A thousand years ago, monks sang plainchant melodies in stone monasteries. Today, composers are still weaving these ancient songs into the lyrical fabric of their art.
Each piece by composer Thomas Clark in this YouTube podcast weaves a 21st-century fabric from one ancient plainchant thread.
Musical explorations of the cosmos — a series of multimedia compositions, each portraying one intriguing aspect of astronomy. Complex patterns of experimental harmony are synthesized in electronic sound and juxtaposed with imagined images.
YouTube podcast by composer/professor Thomas Clark
This YouTube podcast by composer/professor Thomas Clark brings them to time-life with many eclectic compositional styles of contemporary art music. Interesting number patterns are realized as intriguing sound colors, chords, melodic lines, even as the ancient musical technique of canons, over a kinetic visual background of my semi-abstract art images.
2026 . . . imaginary sound animations . . . 24:30
How do prime numbers sound? Or Pi, or the Fibonacci series? It depends completely on how these patterns are interpreted as sound. MATH MUSIC brings them to time life with many eclectic compositional styles of contemporary art music. Interesting number patterns are realized as intriguing sound colors, chords, melodic lines, even as the ancient musical technique of canons.
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explains the musical interpretation of the topic and plays each piece over a kinetic visual background of semi-abstract art images.
2026 . . . synthesized sound sculpture . . . 5 minutes
Sunlight reflected off water makes an endless kaleidoscope of shining sparkles and rippling shadows, their rhythms ever changing with wind and waves.
2026 . . . orchestra . . . 25 minutes
For the first 25 years of my life, my home was the “Great Lake State,” Michigan. It is surrounded by four of these five enormous bodies of water, some of the most recognizable map shapes on the entire globe.
Magnificent Lake Superior, the deepest, is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area and third-largest by volume. Growing up in the southeastern lower peninsula of Michigan, I learned to sail on Lake Erie. I spent more time at Lake Michigan, the closest to Interlochen in the northwest lower peninsula, where I worked for ten summers. All my photos were shot nearby, around the Leelanau Peninsula and Grand Traverse Bay.
The music of this symphony took shape over the last five years in other musical sketches. It all began, though, in 1984 with PENINSULA, my first work published on a CD (Centaur Records). In it, you can “hear” the rocky shores around Northport, the point of the beautiful Leelanau Peninsula.
All that musical sketching has finally coalesced into this four-movement symphony for chamber orchestra, a grand celebration in which you can hear wind and waves, ice-cold stillness, and glorious sun sparkles on restless blue water.
(2026)
Sample score pages:
2026 . . . multimedia: digital images, synthesized music . . . 15 min.
The images are digital photos abstracted to explore their vivid colors and natural shapes. The color spectrum arranges hues from what may be considered metaphorically cool (indigo/blue) to hot (red). The spectral order for frequency of light waves is the same reversed, slowest (red) to fastest (indigo).
Sounds are tone clusters (adjacent steps of a common pitch scale sounding simultaneously instead of successively). The clusters contrast in timbre (sound color) and in harmonic complexity, ranging from complex dissonance (metaphorically red on the spectrum) to simpler, purer sounds (blue end of spectrum).
Clouds of sound emerge, pulsate, sparkle, and fade.
Images become geometric. Tone clusters accumulate in large tides and smaller waves, they dance and dissipate.
Geometric swatches of color cluster together like quilts. Combinations morph kaleidoscopically into one another.
2025 . . . video art . . . 7 minutes
Video art, quilting together geometric slices of colorful abstract images, kaleidoscopically morphing them into each other over a continuously evolving soundscape adapted and synthesized from the composition, RAINBOW RISING.
2025 . . . piano and electronic music . . . 6:45
The constellation Cassiopeia in the northern sky is named after the vain queen Cassiopeia, mother of Andromeda in Greek mythology. One of 48 constellations listed by the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, its distinctive ‘W‘ shape is formed by five bright stars. Cassiopeia contains some of the most luminous stars known, including three hypergiants. Its brightest star, Cassiopeia A (“Schedar”), is a supernova remnant and bright radio source.
The music arose from tracing a map of its brightest points of light. The coordinates of these points on a two-dimensional graph were converted into time and pitch patterns articulating a grand sonority. The graph can be rotated, kaleidoscopically transforming the pattern into similar sonorities.
The same treatment applied to Cassiopeia’s constellation neighbors Perseus and Cepheus builds a denser field of sounds, metaphorically echoing the brilliant star-studded dark sky as seen through a powerful telescope.
2025 . . . synthesized sound montage . . . 7 minutes
Electronic sounds from previous ANGELS pieces (The Fourth Angel, Angels of Bright Splendor) make layered counterpoint for a dark, unearthly montage. Music from another piece, String Theory, originally imagining spinning subatomic energy, provides an ironically human voice, both frantic, engulfed in the threatening sound environment, and soaring hopefully above it.
Global warming is already devastating the earth and all life on it. The Bible’s Revelation 16 tells of seven frightening angels:
“The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire; they were scorched by the fierce heat.”
The other six angels and their bowls wrought plagues of painful sores, bloody seas, bloody rivers, darkness.
“Finally, the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice of doom came out of heaven, saying, ‘IT IS DONE!’ There were noises and thunderings and lightnings; a great earthquake. Every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.”
Watch a YouTube video with abstract images:
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 