Mudflats Music and Time: Thinking in Systems 1980

Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes (1981)

During my last two years at the University I became interested in systems that had been devised in attempts to understand aspects of natural language and thinking. To that end I took a class in Linguistics, followed by, during the Summer Quarter, an advanced class in Chomskyan syntax (a rash move, but I survived); and a class in Formal Logic (aka predicate or boolean calculus) knowledge of which, much to my surprise and amusement many years later, earned me enough money to buy an electric guitar. This was all more or less concurrent with species counterpoint taught by Diane Thome and with John Rahn's theory seminars, which provided a broad outline of Shenkerian tonal thinking and the groundwork of a language for atonal theory as it was propounded in John's then brand-new textbook Basic Atonal Theory.

All of this helped me find a path, eventually, around the head space of poorly understood and increasingly opaque European 12-tone-ism (ala Stockhausen), avante-garde-ism, minimalism, and the host of other ism-isms then floating around, toward a more open-ended and less stylistically charged basis of thinking about notes. I did try my hand at a more-or-less straightforward 12-tone piece, a piano trio. I liked the row I had invented - as I recall some slicing of it (every 5-notes?) generated the inversion or retrograde or something to that effect. The piece itself, however, was clearly a dud and no fun to work on so I gave it up midway.

Your blogger all cleaned up - 1981

But I did want to have something to show for my last undergrad quarter, so I retreated to solo piano. By that time I had become acquainted with Benjamin Boretz's ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset..."), (John had it open at the piano in his office, though I regret missing Keith Johnston's performance from around that time) which restricts itself to 10 pitch-classes. Based on that bare fact I composed a 10-note row and proceeded to treat that row as existing entirely within a 10 pitch-class (mod-10) universe, that is, one in which the missing notes didn't exist and didn't create any interval gaps in terms of how I was calculating row transformations. My gamut, so to speak, had bumps.

I wrote seventeen short pieces. For each one I used a 5-note segment of the row and coupled it with that segment's mod-10 rotational array. I made the row-segment one voice and the rest of the array a second voice and called it good. For some reason involving a long forgotten system of cycling through row segments, I ended up with seventeen of them - my happy number.

The result, Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes, was my parting shot at what had become a seemingly increasingly fraught weekly composers' seminar. Since the pieces came across as clever and attractive - recognizably musicy - the older members of the faculty were in hearty approval of the conservative direction I seemed to be headed. This allowed John the opportunity of claiming that it was actually the most sophisticated serial work any of his students had presented. I'm not sure of the truth of that remark, and suspect he simply couldn't resist the joke, but I did appreciate his support.

These pieces are fun and agreeable to play, and I have programmed them repeatedly over the years. They also exhibit significant pre-characteristics of the particular rabbit hole down which I have been plunging since the mid-90s: cyclic generation of pitch-sets as the basis for a set of pieces, and systematic use of non-standard mod-X arithmetic.

Recordings:

Recorded live at the Seattle Concert Theater, July 9, 1981: