Night Bridge

2024 . . . Serenade for viola and strings . . . 8 minutes

This is not a musical sketch about bridges. Its impetus is a musical idea, the exploration of complex patterns for articulating a chord.

An arpeggio is the pitches of a chord sounded one at a time instead of as a block simultaneity. The order is usually straight up from lowest to highest pitch (Moonlight Sonata), or up and back down, or jumping around (Alberti bass). On a piano the damper pedal is usually used to let each pitch continue to sound with the others, bringing together the complete harmony.

In contrapuntal textures, individual voices each contribute a member pitch of the chord, either simultaneously (chorale) or at different moments, but again sustaining all pitches over time into a pitch constellation (like Orion).

In Night Bridge, pitch constellations build up from a single pitch to four pitches before dissipating back to a single tone; then a reflective pause before another constellation starts to build. A solitary musical voice floats above the resulting liquid waves of tone.

Back to the bridges metaphor: their spanning is more mysterious at night, when lights may reflect off ripples in a peaceful passage over a flow of dark water. The most venerable bridge I’ve traversed, the Charles Bridge over the great river Vltava, inspired the contrapuntal chamber music in my Karlův most (2018). Night Bridge echoes that music.

Here’s another favorite bridge, viewed at night from Chicago’s Michigan Ave. bridge: