the composer in 1991. A teacher, history buff, and lover of the local wines of south Moravia, Marada fascinated me with elaborate tales, explaining the symbolism of each painting. The five works I selected to sketch musically have a common element, masterfully painted images of exotic light. Composing musical analogs for these ancient images, I incorporated medieval music from the Bohemian/Moravian region of central Europe. The music weaves authentic medieval chant tunes into an intensely contrapuntal fabric, interspersed with modern sparks, streaks, and splashes of sound color. Originally composed for brass quintet, the musical images called for a richer, more varied sound-color palette:

    Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 3 Bb clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 alto saxes, tenor sax, baritone sax, bassoon; 2 F horns, 2 Bb trumpets, 2 trombones, euphonium, tuba; timpani, 3 percussion (misc. unpitched – triangle, sus.cym., etc.; bells, chimes, vibraphone, xylophone)

    Ancient Images

    Clark 2005 (TC-76)

    Five sound sketches on the historical paintings of Alfons Mucha

    I. Star Light

    detail of 1. Slavs in their Original Homeland

    II. Green Light of Mysticism

    detail of 17. Holy Mount Athos

    III. White Light of Learning

    detail of 4. The Bulgarian tsar Simeon

    IV. Lantern Light of Hope

    detail of 16. The Last Days of Jan Amos Komenský in Naarden

    V. Fire Light

    detail of 18. The Oath of Omladina Under the Slavic Linden Tree

    Quilting

    Now to photo images instead of paintings — both music and visual images can be assembled in a manner inspired by quilts, layers of fabric in small swatches pieced together. The Amish of Lancaster County Pennsylvania were known especially for quilts of contrasting colors of repeating geometric shapes.

    Here is a more-than 100-years-old quilt I found exhibited in the Quilting Museum in LaGrange, Texas.

    Louisiana Acadian quilt, 1890

    For a fresh approach to my 2025 multimedia work, this kind of layered patching was applied to both synthesized sound blocks and to digitally enhanced images from my Nikon Z50 (NIKKOR 16-50 lens). Three musical textures — flutters, swelling chords, and an ancient-style canon — are quilted onto an unchanging broad harmonic background. They overlay each other in four different combinations.

    MONTAGE

    multimedia video

    Clark 2025 (TC-154)

    Video here – YouT

  • 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

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is zamek-garden.jpg

    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

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_0659.jpg

    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

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is svobody.jpg

    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 . . .

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is lounovice.png
    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”

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is up-blanik.png

    Storm

    “bouřka”

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is thunderhead-1.png

    Dusk

    “soumrak”

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is boh-dusk.png

  • 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