MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: Charles Ives

  • 9. Mapping

    Leelanau, 1983 —

    My last summer working at what was then called the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan was 1983. We spent as much time off as possible on the nearby shore of Lake Michigan. Three spots on the western edge of the Leelanau peninsula were favorite magical places. Otter Creek played out into a sandy delta at the beach, perfect for a picnic. Good Harbor Bay was an excellent shore for finding gray Petoskey stones, revealing fascinating hexagonal-shaped fossils when wet. Farther north, the Great Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes rise majestically hundreds of feet above the water’s edge.

    Béla Viktor János Bartók’s monumental 1937 work, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, begins with a mysterious, meandering line played by subdued violas. It sounds to me like walking at the water’s curving edge on a fog-shrouded beach. The line becomes the subject of a gigantic fugue, building to a powerful climax. In my imagination, we reach the sheer cliff of a massive bluff at the end of a Lake Michigan bay.

    Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste

    I. Andante Tranquilo

    Chicago Symphony

    LISTEN > YouTube

    Shores

    Of course, Bartók never saw Lake Michigan. But shorelines are a fascinating kind of fractal patterns in nature.

    In 1980, Larry Austin received a commission from the Canadian Broadcasting System and KPFA for an experimental radiophonic work. For the premiere broadcast, the performers were in three different Canadian cities, synchronized by electronic signals! The mind-boggling result was a piece consisting of

    “a massively contrapuntal texture, with many instruments playing continuous, independent lines, all in different, independent tempos. The contours of each contrapuntal part were determined using maps of Canadian coastlines.”

    [Clark — Larry Austin: Life and Works of an Experimental composer. Borik Press, 2012, p. 40]

    Canadian Coastlines

    I.C.M.C. 1981, Denton Texas

    LISTEN › YouTube

    Glacially-etched shorelines also inspired sonic imagery for a series of my pieces culminating in PENINSULA. Mappings of the natural contours of the Leelanau Peninsula provided richly varied patterns as basic coordinate numbers for sculpting sound patterns. The piano explores some of the endless possibilities for articulating a spectrum of sonorities. A surrounding environment of synthetic sounds was made by digitally analyzing timbral qualities of acoustic instruments, mostly with percussive articulations (metaphorically the rocky shore). The timbres were modified and resynthesized into a pointillistic sound texture. The density of the sound events rises and falls in waves according to changing values derived from the basic mappings. Larger confluences of waves are located in time by map points of special significance on the graph.

    The coexistence of piano sonorities and synthetic sounds is a metaphorical meeting of seascape and landscape, both animated in time.

    PENINSULA

    Clark 1984 (TC-50) Borik Press

    Clifton Matthews, piano, Winston-Salem NC, Feb. 2007

    There were many other groundbreaking pieces by my late friend and collaborator, Larry Austin. The first, Improvisations for Orchestra and Jazz Soloists, brought him to national prominence in 1964 with highly publicized broadcast performances by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.

    As Austin moved into computer music, he began exploring compositional algorithms using mathematical models such as fractals.

    Some of Charles Ives’ sketches for his monumental, never completed Universe Symphony were tracings of the outlines of rock formations. Austin studied deeply this Ives work starting in 1974 and eventually completed a version of Universe Symphony for expanded orchestras in 1993. In Austin’s own work beginning in 1976, mapping contours of mountain ridges and star constellations yielded musical patterns for First Fantasy on Ives’ Universe Symphony, Maroon Bells, and *Stars.

    Constellations

    Always interested in astronomy, I tried plotting star constellations on two-dimensional matrix graphs. The coordinates of each star in a constellation could be interpreted as time-point and pitch information, resulting in a complex arpeggiated group of notes. More intriguing was the capability to rotate the map, resulting in many possible variants that stretch or compress the rhythm and chord structure.

    Cygnus
    Cygnus rotated 90º
    Orion
    Orion rotated 90º

    The first compositional product of this design work, LIGHTFORMS 1 – Constellations (TC-65), scored for piano, was published by Borik Press in 1992. Naming these patterns, pitch-time chord arpeggios, as constellations became a breakthrough concept

    In my book, Mapping the Music Universe, I cite a remarkable pioneer of cartography. “William Smith, a rural surveyor, in 1799 drew a colorful map of the subterranean rock strata of his county in English coal country, launching the modern science of geology.”  The map was extraordinary not only as a scientific breakthrough, but also visually by his hand coloring each huge copy.

    As digital synthesizers came along, sound making with computers offered more calculated control of the timbral (tone color) spectrum. My astronomical metaphor continued with a 1993 piece, using the then state-of-the-art Synclavier II digital synthesizer to “color” the constellation patterns of LIGHTFORMS 1. Reflecting the varied colors of stars, I built color families of sound, distinguishing unique frequency-modulation ratios for each group.

    LIGHTFORMS 2: StarSpectra

    Clark 1993 (TC-68)

    In 1887, French astronomer Amédée Mouchez launched an ambitious international star-mapping project (Carte du Ciel) at the Paris Observatory. It was never finished, until now the challenge has been taken up by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory (formerly the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) in Chile. It is conducting the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, repeated astronomical surveys of the entire southern sky.

    From wandering forest paths to trekking scenic shorelines, my life has always been full of ambient exploration. Mapping has become my grand metaphor for exploring musical territory, culminating in the book, Mapping the Music Universe. It begins:

    “The heavenly motions are nothing
    but a continuous song for several voices,
    perceived not by the ear but by the intellect,
    a figured music that sets landmarks
    in the immeasurable flow of time.”

    — Galileo Galilei

    “When we gaze at stars and planets, they appear as stationary points of light, fixed in place in what seems a random pattern across the entire night sky visible to our hemisphere. Time stands still.

    “Throughout human time, humans have imagined that stars make picture patterns we name as constellations: fish, warriors, goddesses, animals. Only the persistent observers, such as astronomers, identify their nightly march across the sky, rising in the east and disappearing below the western horizon.”

    In Mapping the Music Universe, a studied journey through musical time, pitch, and structure, many composed examples took on characters of named constellations, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. They coalesced into 12 etudes, collected here as “a continuous song.”

    Mapping the Cosmos

    Clark 2021 (TC-114)

    Listen, imagining a 24-hour 360º rotation of our earthbound telescope, viewing the entire cosmos in 24 minutes.

    _____________

  • 5. Dusty Dusk

    Tacoma, 1974 —

    As a teenager, I was into all kinds of art — sketching, painting, reading plays, and writing poetry. Lots of poems, my way of a kind of diary writing, expressing to myself the places, relationships, and feelings. (I won’t reveal any of this naive creative work here.)

    Later, two poems in particular were written at major turning points in my professional and personal life. That’s when I started setting poems as art song lyrics. Some of the musical material for what became Landscapes in Motion was first set in the 1970s, and some in the 1990s, now reworked with a more mature 21st-century craft, while preserving the original dark suppleness of tonality and time.

    Upon completing my master’s degree at Michigan in 1972, I taught music theory as a one-year lecturer at Indiana University in Bloomington. Another one-year fill-in position took me to Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, where I got great experience teaching music theory, composition, new music performance ensemble, and even trombone!

    Without a doctorate, however, there was no real prospect of winning a permanent professor position anywhere. And continuing a succession of one-year gigs moving all over the country was not sustainable. What to do?

    I had taken my sailboat with me all the way out to Tacoma from Interlochen. After a beautiful sunset sail on Lake Spanaway in my little 15-foot “Butterfly” dinghy, I wrote a poem.

                            “Sailing at sunset”  (1974)

    Dusty dusk settling silk on dying silver of wave-modulated water,
    the sail still silently searching for a departing breeze,
    swinging gently its boom and softly rattling its blocks
    in confounded cross-rhythms to the lapping shore.
    Streams of crimson flowing dust streak the sky
    above looming shadowed firs.
    Deepening shadows settle dark dust on the deck
    while still the mast peak rages red and soars into a deepening sky.
    Scorched face soothed by the oncoming night breeze,
    eyes searching the sunset sky for sign of tomorrow’s wind.
    Where will we sail then? Wherever wind wills . . .
    and a new dusk consume our shadows.

    A New Dusk

    Clark 1974 (TC-28)

    Afterglow

    Turns out, I went back to Michigan for doctoral studies, and went back to working at Interlochen as assistant to the director of Michigan’s university-level program there. In that 1975 summer, I met Beth, a journalist working a temp gig on the camp’s publicity staff.

    We fell in love, and I spent many weekends of the following academic year riding the Amtrak Turboliner from Ann Arbor to Chicago to be with her. I wrote a poem on one of those train rides, again uncertain about my (our) future.

                            “Riding backwards on a train”   (1976)

    The cider mill beside the river,
    cows grazing by a dead tree,
    a red barn stuffed with hay.
    An old square house alone on a hilltop,
    a church’s silent steeple above the trees,
    a country cemetery, old stone crosses guarding against oblivion.
    Then the sun is gone,
    storm clouds ripple across meadow skies,
    the river turns away.
    Riding backwards on a train, frozen fields float by.
    Glossy sheets of white ice glow with winter sun.
    Dead brown stubble breaks the mirror, patchy footprints of autumn’s retreat.
    Pale late light of afternoon flickering
    through leafless trees that line the lifeless fields in rows,
    through fields of withered cornstalks.
    Leap into brown dry woods, plunge past barren trees,
    spray a wake of fallen leaves, lunge into holy autumn stillness,
    riding backwards on a train, headed east into a frozen future.

    Shortly before his death, Charles Ives published a collection of 114 Songs in 1922. Many have become exemplars of his iconic 20th-century American style. Here are two that fit our tender twilight theme.

    Evening

    Paul Sperry, Irma Vallecillo

    LISTEN > YouTube

    Afterglow

    Paul Sperry, Irma Vallecillo

    LISTEN > YouTube

    Before night

    So far, I haven’t mentioned an important influence on my ’60s and ’70s immersion into the mid-century Avant Garde. In the 1960s, Luciano Berio wrote an influential, frequently performed series of unaccompanied solos for varied instruments. All are tour-de-force virtuosic technical displays with a theatrical impact. I performed Sequenza V for trombone on a Contemporary Directions concert in Rackham Lecture Hall (Ann Arbor). It was commissioned by and written for virtuoso trombonist Stuart Dempster, with whom I later briefly studied.

    I said instruments, but Sequenza III (1965) is for unaccompanied voice, drastically different than a typical “song.” Berio explains:

    “In Sequenza III the emphasis is given to the sound symbolism of vocal and sometimes visual gestures, with their accompanying ‘shadows of meaning,’ and the associations and conflicts suggested by them. For this reason, Sequenza III can also be considered as a dramatic essay whose story is the relationship between the soloist and her own voice.”

    Sequenza III was written in 1965 for Cathy Berberian. The “modular” text is by Markus Kutter:

    Give me a few words for a woman
    to sing a truth allowing us
    to build a house without worrying before night comes

    SEQUENZA III

    Laura Catrani, soprano

    Ice

    In 1983, teaching grad courses and still directing the New Music Performance Lab. Musicology master’s student Robert Nasow played cello in the ensemble, but he was also an avid and talented poet.

    When his fellow grad music student David Lynn Kennedy was killed, Robert wrote a heartfelt elegy for him.

                            “Ice Floe“

    by Robert Nasow

    Yes, I am cold . . .
    my hands are cold to the touch.
    Something must fill this hollow at the center of my body.
    Untouched, no one will long remember your face . . .
    She withdraws to contemplate the child,
    her voice breaks into emerald light, effulgent pure water,
    sings unknown distances of sleep.
    Brittle, come break off my hand,
    this glazed stem of Queen Anne’s lace.
    There are ways of living we have never dreamed of.

    His poem became a lovely vehicle for a memorial song, which was premiered by UNT grad students who were also involved in new music with me.

    Ice Floe

    R. Nasow / Clark 1983 (TC-46)

    Jing Ling Tam, soprano

    Paul LeBlanc, guitar