Many 19th cen. American landscape artists painted fascinating panoramic scenes, including Albert Bierstadt, who captured the grandeur of Western, mountainous landscapes.
Much mid-20th-cen. large ensemble music “painted” with sound masses, animated and evolving instead of harmonically progressing — notably“Variations for Orchestra” (Bassett),“The Seventh Trumpet“ (Erb),“Aftertones of Infinity“ (Schwantner). My “Animated Landscapes” (1973) for orchestra was titled echoing Cage’s“Imaginary Landscapes.”
1. Establish a model
Albert Bierstadt: Passing Storm over the Sierra Nevadas (1870) – San Antonio Museum of Art
Choosing one of Bierstadt’s finest works, 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.
2. Build big constellations
The fixed, stationary nature of a landscape painting suggests a static harmonic approach, projecting and prolonging one constellation as an underlying sonority for the whole musical “canvas.”
Here are two examples of a 12-tone constellation. The first was used as the underlying sonority of the pointillistic first movement of Anton Webern’s Symphonie Op. 21 (1929). Note that to accomplish the palindromic symmetry of the interval array, Eb is placed in two different octaves, thus 13 pitches total.
Another example of placing all 12 pitch classes in particular octaves is from Witold Lutosławski’s Jeux vénitiens (1961):
TC example
A large register-spanning constellation need not be 12-tone. Building a sonority of very different (less dissonant) quality, let’s start with just octave C’s and their fifths, G. Pitches a whole step away from these tonal pillars are added. The result is 13 pitches only from the F major scale. Then their complement, a big 8-pitch constellation of similar array, is built from the pentatonic scale of the flats, the other “black keys” .
3. Animations
Different basic techniques for animating in time a large constellation of pitches . . .
Arpeggio – one note at a time in any order, is a kind of stacking.
Stacking – introduce sustained tones one or two at a time. The reverse, unstacking, works too.
Swells – crescendo/diminuendo the whole sonority (think ocean waves in Debussy’s La Mer)
Pointillism – a more complex texture of distinct sound points separated by registral and rhythmic spacing. Although they can be different sound colors, in this example they are all the same timbre:
4. Develop a sound palette
Larger ensembles can be good for musical landscapes, offering a varied palette of instrumental timbres. Like pigments, these sound colors group in hues: the
- double reeds
- other woodwinds
- cylindrical brass (trumpet, trombone)
- conical brass (horn, euphonium, tuba)
- bowed strings
- plucked strings (harp)
- metal pitched percussion
- wood percussion; drums; exotic gongs, etc.
For synthesized sounds, beyond emulating these instrumental timbres, envelope and spectrum distinguish the sounds:
- sharply accented or gradually emerging sound onset
- bright metallic to dark hums
- reverberation.
For Passing Storm, I chose three “choirs” with distinct sound qualities:
- Clanging percussion and plucky harp
- Gentler emerging-onset sounds (Sibelius Pad 2 – warm) functioning like woodwinds
- Brighter sustained sounds (Sibelius FX4 – atmosphere) in the orchestral role of bowed strings
5. Compose the whole canvas
In painting, “composition” refers to the main parts of an image and how they are arranged with each other in two-dimensional and the illusion of three-dimensional space. For music, we might call this the macro form. As with most landscape paintings, the musical textures may overlap in continuous sound. There may be sectional divisions, analogous to strong demarcation lines like a horizon. The sense of broad, distant scale of view will be best captured with extended textures of expansive rhythm and even with reverberation.
While not trying to actually map the physical composition of a painting, we can get musical inspiration from considering the painting’s features of background, foreground, and highlights of strong visual focus. My example was coming together starting 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 painting, 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 proceeding four minutes overlaps sound masses exhibiting the various animations in time we explored earlier. Dark and light in a painting are portrayed by loud and soft, timeless sustained sound vs. busy points of sound.
Animated Landscape No. 4: Passing Storm
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