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| your blogger with pile of woodchips |
In 2014 I finished the first eight pieces of what I felt would be a
significant project for me, but which over the next six years or so would
balloon alarmingly. The original impetus was to compose a response to Franz
Liszt's
Études d'exécution transcendante, but flip some terms to be
about immanence instead. Of course, then the pun got the better of me and I
ended up with the title
Études d'exécution imminent. I really had no
idea what the project would entail at first but knew that I wanted to work in
mod-17 again, and that I wanted to work with the widest possible variety of
interval types. In mod-12 arithmetic there exists a set of four-note groups
(tetrachords) that contain each of the five mod-12 pitch-class intervals
without duplication - the so-called all-interval tetrachords. There are no
such structures in mod-17, so that option was off the table. Instead I
generated a 17-tone row that arranged 4 transpositions of what would have been
an all-interval tetrachord in mod-12 symmetrically so that they didn't
duplicate any mod-17 pitch-classes, and stuck the missing 17th pitch-class in
the middle.
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| Karen on Second Burroughs, Mt. Rainier National Park |
I then notated that row on the top staff of a large sheet of score paper left
over from my pencil score of
A Cat's Life, following it with two
transpositions such that the last note of the first row is the first note of
the next. When completed I had three linked transpositions of that row. I
quickly discovered an emergent property of the row: playing every other note
(but skipping the middle "extra" note) resulted in chromatic scale (all
half-steps), so that throughout the first pieces in the set chains of like
intervals are clearly audible. I then subjected my three-row series to the 16
multiplicative transformations, which filled the page top to bottom. the
seventeenth such transformation - M17, or M0 - generates a single pitch-class,
and I had no clear plans for what I might do with that and saw no good reason
to notate it anyway.
This page of notes lived on my piano desk for the next 6 or 7 years while the
etudes put themselves together. I started by writing eight pieces, one for
each of the first eight series on the page, without much in the way of fancy
thinking - I was just trying to make music out of the list of notes. The ninth
series was the inversion of the eighth and the tenth the inversion of the
seventh, etc. so it seemed like a good inflection point. I might have stopped
right there - and I left that option open to myself - but they
eventually became the "Preface" to the completed project. I decided
to take a break, and thus began a self-imposed sabbatical from composing
written-down music, during which I made a large quantity of solo
improvisations on various guitars and other instruments.
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| Karen and your blogger, Mt. Rainier National Park |
As it turned out I observed my sabbatical indifferently. During it I completed
three compositions, independent of the etudes. The first occasion was due to
an invitation from Open Space to provide something for Ben Boretz's
Festschrift, in celebration of his upcoming 80th birthday, then in planning.
My assignment was to respond to his set of solo piano improvisations from the
late 80s that had shown up in the mail first as cassette tapes hot off the
deck, and then later most of them found their way onto an early Open Space set
of CDs, under the title
One. Being heavily involved then in another
solo piano project I decided it would be better, and liberating, to think in
terms of clavichord. After assembling some musical material based on the
opening figure of one of Ben's solo session, and fighting with it for some
time trying to fit it into a single trajectory I eventually sorted all the
separate elements into their own buckets and suddenly there it was: six
perfectly fine little pieces. I called it
Another.
It was at about this time that some ideas I had been entertaining about the
most acceptable attitude concerning the social requirement for performers to
follow a composers' score with strict fidelity became more clear to me. It seemed to me that not
affording a performer of a score the same degree of creative freedom enjoyed
by the composer in making that score was arrogant and bossy, which is not how
I feel about what I compose. So what few performance indications I included
are couched as suggestions, my favorite being "as an alternative, try not
filling the clavichord with ping pong balls". I recorded several versions -
two on clavichord (one with and another without ping pong balls) and one on
piano. When I played it in public I used piano, since my clavichord doesn't
travel.
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Banned Rehearsal, Aaron Keyt, Steve Kennedy,
Neal Kosály Meyer, your blogger, and Karen |
The other big piece,
J, came to me pretty much all at once. I was
attending a concert at the Chapel Performance Space in which local saxophone
wizard Neil Welch was performing his tribute to those who had been so horribly
killed at the nearby Cafe Racer some months before. My thoughts wandered to J.
K. Randall, who had passed away quite recently, when I had a flash idea that I
thought only needed to be worked out in notes on paper to be finished. In the
end I had to make an adjustment to the pacing of one strand in order to not
have that strand straggling off the end of the piece for another five or ten
minutes, but otherwise stuck to the original flash idea. The material is
conceived in mod-12 and consists of successively introduced strands of notes
going down until they hit the pitch-class they started at, and then back up,
via patterns of increasing intervals (going down) and decreasing intervals
(going up). As the strands mix it up in the middle the plain as dirt workings
of those interval patterns results in quite a fine polyphonic dialog. Ben
remarked that it was among my most lucid of pieces, fitting as a tribute to
Jim, who was among the most lucid of composers.
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Banned Rehearsal following our
30th Bannediversary Outing
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The last piece completed during my sabbatical is an arrangement of the hymn
Hail the Blest Morn using the traditional tune, written for Karen
to sing at a service during Christmastide. I also made a bunch of field
recordings and revisited my 1985
Summer Songs project by re-working
some of them using better recording equipment and overdubbing. I shared them on
my Bandcamp page for a while but in the end they mostly reminded me what
didn't quite work the first time either.
I also spent a good bit of time working up A Cat's Life again, and
through Aaron's good offices found a young actor, Olivia Sterne, who nailed
the narrator part. I presented it at a recital in April of that year, along
the Doug Palmer's Attitude, Aaron Keyt's Sonata, and J. K.
Randall's Greek Nickel #2.
Aaron moved to the Boston area for a couple of years while his partner was at
law school, so the Telepath project of Banned Rehearsal picked back up again
after a 20+ year hiatus. But before that we celebrated our 30th
"Bannediversary", with a concert at The Chapel.
Banned Playout:
2014:
Numbered 850-876 14:16:06
Telepaths 23-26 03:28:39
Total 2014: 26:55:00
Grand Total: 835:16:55
Scores:
Études d'exécution Imminent
Another
J
Hail The Blest Morn
Recordings
Études d'exécution Imminent (Preface)
Another
J
