MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: art

  • 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?

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  • 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)

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