Revisiting my 1988 improvisation sketch for the New Music Performance Lab at University of North Texas became a prequel to a recent composition. FARBEN (2025), variations on the first movement of Webern’s Symphony, isolates instrumental colors as “prickly-pear” points of sound separated in time-and-pitch space.
Julian Onderdonk, Blue Bonnets and Cactus in the Rain (1914)
The recomposed 1988 music beginning SPECTRAL LIGHT takes another approach to sound color, layering canonic textures of thicker sonority in a gentle Impressionistic blur, like the brush-blended blur of a Monet painting.
Claude Monet,Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect (1903)
Timbres emerge, echo, and fade in a floating, slow-moving distant landscape of color.
There are so many beloved serenades. There is Dvořák’s Serenáda pro dechové nástroje d moll (Op. 44, 1978) for winds. For strings, Smyčcová serenáda E dur(Op.22, 1875) by Dvořák and Serenade for Strings in C Major (Op.48, 1880) by Tchaikovsky stand out as masterful evocations of the genre’s elegance and vibrant color potential. And then there are Mozart’s many wonderful serenades, some for winds and the most popular, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, for strings. (Our daughter played it as a violist in her high-school string quartet, and everyone in the family sang it around the house.)
The language of my new serenade’s title honors that beloved string piece. It also fits my ongoing obsession with nocturnal and astronomical images. (See Mapping the Music Universe.)
The introductory first part quietly morphs darkly complex sonorities. In contrast, I recently became interested in studying the lovely middle movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 18 (K.456, 1784). Its simple half-note secondary theme launched a study that led to composing variations on it, becoming the brightening latter two parts of this new serenade.
Three pieces of the early 20th century, which I studied deeply in the 1970s and later used extensively in my teaching of modern music, were each masterful explorations of musical sound color:
Claude Debussy’s La Mer (1905), an iconic tone poem of Impressionistic musical painting with an orchestral palette
Arnold Schoenberg’s “Farben (Summer Morning by a Lake: Chord-Colors”, the third of his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909) — a gentle study of orchestral sound color
Anton Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21 (1928), whose first movement is a delicate gem of pointillistic color canon built on one enormous, static, symmetrical 13-pitch constellation
After fifty years, these works are embedded more deeply than ever in my musical consciousness. Farben pays special homage to Schoenberg’s masterpiece, layering kaleidoscopic wind-instrument colors to build massive, morphing constellations, echoing Webern’s hidden chord-color symmetry.
In the midst of my recent Impressionistic “Sketches” series, the 2024 piece Folio(TC143) was a throwback to the more abstract sound mass style of the 1960s and ’70s. Its percussive attacks and inert masses of sound were all synthesized, also throwbacks to my early days of electronic tape music. (One of the earliest electronic compositions, Stockhausen’s 1960 Nr. 12 Kontakte, was full of sounds like giant steel beams hitting a concrete floor!) The other retro feature of Folio is suggested in its title: homage to Earle Brown’s 1952 FOLIO, a collection of abstract art scores in stark, proportional graphic notation.
A wind and percussion transformation of Folio was challenging. Folio (TC143) was composed in the abstract avant-garde style of the ’60s. It carved sound sculptures of solid, hard-edged sonorities in expansive pitch/time space. Now colored with cool woodwind sounds, radiating brass, and sparkling percussion, GEODES animates Folio‘s solid sound masses in surging and fading rhythmic textures.
The chaotic boldness of rocks . . . my own collection of many found on beaches and hikes, but also splendid displays at three places: Dick’s Rock Shoppe in Estes Park, Colorado; Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Elmhurst (now in Oak Brook), Illinois; and a wonderful gallery of geodes at the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas. A geode is Nature’s sculpture, an inscrutable gray rock sphere that, when sawed open, reveals a magical world of dazzling-colored crystals. Different minerals make crystals of varied hues of pink, purple, umber, or cream, reflecting new light.
This musical material goes all the way back to a solo trombone piece I started writing in 1969. Night Songs, which I premiered in Ann Arbor on bass trombone, exemplifies the dark atonal pitch language I was beginning to explore as a composition student of George Balch Wilson at Michigan.
Its first movement, “Elegy,” is somber in expression and amorphous in rhythm, a feature I use as an example of rhythm “beyond meter” in current writing and talks about Time. The line’s sonorous darkness now becomes a fertile theme for exploratory variations, suggesting the liquid life of mysterious creatures in ocean depths.
As the musical line ascends to a high-register bubbly surface level, it eventually sheds its atonal sharps and flats to become a lighter, diatonic pitch pattern. (Listen carefully at 2:27 and again at 3:40.)
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. He 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 adopt a gentler Impressionistic approach and a lush, bright harmonic language reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel.
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.
My mind is always silently playing music of some kind in my head. Constantly . . . including first thing every morning while I’m walking with the dog.
To focus this mental playback loop into something constructive, I’ve started humming tunes to myself on the walk. The dog seems to like it, thinks I’m singing for her.
Sometimes this new habit escalates from humming familiar jazz and Broadway classics to composing new tunes. A while ago I started composing in my head a Scott Joplin style rag. (I have always loved and admired Graceful GhostRag by Michigan prof Bill Bolcom.)
Back at the computer, here is what eventually came of this mind game:
In 1991 I made my first trip to Czechoslovakia to perform at the International Music Festival in the ancient Moravian city of Brno. It was on a side trip to the nearby town of Moravsky Krumlov that I first saw Alfons Mucha’s series of epic paintings depicting the history of the Slavic world. The stories expressed in these 17 enormous unframed canvases were intriguing, but I was most inspired by his dazzling rendering of light, the hallmark of truly great artists. Five stood out and became my challenge to complete the transformation of their depictions of light into music.
In the midst of my recent Impressionistic “Sketches” series, the 2024 piece Folio was a throwback to the more abstract sound mass style of the 1960s and ’70s. Its percussive attacks and inert masses of sound were all synthesized, also throwbacks to my early days of electronic tape music. (One of the earliest electronic compositions, Stockhausen’s 1960 Nr. 12 Kontakte, was full of sounds like giant steel beams hitting a concrete floor!) The other retro feature of Folio is suggested in its title: homage to Earle Brown’s 1952 FOLIO, a collection of abstract art scores in stark, proportional graphic notation.
This wind and percussion transformation of Folio was challenging. But I thought about the chaotic boldness of rocks — my own collection of many found on beaches and hikes, but also splendid displays at three places: Dick’s Rock Shoppe in Estes Park, Colorado; Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Elmhurst (now in Oak Brook), Illinois; and a wonderful gallery of geodes at the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas. Geodes are Nature’s sculptures, inscrutable gray rocks that, when sawed open, reveal magical worlds of dazzling-colored crystal structure.
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 