MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: art

  • Mapping Music 5. SCALES

    What is a scale? Its essence is an interval pattern, selecting which pitches out of the entire chromatic possibilities become scale steps. Successive interval arrays are a vivid way to describe its pattern:

    SCALE PATTERN — periodic interval pattern that cycles through each octave, defining which pitch-classes from the 12 possibilities are degrees of the scale

    In that sense, it is a theoretical circle, starting over in each octave — or more imaginatively, a spiral. Let’s visualize the natural-note white keys on the keyboard, a prime example of the ubiquitous diatonic scale, as a circle.

    diatonic scale circle

    Now an unlooped visualization as stair steps, rungs on a spiral ladder:

    diatonic scale cycling through three octaves

    Anyone familiar with the white and black keys of a piano will recognize this pattern!

    Chroma

    Almost all scales in both Western music and other art-music traditions are built on the framework of octave equivalence, the close affinity of two pitches that are one or more octaves apart. We give them the same pitch name – all called “C” or “F#” for example. This makes the circular nature of a scale, that its pitch names and the intervals between them start over at the octave and repeat.

    We also have the feature on an equal-tempered piano that one black key produces a pitch with two possible names depending on the scale in which they appear. For example, the D# seventh scale degree in an E Major scale is the same piano key as an Eb, the fourth scale degree in a Bb Major scale. The two pitch names are said to be “enharmonic.”

    When a melodic line in an all-white-key C major scale introduces an F# for color or to temporarily alter the interval terrain, we call it a chromatic tone, after the Greek word for color, chroma. Now we have a comprehensive scale of all possible pitches. Going further, theorist Allen Forte defined  a way to reduce all the pitches in an entire eight-octave chromatic pitch space into just twelve categories:

    PITCH CLASS — a set of all pitches that are octave and/or enharmonically related

    He gave them pitch-class numbers 0 through 11.

    chromatic scale

    In the advent of computer systems to produce, edit, and analyze musical sound, a sound’s identified pitch class is termed its chroma.  

    Synesthesia – some people, such as the composer Scriabin, actually see a color when they hear a pitch or a tonal key. In his variant of synesthesia, C is red, G is orange, D yellow, and A green. Scriabin’s Promethius: The Poem of Fire (1910) includes a part for “clavier à lumières,” a color organ that emitted light of what he deemed the appropriate color for a pitch instead of sound.  

    Scale prototypes

    When we describe a scale, we name the pitches in order within an octave. Better yet, we name the successive intervals going up within the octave. The classic description of the ubiquitous diatonic scale, in whole-steps or half-steps, in its major mode starting on the tonic pitch, is:

    whole / whole / half / whole / whole / whole / half

    [octave repeats the cycle]

    Or in British terms:

    tone / tone / semitone / tone / tone / tone / semitone

    In the chromatic 12-tone universe, that scale pattern measuring the intervals in semitone sizes would be:

    2 2 1 2 2 2 1

    That is what I would call a scale pattern . . . a Successive Upward Interval Sequence in Semitones (SUISS!). But let’s call it a scale pattern array, working exactly like the arrays describing constellations.

    Now we can particularize our scale pattern definition to apply to any smaller set of pitch classes, even if they don’t look like a scale:

    SCALE ARRAY — successive interval array describing the pitches of a constellation condensed by octave equivalence to their most compact pitch-class-equivalent arrangement within an octave, ordered lowest-to-highest (Forte’s “normal order”)

    In this sense, the array of a smaller set or scale fragment is just like a scale pattern.

    Successive Interval array is a versatile tool that can apply to any pitch collection, to a linear, scalar pitch pattern as well as to a vertical chord sonority or even an arpeggiated diagonal collection of pitches I call a constellation.

    Modes

    Most of our familiar scales are actually a different mode of the same 7-note diatonic scale, with a different starting and ending point called a tonic establishing the mode.

    scale modes

    Scale patterns and set classes

    We can describe a set of pitches as an octave-compressed abstraction of 3 or 4 pitches as a lowest-to-highest ordering of pitch classes. It doesn’t produce anything like the 7 or so notes per octave we’re used to thinking of as a scale, as those shown above. It is conceptually powerful, nonetheless, to call the successive interval array of this compressed abstraction a scale pattern, even though it’s a scale fragment with no name. Its name can simply be the successive interval array, such as 2 4 2, the array describing a symmetrical pitch-class set called the French Augmented Sixth chord.

    [Theoretical aside] In establishing set theory, Forte described these compact arrangements by naming the pitch-classes in order using a mod-12 number system shown above, C=0, C#/Db=1, D=2, etc. He identified twelve 3-note classes, including upside-down inversions reversing the scale pattern, as members of the same class. (Lewin kept these inversions separate, defining instead nineteen 3-note set classes. We’ll use Forte’s; the set classes as generalities are not as crucial to composing as to theoretical analysis.) Forte used cumbersome descriptions employing pitch-class numbers and “normal order.” In the Journal of Music Theory 15 (1971), Richard Chrisman defined and proposed successive interval arrays as a better, more revealing way to characterize the commonality of a family of pitch-class sets that are all related by transposition and/or inversion.

    Relating to Forte’s concept of a set class, any set grouping three pitch-classes can be analyzed as an interval array or partial scale pattern.  

    scale patterns of all 3-pitch-class sets

    Sets forming triads (or seventh chords below) are highlighted in BLUE; those that are atonal (cannot be found in a diatonic scale) are highlighted in GOLD.

    While the number of possible interval arrays for constellations of four pitches is enormous — even if limited to interval stack sizes less than two octaves, there are more than 12,000 possibilities — we can use this scale-pattern abstraction tool to categorize them into forty-three 4-pitch-class families. 

    scale patterns of all 4-pitch-class sets

    The blue-highlighted scale patterns have common triadic chord names:

    • 1 4 3 = “Major Major 7th chord” (in any chord inversion)
    • 3 2 3 = “minor minor 7th chord” (in any chord inversion)
    • 3 3 2 = “dominant 7th chord” (in any chord inversion)
    • 3 3 3 = “fully diminished 7th chord”

    The scale pattern 2 4 2 is an interesting symmetrical, non-diatonic pattern called a “French augmented 6th chord”.

    Vocabulary

    These maps collecting 62 scale-patterns summarize all possible constellations of 3 or 4 unique pitches, our total harmonic vocabulary in the chromatic universe.

    © 2026 – All Rights Reserved

    Thomas S. Clark

    TClarkArtMusic.com 

  • Mapping Music 1. TIME

    “If you want to find the secrets of the universe,

    think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”

    (Nikola Tesla)

    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 vibration, a repetition of compression waves of energy in air (or water). Repetition of an event or series of events establishes a frequency of repetition and the period or cycle length, 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 air-compression 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.

    the periodic time/sound universe

    In this illustration, the Y-axis is speed/frequency (slowest at bottom, fastest on top), the X-axis is regularity of repetition (perfectly regular at left, randomly sporadic time spans at right). The blocks have sharp rectangular edges; if I were a better artist, the boundaries between descriptive categories would actually be curving and very blurred. Though the graph shows firm straight lines separating pitch and noise, there is actually a fuzzy, curving grayscale continuum from pure, simple pitch through complex, colorful pitched timbres to noise.

    Defining time

    What is time and how does it work in our lives and in the rhythms that are the fundamental “substance” of music? I say substance metaphorically, because time does not exist as any physical matter. It is a perceptual construct, a complex quilt stitched out of human experience.

    Discover magazine ran an article in June of 2007 titled, “Time May Not Exist”.

    “Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? ‘The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,’ says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. ‘The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.’”

    The mysteries of time were explored as early as sixteen hundred years ago by the great Saint Augustine of Hippo, in Book XI of his deeply philosophical work, Confessions.

    “. . . What is time? Who can give that a brief or easy answer? Who can even form a conception of it to be put in words? Yet what do we mention more often or familiarly in our conversation than time? We must therefore know what we are talking about when we refer to it, or when we hear someone else doing so. But what, exactly, is that? [Book XI, Section 17]

    Nicholas Stratas’ thought-provoking article in the July 2007 issue of Wake County Physician, “Time – Continuous Yet Bidimensional” asserts that most of us have a firm concept of Past, Present, and Future. But defining them is challenging, and sorting out how these constructs interact in our consciousness even more so. Michael Spitzer, in The Musical Human (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), wrote:

    “Musical time is a window into time consciousness in general. We listen to music in the moment, sitting in the saddle of an ever-shifting Now, as the past whizzes by to become memory, and the present anticipates what is just around the corner. Music’s present tense is really a bundle of memories and anticipations . . .”

    Many years ago, I first read an article translated from Die Reihe, written by a preeminent avant-garde experimental composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen. “Structure and Experiential Time” described Stockhausen’s view that time does not flow uniformly through the experience of a serious musical composition. It ebbs and surges as the composer shapes not just the tempo but the flow of information in the form of repeated or new musical events, simple or complex musical structures.

    “When we hear a piece of music, processes of alteration follow each other at varying speeds; we have now more time to grasp alterations, now less.”

    Even tempo, a supposedly steady clock in most music, ebbs and flows. Computer music composers in synthesizing musical sounds have found that a mechanistically rigid clock tempo sounds artificial. Human musicians are constantly flexing tempo in subtle ways to convey almost subliminally where the music is “going” (another metaphor, that of travel through space).

    Saint Augustine recognizes the slippery challenge of measuring time:

    “ . . . We observe the different ways times lapse, and compare them, and call some longer and some shorter. . . . It is passing time we measure, as we experience it. . . . Time can only be measured as it passes. Once past, it is no longer there to be measured.” [Book XI, Section 21]

    “We measure time as it passes . . . . But how can we measure the present, when it has no extent of its own? . . . Time must be measured in something with extent . . . But in what extended thing do we measure time as it passes?” [Book XI, Section 27]

    “So time is measured, my mind, in you. Raise no clamor against me—I mean against yourself—out of your jostling reactions. I measure time in you . . . because I measure the reactions that things caused in you by their passage, reactions that remain when the things that occasioned them have passed on. . . . Time has to be these reactions for me to be able to measure it.” [Book XI, Section 36]

    Time perception

    Pulling all this together, I’d like to suggest several things about time in classical music.

    • Time is perceptual.
    • Time is multidimensional.
    • Time is elastic.
    • Time is experienced in complex ways as the fundamental basis of music’s richness.

    In LEARNING TO COMPOSE, co-author Larry Austin and I begin the chapter titled “Time Streams” with a quote from a philosopher, and then express in our own words the fundamental nature of time.

    “ ‘Music makes time audible and its form and continuity sensible.’
    —Suzanne Langer

    Music exists in time. Time exists as we sense it, articulated on many levels by changing and cyclically recurring events.

    As beautiful, colorful and essential as sound is in making music, musical sounds are the means to an end, building blocks for events that primarily mark articulations of time.

    We sometimes like to think of music as having two fundamental dimensions, like a graph. The horizontal dimension is the parameter of time. The vertical dimension is the parameter of pitch. But pitch is actually a temporal phenomenon – the frequency (periodic change over time) of sound waves. How amazing are the human ear and human mind to perceive waves of air coming at us a thousand times a second or much faster and distinguish the small differences that make a pitch “in tune” (or not) and the even subtler differences that identify an oboe instead of a violin producing that pitch. All of this from a perception simply of periodic rates in time!

    Stockhausen pointed out that in mentally processing all of these sonic distinctions, we are forced to pay more attention to changes in their qualities, combinations, and “spacing” in time. These are his “alterations”.

    “The greater the temporal density of unexpected alterations . . . the more time we need to grasp events, and the less time we have for reflection, the quicker time passes; the lower the effective density of alteration (not reduced by recollection or the fact that the alterations coincide with our expectation), the less time the senses need to react, so the greater intervals of experiential time lie between the processes, and the slower time passes.”

    The concepts of expectation and information help make some sense of things. “Information” is perceptual data that is similar to what you just heard or logically confirms what you were expecting next. “Entropy” is the opposite perception – surprise, contrast, noticeable change. In musical listening, though we don’t do so consciously, we are constantly “computing,” assessing, retaining, and predicting.

    Saint Augustine connects Past, Present, and Future with memory, experience, and expectation:

    “What should be clear and obvious by now is that we cannot properly say that the future or the past exist, or that there are three times, past, present, and future. Perhaps we can say that there are three tenses, but that they are the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future. This would correspond, in some sense, with a triad I find in the soul and nowhere else, where the past is present to memory, the present is present to observation, and the future is present to anticipation.” [Confessions, Book XI, Section 26]

    And to make matters more complicated, it is not at all a linear process. Let’s take a metaphor. I can’t resist one that Einstein was very fond of in his thought experiments.

    As listeners, we’d like to imagine ourselves as a train riding on tracks through time, a train that keeps moving forward and doesn’t back up. The clickety-clack of our wheels is a steady tempo measuring time. We only remember back to the tracks the locomotive has passed but still lie under the wheels of our caboose at the end. And we only look ahead a little bit, as the tree-bordered tracks curve, preventing a longer straight view.

    That’s way too simple, a two-dimensional time frame in which we either recall a little of what we just heard or maybe guess a little what might happen next. As Meyers, Stockhausen, Spitzer, and Dr. Stratas all observe, in keen listening to music our minds are filled with memories of not just the previous measure or phrase, but the very beginning of the piece, its theme or launching impetus (Grundgestalt as Schoenberg named it) and, in a more diffuse sense, all that has “happened” up to the present moment. The present moment is not one single phenomenon in time either. Melody, countermelody, bass line, chordal texture, and punctuating sounds are simultaneously tracing distinct paths, each with its own pace through time. At the same time, we are constantly expecting what’s coming, or at least “feeling” where the music might be going. And, as if that weren’t complicated enough, we are busy reevaluating what we just heard in relation to what we had been expecting. Saint Augustine describes it more succinctly:

    “Only in the mind can this [the experience of time] be accomplished, because of three activities there—the acts of anticipating, of observing, and of remembering.” [Book XI, Section 37]

    None of this is conscious, but in describing it in concrete terms, we recognize the dizzying multidimensionality, time arrows pointing in all directions and curling back on themselves. This is what I believe constitutes deep listening, “getting lost in the music”.

    Just one more idea – elasticity. Stockhausen recognizes that in music the sense of time passing changes, stretches or compresses, depending on how much “alteration” is being encountered. This is why music can seem “steady” or “surging ahead” or dissipating and almost “frozen”. It is not at all the tempo that causes this, but rather the rate of change, sharp contrast or subtle evolution, in the harmonies, the melodic character, or the rhythm.

    A rhythmic playfulness in modern music stretches our sense of timing. Tempos change, are interrupted, break down, tumble into avalanches, come to rest. Time itself stretches and becomes the titled thematic element in pieces such as Time Cycles (1960) by Lukas Foss. Here is another example titled about time, written at the starting gun of the new millennium.

    Fred Lerdahl – Time After Time (2000)

    Awe

    In his book When (Riverhead Books, 2018) Daniel H. Pink writes,

    “I used to believe that timing was everything. Now 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.”

    _____________

    © 2026 – All Rights Reserved

    Thomas S. Clark

    TClarkArtMusic.com

  • journal 13. Millennium

    Taiwan, 2001 —

    In my administrative career, 2001 was a high point, as interim dean of UNT College of Music, then the largest music school in the nation. Though I hired several professors, launched a magazine and Dean’s donor group, and headed up our part of a university capital campaign, I didn’t do any composing.

    Cho (left) and NTUA president (right)

    There was international travel, though. My Chinese-American colleague Gene Cho had established an exchange relationship with the National Taiwan University of the Arts, and he guided me to Taipei for the grand ceremony to sign the formal agreement.

    While there, we saw a traveling exhibit of the Qin Shi Huang Terracotta Army, took a train to visit Hsiuping University of Science and Technology in Changhua City, and went by car to the northern tip of the island of Formosa. In a cold mist on the rocky shore, we gazed out at the infinite expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

    California composer Robert Erickson wrote that the stimulus for his music “is usually some noise or some non-music sound composing the environment in which I live, its sounds, its ambience.” In 1968 he composed Pacific Sirens (ocean sounds) involving taped sounds gathered from the environment with acoustic instruments.

    LISTEN ›

    Pacific Sirens

    GreyWing Ensemble

    Global warming

    I was commissioned by North Carolina State University’s Arts Now Series, directed by Dr. Rodney Waschka II, for an artistic contribution to The Ericka Fairchild Symposium on Climate Change. “The Fourth Angel” refers to one of the “seven last plagues” as they were called in the King James Version of the Bible. In the NRSV translation, Revelation 16:8 reads:

    “The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire; they were scorched by the fierce heat.”

    The other six angels and their bowls wrought plagues of painful sores, bloody seas, bloody rivers, darkness, a dried up Euphrates, and finally the seventh angel’s loud voice pronounced, “It is done!”

    Standing in the middle of the sequence, the prophecy of the fourth angel is a dramatic metaphor for global warming.

    The Fourth Angel

    Clark 2006 (TC-77)

    Though there are some literal sound references, the angel is portrayed more broadly as a metaphor for the forces of nature. Rather than capturing actual samples of nature sounds, the computer-generated sounds are all synthesized, musical objects constructed employing a now-common computing technique called grain-table synthesis. (The choice of machine synthesis over nature sampling suggests a particular belief about the causes of global warming.) These synthetic sound images form a broad range of simple and complex musical rhythms and textures evocative of the natural world:

    • sunlight reflected off water and ice
    • glaciers calving and cascading into the ocean
    • solar radiation
    • night sounds.

    Extending the metaphor, sounds echo and swirl in sound space, just as do the dynamic, powerful weather systems that shape our global climate.

    Other angels

    Thus pieces about angels began with The Fourth Angel. Portraying imagery from Revelation, the seven angels in chapter 16 inflict suffering upon humanity. Angels of Bright Splendor evokes an equally awesome but more hopeful experience of our life-giving sun.

    In Zuni origin mythology, thunder sounded, and The People climbed from darkness, emerging into the daylight world. Seeing the Sun (Awonawilona, they cried, not used to such intense light. Where their tears fell, sunflowers sprang from the earth.

    Angels of Bright Splendor

    Spirits

    Heavenly light, voiced musically with metamorphic chord clusters, became an iconic sound in a famous 1968 movie. György Ligeti describes the technique for his 1966 piece for 16-part mixed choir, Lux Aeterna (“eternal light”):

    “The complex polyphony of the individual parts, embodied in a harmonic-musical flow in which the harmonies do not change suddenly, but merge into one another; one clearly discernible interval combination is gradually blurred, and from this cloudiness it is possible to discern a new interval combination taking shape.”

    LISTEN ›

    Lux Aeterna

    A Cappella Amsterdam

    Angels in most world religions and mythologies seem to serve one of two functions: wielding controlling power over the physical world or over human affairs; or making spiritual announcements to humans. The next piece in the angels series, scored for antiphonal double SATB choirs, brass, and strings, gives voice to the unseen voices of angels and other spirits. The choir pronounces the names of Native American and Hebrew spirits representing the power and beauty of nature – wind, moonlight, rainbows.

    •   Gǎoh – chief wind spirit (Iroquois)
    •   Yaogah – bear spirit of the north wind (Iroquois)
    •   Neoga – fawn spirit of the south wind (Iroquois)
    •   Oyandone – moose spirit of the East Wind (Iroquois)
    •   Amitolane – rainbow spirit (Zuni)
    •   Nokomis – daughter of the moon (Algonquin)
    •   Gabriel – archangel of justice, annunciation (Hebrew)
    •   Maris stella – star of the sea (Latin)

    Unseen Voices

    Clark 2018 (TC-94)

    Messengers of peace and assurance . . . and hope for the future of this millenium?

    ___________

  • journal 11. Moravská Hudba

    Brno, 1991 —

    I first visited Czechoslovakia in 1991 to perform at the Brno International Music Festival. How this opportunity came about is a story in itself. My colleague Tom Sovik at the University of North Texas joined a group promoting the City of Dallas as a sister city with Brno, the second largest Czech city and capital of the Moravian province, where he had done his doctoral musicology research. At his suggestion, I wrote a short piece as a gift to Brno. Its mayor turned over the gift score to the secretariat of Brno’s International Music Festival, a distinguished Moravian composer Arnošt Parsch. He invited me to come to the festival and conduct my music. The result was an October 1991 performance in Brno’s New Town Hall of two of my works, ANTIPHONS (1989) and CANZONA, for combined woodwind and brass quintets, which I conducted.

    rehearsing with Czech ensemble

    Parsch invited me back in 1992 for the 27th Brno International Festival’s Experimental Music Exposition V. I presented my LIGHTFORMS 2: StarSpectra multimedia computer music and played trombone in an experimental multimedia piece by my friend, Rodney Waschka. I had performed the same program early that fall at the Festival Internacional Alfonso Reyes in Monterrey, Mexico.

    PTACí

    While in Brno for the 1991 festival, I met choreographer Hana Smičkova, who invited me to compose a work for her Mimi Fortunae Dance Theater, which rehearsed in the ancient Spilberk Castle. I began studying the great 20th-century Moravian composer Leoš Janáček’s music as background for the ballet’s composition.

    PTACí (“Birds”) was premiered in Brno in 1993 by the Moravian Chamber Orchestra, which I conducted. The ballet, choreographed by Smičkova, was performed by Mimi Fortunae in historic Mahunovo Divadlo, the first building in Europe to be equipped by Thomas Edison with electric lights.

    During these years, Parsch and I became composer friends. Our visits to each other always included long walks in nature and deep discussions of music, art, and culture. In 1991 I had visited the northern Moravian mountain village of Hukvaldy, the summer home of Janáček. He loved nature walks and studied bird songs.

    Hukvaldy Sketches was first a concert suite of PTACI, my set of modern musical impressions of old Moravia, in the ancient heart of Eastern Europe. Scored for a chamber quartet, it was premiered February 6, 2018, at Texas State University Performing Arts Center, by Ian Davidson (oboe), Vanguel Tangarov (clarinet), Ames Asbell (viola), and Kari Klier (marimba).

    The final transformation of this work was a re-scoring of Hukvaldy Sketches for the original PTACI orchestration. Its five scenes:

    Hrad – morning climb to the castle ruins

    Ptáci – watching Leoš’s birds

    Vody – forest streams and shadows

    Bystroušky – mouflons and other mountain wildlife

    Podzim – autumn sunset

    PTACí / Hukvaldy Sketches

    Clark 1993/2016 (TC-69/80)

    Morava

    In my intense study of Janácek, I reveled in the expressive depth of his uniquely modern Moravian music. His powerful String Quartet No. 2 and his collection of gentle piano music, Po zarostlém chodníčku, affected me deeply.

    In one of my Brno performances, Parsch’s Czech colleagues commented on my music’s affinity to modern Moravian musical style. I was informally dubbed an honorary Moravian Composer, a distinction I proudly took as a high honor of their acceptance. Since then, I have written many pieces with Czech imagery:

    Two of these are vocal music that include some Czech lyrics. The treble choir piece A NEW LIDICE begins with “We build a new village, while a just world watches. Stavíme novou vesnici. Spravedlivý svêt bude sledovat.” Children (including my daughter Alison) sang a short phrase in Czech in MORAVIAN MOUNTAIN SONGS, written for the Woodrow Wilson Elementary School Choir in Denton, Texas.

    Sinfonietta

    with Parsch at the spring outside Brno

    Leos Janácek composed his great concert work, Sinfonietta, in 1926 for the Sokol Gymnastic Festival in Prague. Janáček said it was intended to express “contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, courage and determination to fight for victory.” It is what I call musical sketches of his home city, Brno, the largest city in the Moravian east of what was then Czechoslovakia.

    I visited Brno several times starting in 1991 to perform my music at its International Music Festival.

    LISTEN ›

    Janácek Sinfonietta

    UNT Symphony Orch. on YouTube

    The festival traditionally ends with a performance of Sinfonietta by the Brno Philharmonic in Janácek Divadlo (theatre). In 1993 my ballet, PTACI, was premiered at historic Mahunovo Divadlo, across a plaza from Janácek Divadlo.

    Though I could have continued my “Sketches” series with a “Brno Sketches,” instead a 2024 work is a set of more abstract variations partly based on and quoting themes from Sinfonietta (in the tradition of Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Haydn).

    • Variation 1 “Canon” engages that ancient musical technique, evoking Brno’s medieval history.
    • Variation 2 “Overtones” explores two harmonic series, C and Bb, painted over each other in layers of color, with hints of fanfare emerging through the clouds.
    • Variation 3 “Constellations” is a kaleidoscopic succession of large sonorities built on stone-sturdy Perfect Fifth intervals brightened by jazz-like added tones.
    • Variation 4 “Fanfare” is an ostinato pattern-music fantasia on Sinfonietta‘s grand fanfare themes.

    Brno Variations

    Clark 2024 (TC-138)

    ___________