MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: La Mer

  • 7. Carte du Ciel

    U.Mich. Electronic Music Studio, 1975 —

    Mapping the stars —

    My 2024 book, Mapping the Music Universe, begins with recognition of historic, world-changing pioneers in science and the arts. It includes Carte du Ciel (“Map of the Heavens”), an ambitious second phase of an international star-mapping project initiated in 1887 by Paris Observatory director Amédée Mouchez.  A new photographic process revolutionizing the gathering of telescope images inspired the first phase, the Astrographic Catalogue of a dense, whole-sky array of star positions. Carte du Ciel, never completed after 70 years, used the Catalogue as a reference system for a complex survey of the vast field of even fainter images.

    In my 2019 computer music of that title, ghostly wisps of sound are punctuated by brighter bursts, clustered in a natural, not-quite randomly dispersed texture.

    CARTE DU CIEL

    Clark 2019 (TC-98)

    Space sounds

    A pioneering work of early electronic music made a huge impact on my imagination when I first heard it on FM radio in the 1960s. Karlheinz Stockhausen made Kontakte (Nr. 12 in the composer’s catalogue of works) in 1958–60 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk electronic-music studio in Cologne with assistance from Gottfried Michael Koenig. It originated as a tape piece for four-channel loudspeaker reproduction. The title refers to “contacts between various forms of spatial movement” of the sounds coming from four different directions.

    Stockhausen – KONTAKTE

    Deutsche Grammophon

    LISTEN › YouTube

    American composer Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon was released by Nonesuch Records in 1967. The title comes from a Yeats poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”. It was made with a Buchla 100 analog synthesizer, which Subotnick helped develop, a common practice of early electronic music pioneers to build their own tools.

    Part I is a calm exploration of tone quality. Part II generates rapid machine sequences of sounds.

    Silver Apples of the Moon

    Nonesuch Records

    LISTEN › YouTube

    Exigencies

    My works of analog electronic music were composed at the University of Michigan Electronic Music Studio in Ann Arbor starting in 1975. The studio, on an upper floor behind the stage and organ pipes of historic Hill Auditorium, was assembled by Michigan composition professor George Balch Wilson in 1962.

    Patterned after the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the studio included reel-to-reel half-inch tape decks running at 15 or 30 inches per second, a mixing board and patch bay, an early model of the famous Moog Synthesizer, other tone generators, and a large wooden coffin containing a heavy metal plate to create electronic reverberation.

    Wilson’s first tape piece is an excellent sample of the analog studio’s sound and capability in expert hands.

    Wilson – EXIGENCIES

    Equilibrium records

    LISTEN › YouTube

    My first large work of analog electronic music, Celestial Ceremonies combines otherworldly sounds made with this now antiquated equipment at Wilson’s U.Mich. Electronic Music Studio. (You may hear a resemblance to the sounds of EXIGENCIES.) Updating my work in 2017 with digital enhancements, I also separated out a suite of four sound sketches with subtitles.

    Celestial Ceremonies

    Clark 1976 (TC-33)

    Dark Energy
    Black Hole
    Gravitation
    Luminescence

    Kraken

    For a sample of my current use of digital synthesis technology, we go back to La Mer. Diving into what has been described as our other unexplored frontier, here is a fantasy sketch of the deep sea on the blue planet.

    Mar Profundo

    Clark 2025 (TC-156)

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  • 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)

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