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:
1975 . . . wind ensemble . . . 9 minutes
The next in the series begun with the 1971 original, Nocturne for orchestra, Olympic Shores was scored for wind ensemble. A large 1974 work for double choir, brass, and tape, Shores of Infinity, preceded it. While the same textural approach to a large instrumental ensemble continued, the title reflected my Pacific Lutheran University experience in Washington state the previous year.
Clark 1975 (TC-31)
NTSU (now UNT) Symphony Band
A chamber music piece titled Shores (TC-44) followed in 1978, which opened a new stream of writing for me with its completely non-metric time notation, bright arpeggiated pitch constellations, and oscillations animating the harmony and the texture.
Though it was performed in 1978 in Denton by the NTSU New Music Performance Lab, I’ve not been able to salvage an old recording.
The idea of animating an otherwise static sound mass, devoid of progressive harmony, was a quintessential feature of what I came to think of as the Midwestern Style of 1960s and 1970s large ensemble music. Successful models included prize winning pieces such as (my teacher) Leslie Bassett’s Variations for Orchestra (1966), Donald Erb’s The Seventh Trumpet (1969), and Joseph Schwantner’s …and the mountains rising nowhere (1977) and Aftertones of Infinity (1979).
As a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 1973, I composed my second orchestra piece. The title, Animated Landscapes, was inspired by John Cage’s famous Imaginary Landscapes No. 4, which we performed as I was an ensemble member of Contemporary Directions.
1971 (TC-25)
U.Mich. Symphony Orchestra
2025 . . . multimedia sound, image, text (12:00)
Musical impressions of dusk, with text and images by the composer. Quoting one mellifluous phrase (boldface below) from Robert Frost’s “Waiting Afield at Dusk” (1913), the VESPERS text is like a Haiku:
2025 . . . multimedia, computer music and digital images (6:45)
Original music and visual images are assembled in a manner inspired by quilts, layers of fabric in small swatches pieced together. The Amish of Lancaster County Pennsylvania were known especially for quilts of contrasting colors of repeating geometric shapes.
In MONTAGE, layering is applied to both synthesized musical textures and to digitally enhanced images from my Nikon Z50 (NIKKOR 16-50 lens). Three musical textures — flutters, swelling chords, and an ancient-style canon — are quilted onto an unchanging broad harmonic background. They overlay each other in four different combinations.
2025 . . . musical impressions of dusk (12:00)
The video version of VESPERS reveals a Haiku-like text, quoting one melliflous phrase from Robert Frost’s “Waiting Afield at Dusk” (1913).
View the video on YouTube in
2025 . . . computer music (7:00)
Measuring supernovae, cosmologist Vera Rubin hypothesized that 80% of what’s out there in the universe is invisible or otherwise undetectable, mysterious matter and energy of undiscovered nature. Imagined in sound and color, dark-energy music is amorphous in form and time flow. Canonic lines float and interweave, building an evolving fabric of complex, ethereal sonorities.
Having begun composing in 1963, I started formal composition study in 1968 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. American composer Eugene Kurtz, based in Paris but filling in that semester at Michigan, was assigned to teach the new freshman. A proponent of modern French music, his compositional models included Debussy and Ravel.
Kurtz assigned me to immerse myself in deep study of their music, in particular Ravel’s Sonatine (1905).
Fifty years later in my career as a more experimental composer, my compositional style began to mellow toward this gentler Impressionistic approach and a lush, bright harmonic language reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel.
An Homage to Ravel, my new Sonatine is spun from a single harmonic progression, seven chords each stacking a Perfect Fifth interval high above another.
This material (what Schoenberg would call a Grundgestalt) generates melodic lines and many arpeggiation patterns, in successive variations of changing register, intensity, and rhythmic pace.
Clark 2025 (TC-00)
In 1907, French composer Claude Debussy wrote, “I am more and more convinced that music, by its very nature, is something that cannot be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms”. Color, light, and texture were also the hallmarks of a new style of painting developed by French artists — Impressionism.
At the threshhold of the 20th century on 15 December 1899, Debussy completed the first of his Impressionist masterpieces for orchestra, Trois Nocturnes. He avoided labeling it “symphony” or “tone poem” by calling the movements “three symphonic sketches”. The first sketch of Nocturnes is subtitled “Nuages,” premiered on 9 December 1900 in Paris.
Debussy’s biography describes the genesis of the piece while crossing the Pont de la Concorde in Paris in stormy weather. The composer’s notes say, “‘Nuages’ renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white.”
Vienna Philharmonic on Youtube
Adopting the French language and musical style recognizes the early French explorers of the Great Lakes region of North America. The first decades of my life began there in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (the “mitten”). It has its own smaller Leelanau Peninsula in the northwest corner (the mitten’s “little finger”) near Interlochen’s National Music Camp, where I spent many summers. Nearby Grand Traverse Bay has its own even smaller Old Mission peninsula, where I loved to visit its lighthouse. The Leelanau has a grand lighthouse at its northern tip and a scenic drive, state highway M21, winding for 64 miles all the way around the peninsula’s shoreline, through forests and past the Great Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes.
In 1984 my piece titled PENINSULA for piano and sound synthesis was a more experimental work that traced a map of the Leelanau and its landmarks to determine by their spatial coordinates the timing and pitches of sound constellations.
Moving forward from that mapping phase of my compositions, my Impressionistic phase produced the sound sculpture Leelanau Sketches in 2022. Some of its musical material reappears now in five symphonic sketches, Belle Péninsule. Here is the fourth movement, which quotes Debussy’s “Nuages.”
Debussy’s completed his second composition of three symphonic sketches for orchestra, La Mer, in 1905. It is a monumental work of Impressionist sound-painted textures and a textbook model of lush, beautiful orchestration. The three sketches are titled:
“De l’aube à midi sur la mer”
“From dawn to midday on the sea”
“Jeux de vagues”
“Play of the Waves”
“Dialogue du vent et de la mer”
“Dialogue of the wind and the sea”
My homage to La Mer, Sea Sketches, sound-paints waves, deep currents, wind, and sun-sparkling surfaces, employing swelling sound colors and post-modern cyclic techniques in a pan-diatonic tonal setting. The end briefly quotes the opening arpeggio of Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lin” (“The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”) from Book I of his Préludes for piano (1909-1910).
Clark 2023 (TC-132)
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 