PhD Thesis - Folio of Compositions with Commentary
A number of pieces in the folio (Peel, David, Spin, Joy) may be regarded as etudes, in that they examine a small number of concerns or techniques in a terse, methodical manner. The etudes were composed during a fin de siecle minimalist revival, when many young artists turned their attention to aspects of early minimalist technique. [1] Running through the etudes is an attraction to working with simple starting conditions yielding complex, unpredictable results, often concerned with the nature of sound itself.
These works, and the intermedia works examined in Chapter Five, are of a different character than the main body of works in the folio. Fitting more readily into a standard concert-hall setting, the non-etude works are concerned primarily with intuitive matters of expression and musical discourse. Each of them shares core concepts, especially regarding time, with the etudes and intermedia works, however, and uses their techniques, though in ways which are not as didactic or as clearly stated. The techniques which form almost the entire content of the etudes and intermedia works are subjugated in works such as the String Quartet to the service of expression, and are used in partial, fleeting ways with less concern for clarity of the underlying process than for their resulting effectiveness.
Peel is a one-page piano composition focusing simultaneously on several very simple concepts, which may be expressed as precompositional instructions:
Use the ends of sounds (rather than the beginning) as the agent of rhythm
Form a gradually cumulative structure by the simplest of means
Carry out gradual harmonic change
Convert chords into single pitches by a linear process
The first of these was decided upon during a reading of the Finale of Schumann's piano work Papillons, op. 2, which finishes in a highly original way (fig. 4-1).
As a chord is gradually "peeled away" to become a single note, Schumann draws the listener's attention to the ends of the piano notes. As each note ends, the new lowest note seems to begin. As the characteristic piano attack is missing, one imagines other instruments, such as bowed strings, playing. I found this effect fascinating, and its inherent timbral ambiguity seemed an ideal focus for a process work.
The idea of rhythm being generated by a sound's sudden absence is analogous with the electronic principle of semiconductors - the "flow of holes" or the flow of lack-of-charge. [2] In Peel, it is the flow of silence rather than sound which is solely responsible for rhythmic information. There is a much greater stress placed on rhythm than in the Schumann example; notes' endings as the agents of rhythm become the primary focus. This rhythm, which on the local level remains the same from beginning to end, is ambiguous. The listener switches between hearing two bars of seven-eight and one bar of seven-four.
The longer-term rhythmic structure is harmonically driven and relates to the second foundational concept: "create a gradually cumulative structure by the simplest of means." This structure could hardly be simpler - cycles gradually lengthen by adding one chord on each repetition. This additive approach to ordering musical events is often used by Frederic Rzewski on a more local level, for example in Coming Together, in which it organises the pitch content. Fig. 4-2 demonstrates a melodic pattern being constructed note by note.
Figure 4-2 Frederic Rzewski, Coming
Together, bars 21-24 showing cumulative sequence
In Peel, a similar cumulative process converts a single chord into a progression, working in opposition to the simultaneous process collapsing each chord to a single pitch. The cumulative process produces a balance between repetition and surprise.
Harmonically, events move gradually. The primary process, related to traditional suspension techniques, is that of changing one pitch at a time until an entirely new chord is formed. Almost all of the chords comprise two triads, their roots related as neighbours or tonic-dominant (as indicated in fig. 4-3). Chords 3 and 8 have transitory suspended fourths in the upper triad.
Figure 4-3 Triadic combinations in Peel
Within the progression, the final chord stands out in several aspects. It is the only one in which open position is used, and the only one in which any voice crossing occurs, thus changing the pattern of a rising arpeggio. It is also the only place where disjunct motion occurs in the bass. These exceptions signal the end of the piece, giving a sense of completion.
David is an electroacoustic composition consisting entirely of a single process applied to a short recording of vocal improvisation by my six-year-old nephew David Bullock. I had left David with a digital delay unit, a microphone and a tape recorder for his amusement, and was struck by one phrase while listening back to the resulting tape (fig. 4-4). I was attracted to the rhythmic suppleness of the seven-eight meter, the interesting slides of timbre and pitch, and the pattern's suitability for repetition.
Its usefulness as ostinato material is due to its inherent "frozen counterpoint", with implied triads of i, iv and V in G# minor. Each repetition is driven by a V-i cadence from the end of the pattern back to the beginning. This harmonic vitality and the pattern's timbral interest make the pattern suitable for extended listening, allowing the listener to explore the internal structure of the sound.
Figure 4-4 Vocal sample in David
David introduces a new compositional technique related to the phasing process of Steve Reich's early compositions such as Come Out and It's Gonna Rain. In these tape works, two identical copies of a tape loop are played simultaneously. One loop is slightly faster than the other so that the two beginning points gradually drift apart in time, the faster loop moving so far ahead that it eventually "catches up" with the beginning of the next cycle of the slower loop. In David, this same process occurs, with a subtle but major difference. With each repetition, the faster "loop" (actually a digital sample) makes a copy of itself that remains at that phase position and continues to be heard. Each repetition, then, adds a new part to the texture, very slightly earlier than the part added in the previous repetition. This process could be termed cumulative phasing. [3]
During cumulative phasing, textural density increases from a single voice to many hundreds, gradually filling in every point of the cycle [4] and destroying any horizontal movement. The phrase is eventually transformed into a drone. This is a clear case of verticalisation; an attempt to obliterate time, and concentrated listening will often result in a distortion of "clock time" awareness.
The drone towards which David progresses is not simply a chord made up of the six pitches notated in fig. 4-4. It takes only a handful of repetitions before other pitches - combination and difference tones - become evident. Gradually, these resultant sounds increase in volume until they reach a point of domination after about five minutes or so (depending on the speed of the phase shifting). The emergence of these pitches is perhaps the most engrossing aspect of the experience of listening to David, as they gradually raise awareness of the nature of the original recording, drawing attention to the complexity of sound itself. The final drone is very rich in upper harmonic partials (due to the resultant tones), and resembles the highly resonant sound of the tamboura.
The process of David generates a great deal more complexity of musical texture than it starts with, using the simplest of means. One may think of the sound assuming an organic richness. There is some aesthetic value placed on carrying this out with as little digital memory and processing power as possible, and on generating a large-scale structure from a recording of two seconds' duration.
If the phase shifting rate is changed very slightly, a completely different drone results. In one version of David, this aspect is used to create a harmonic progression. The first section results in a strong C# in the bass, reinforcing the implied i of the melodic pattern. A second run of the process with a slightly faster phase shifting rate produces a clear D#in the bass, with strong reinforcements of the lower voice's notes G# and Fdouble-sharp, giving a strong impression when combined with the other pitches, of a D# dominant seventh chord. A still faster phase shifting rate in the third section brings out a B in the bass, with the most prominent upper notes being G# and C#. This creates a non-triadic, rather unstable sonority, and at the end of the piece gives the impression that the music could continue indefinitely.The primary process of David is a linear pattern becoming a single pitch. The reversal of this process, in which a pitch becomes a linear pattern, is the basis of the electroacoustic work Spin. A technique different from that found in David is employed to effect the process; in Spin, the repeating material is gradually lengthened, starting with a repeating segment so short that it is heard as a very high pitch. As the "loop" length is increased, the pitch drops until it is perceived as a rhythmic pulse. Microsecond by microsecond, the pulse is itself transformed into a melodic phrase as the process reveals more and more of the complete two-bar musical pattern (an excerpt from Frederic Chopin's Etude no. 1). Harmonically, the pattern functions as an extended unresolved cadence - a eternal reiteration of vi-ii, never to be completed with the implied conclusion of V-I. [5]
If a listener carefully listens to the lengthening process of Spin, she will become keenly aware of each newly heard fragment. In this regard, the work shares ground with Carl Stone's Shing Kee (1986), in which a repeated phrase is similarly lengthened. [6] In Spin, the emphasis is rather different, however, as it is concerned with "horizontalisation", or converting vertical pitch into horizontal rhythmic phrases.
A certain pleasure is taken in the piece with laying bare the workings of the machine. Digital clicks, usually avoided as mistakes, are embraced, celebrating the sound of the sampler at work.
Spin makes evident the continuum between the cycles of a single pitch and the longer-term cycles of ostinati and pulsing rhythms. The repeating musical phrase is seen as the same kind of thing as a repeating pulse which is the same as the repeating air pressure waves of a single pitch. [7] Horizontality increases as the time scale increases.
In Spin, when the process of horizontalisation is complete, a second process is overlayed, then a third, a fourth and a fifth, cascading like spirals. Each new voice eventually reaches a position of stable repeating canon with the other voices, forming constantly shifting rhythmic relationships along the way. In this way, another process is carried out - that of density increasing to the point of saturation. The resulting high-density texture is heard for some minutes, each voice eventually fading out to leave only the original loop. Then begins a reversal of the original process, and the loop is gradually shortened. The musical phrase returns to its original condition of a single pitch, and ends the piece rising into inaudibility.
Another work constructed from a "standard repertory" quote is Joy for instrumental ensemble. The final four bars of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring are subjected to a process of time stretching. In filmmaking, a common technique used to slow down a section of film is to duplicate each frame several times. Joy uses a similar approach, but with overlapping "frames" of three quavers: the first three quavers are repeated, followed by repetitions of quavers two to four, and so on, moving through the material a quaver at a time. The result is a seamless expansion of the time frame of the original source. Curiously, in performance the piece usually goes unidentified by listeners. So involved with the magnified nooks and crannies of Bach's harmony, they miss the forest for the trees.
[1] The recent minimalist revival in visual arts is discussed at length by Matthew Collings in This is Modern Art (London: Watson-Guptill, 2000).
[2] In moving to the conduction band of a semiconductor, electrons leave behind "holes", or vacant energy states, which allow current to be conducted in the valence shell. The holes may be regarded as having positive charge (or lack of negative charge), so that the current in the valence shell can be described as a flow of holes.
[3] Effected digitally, the phase shifting occurs in very small discreet steps rather than in the continuous drifting of classic Reichian phasing.
[4] This is an approximation. In fact, there are an infinite number of points in the cycle, and the piece could go on forever without actually achieving a complete obliteration of horizontal elements. The changes become too subtle for unaided human perception, however, after about 45 minutes.
[5] The excerpt is from a circle-of-fifths passage (bars 42-43).
[6] Probably the first work to be exclusively concerned with this process is Steve Reich's Four Organs (1973).
[7] The continuous scale of rhythm and pitch is discussed at length in a famous 1956 article by Karlheinz Stockhausen: ".wie die Zeit vergeht." ("how time passes"), printed in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Text zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, Band I Aufsätze 1952-1962 zur Theorie des Komponierens (Cologne: M. Dumont Schauberg, 1963).
© 2003 Robert Davidson