Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Author: thomasclarkumich

  • 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:

    State Street bridge over the Chicago River

  • Crystallography

    2024 . . . Abstract video and digital sound

    This is the first time I began a multimedia piece with the visual element as primary design concept rather than the music, with visuals joining after. The visual concept, as suggested by the title, is an exploration of patterns in nature featuring complex masses and threads of color. They resemble busy Jackson Pollack action paintings revealing isomorphic patterns. The title evokes the abstract patterning of molecular crystal growth.

    The synthesized “soundtrack” is music adapted from my 2022 work, STONEHENGE for solo classical guitar:

  • Brno Variations

    2024 . . . wind ensemble . . . (13 min.) . . . Picc, Fl, Ob, 3 Clar, Alto Sax, Ten Sax, Bari Sax, Bsn, 3 Trp, 2 Hn, 2 Tbn, Euph, Tuba, Timp, Perc, Dbl Bass

    Leos Janácek composed his great concert work, Sinfonietta, in 1926 for the Sokol Gymnastic Festival in Prague. It is what I call musical sketches of his home city, Brno, the largest city in the Moravian east of what was then Czechoslovakia. I visited Brno several times starting in 1991 to perform my music at its International Music Festival. The festival traditionally ends with a performance of Sinfonietta by the Brno Philharmonic in Janácek Divadlo (theatre). In 1993 my ballet, PTACI, was premiered at historic Mahunovo Divadlo, across a plaza from Janácek Divadlo.

    Though I could have continued my “Sketches” series with a “Brno Sketches,” instead this new work is a set of more abstract variations partly based on and quoting themes from Sinfonietta (in the tradition of Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Haydn). Variation 1 “Canon” engages that ancient musical technique, evoking Brno’s medieval history. Variation 2 “Overtones” explores two harmonic series, C and Bb, painted over each other in layers of color, with hints of fanfare emerging through the clouds. Variation 3 “Constellations” is a kaleidoscopic succession of large sonorities built on stone-sturdy Perfect Fifth intervals brightened by jazz-like added tones. Variation 4 “Fanfare” is an ostinato pattern-music fantasia on Sinfonietta‘s grand fanfare themes.

    To obtain free performance materials, email: TC24@txstate.edu

  • Dancing Water

    2024 . . . kaleidoscopic ostinati (22 minutes)

    I have reveled in composing what I call multi-phase ostinato music ever since my first exposure as a performer in the 1970s to the grandfather of the genre, Terry Riley’s famous In C (1964). The style (commonly categorized and misnamed as minimalist music) involves small melodic repeated-pattern ostinato chains overlapping with each other canonically as they weave a rich, pulsating rhythmic and harmonic fabric out of simple threads. Dancing Water is a retrospective medley of my works in this style, from fresh 2024 writing all the way back to my first ostinato piece, Effulgence (1984).

    The pieces flow together in one continuous listening (or dancing!) stream.

    “Horace’s Fountain” (2024) recalls my 1950s childhood joy of watching the geyser of the Horace Rackham Memorial Fountain at the Detroit Zoo cascade over charming sculpted bears.

    “Shore Birds” was music originally composed for my 1993 ballet score, PTACI (“Birds”), based on the musical bird call sketches of the Moravian composer Leoš Janáček. Here the music suggests the flight of birds over the sparkling surf of Mustang Island.

    “Buckingham Fountain” is one of my Chicago Sketches (2019) originally scored for flutes, inspired by Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint (1982) commissioned and recorded by flutist Ransom Wilson. The fountain in Grant Park is a magnificent symphony of dancing water.

    “Rainbow” portrays the hopeful search for sunlight refracted through water vapor after a storm. Its music is from Looking for the Rainbow (2021), composed during the pandemic as a prequel to Rainbow Rising (2016), an earlier canonic piece for cellos.

    “Otter Creek” flows eagerly into Lake Michigan, where its water shines over rippled sand as it spreads out to join the Great Lake’s waves. The music represented WATER, one of Aristotle’s Elements (2022).

    “Vltava” the great Czech river flowing through Prague, was celebrated as one tone poem in Smetana’s Ma Vlast. In my string orchestra composition Three States of Water (2021) the music represented water’s LIQUID state, contrasted with the SOLID state of “Ice Dunes”.

    “Effulgence” from the 1984 piece that started all this, is a celebration of radiant, resplendent light energetically sparkling on the wind-blown waves of Lake Michigan’s cold blue water.

  • FOLIO

    2024 . . . 16:36

    In the 1950s, the New York School of composers, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown led a mid-century American avant-garde movement with their radical musical experiments. Brown in 1954 published his Folio and Four Systems, a collection of striking abstract-sound compositions emblematic of his concept of “open form.” They were minimalist both in material and somewhat in notation, inspired by the abstract art of Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock. The famous score of Brown’s Dec.’52 in the Folio was just a stark rectilinear graphic of black rectangles separated in white space.

    My massive project, Animated Landscapes – Sketchbook for Small Orchestra took Impressionist art as its inspiration. Wanting now to turn a fresh aesthetic page, I actually turn back to my own avant-garde experimental roots of the 1960s and ’70s. This FOLIO is a collection of 2024 abstract sound sculptures, in the form of mobiles: sound-mass textures that reappear in various orders and combinations. Following Brown’s model, their subtitles are dates referring back to significant times and places in my personal history — a kind of musical memoir.

    The first mobile, Aug ’76 (Ann Arbor), builds massive sonorities isolated by silent time-space, similar to some of Morton Feldman’s piano music. The second, Dec ’86 (Denton), pays homage to Brown’s Folio with playful pointillism. My next Folio page, July ’17 (Good Harbor Bay), captures the rhythms of sparkling sunlight on windblown Lake Michigan. And the last, June ’24 (San Marcos), is directly inspired by Brown’s Dec.’52 in its narrow palette of static sound blocks, separated by lots of silent time-space in open form.

  • Appalachian Autumn

    2024 . . . chamber orchestra (9:40) TC-142

    In 2005 through 2008, I lived in North Carolina only an hour away from the Blue Ridge Parkway. October Saturdays always involved a scenic drive up to and on the Parkway to absorb the glorious fall colors and trickling of secret waterfalls.

    Another in my “Animated Landscapes” Sketchbook for small orchestra, by its title this sound sketch pays homage to Copland’s 1944 masterpiece, Appalachian Spring. My currently developed harmonic sensibilities resemble Copland’s open, bold sonorities. In my composition studies in the 1970s, I was fascinated by Appalachian Spring the ballet as originally scored for only 12 orchestral instruments. This original scoring was a masterpiece of orchestral painting blended with the clear contrapuntal lines of chamber music, highlighting each instrument’s colorful voice.

  • Animated Landscapes

    A Musical Sketchbook

    A collection of eight new scores for chamber orchestra with the same orchestration (4 winds, 3 brass, timpani, percussion, and strings), the musical sketches are Impressionistic soundscapes rather than symphonic narratives in form. The Sketchbook also includes extensive performance, analytic and program notes.

    Read the entire ANIMATED LANDSCAPES Sketchbook

    Each sketch paints vivid harmonic and instrumental colors in simple to complex textures of dynamically evolving tempo and pace. Titles are evocative but not determinant for the development of the musical ideas. My original 1971 orchestral composition titled ANIMATED LANDSCAPES first explored this musical approach in what was then the prevailing Midwestern composers’ large-ensemble moving-sound-mass style of the 1960s and ’70s. My harmonic and contrapuntal craft has matured enormously since then!

    Appearing first in this 50-years-later Animated Landscapes Sketchbook for small orchestra, Appalachian Autumn pays homage to Copland’s 1944 masterpiece, Appalachian Spring. In my composition studies in the 1970s, I was fascinated by Appalachian Spring the ballet as originally scored for only 12 orchestral instruments. This original scoring was a masterpiece of orchestral painting blended with the clear contrapuntal lines of chamber music, highlighting each instrument’s colorful voice. My now developed harmonic sensibilities also resemble Copland’s open, bold sonorities.

    Appalachian Autumn
    Amber Atoms in the Fire Gleaming; Yin Yang (Air); Otter Creek (Water)
    Black Canyon (Earth); Glacier Gorge; Palo Duro (sunset) [Canyon Sketches]
    Looking for the Rainbow
    Massif; Storm; Highland dusk [Highland Sketches]
    Viennese Sketches
    Blue Ridge; Jupiter Rising [Sinfonia]
    Hrad (morning climb to the castle ruins); Ptáci (watching Leoš’s birds); Vody (forest streams and shadows); Bystroušky (mouflons and other mountain wildlife); Podzim (autumn sunset) [Hukvaldy Sketches]
    Separate listening to all 8 pieces found here . . .

    Free score and parts available from the composer: tc24@txstate.edu

  • Looking for the Rainbow

    2024 . . . chamber orchestra . . . 8 minutes (Originally for Karla Hamelin and her Texas State cello students)

    First composed in 2021 during the COVID pandemic, Looking for the Rainbow expresses both the uncertainty and hopefulness in our collective struggle to survive the storms of disease and violence.

    A prequel to Rainbow Rising (2016), an earlier canonic piece for cellos, Looking for the Rainbow explores a more complex rhythmic counterpoint of darker sonorities, evoking a restless spirit of searching, anticipating. (Canon is an ancient compositional technique, a melodic line that while in progress is closely echoed in one or more other “voices” to weave an entire contrapuntal texture out of matching threads.)

  • Canyon Sketches

    2024 . . . synthesized soundscape (14 minutes)

    Three sound sketches explore the timeless qualities of three magnificent canyons: Black Canyon of the Gunnison (Colorado); Glacier Gorge in Rocky Mountain National Park; and Palo Duro Canyon (Texas). Actually, each sketch began fundamentally based not so much on the canyons as on musical techniques.

    2024 . . . chamber orchestra version (12 minutes)

    A complex three-part canon of meandering 12-tone lines musically sketches the colorful streaks of pegmatite dikes in the Black Canyon’s cliff walls of Precambrian gneiss.

    1. Black Canyon

    Downward plunging arpeggios experience relentless musical gravity, sounding out the energetic fall of whitewater over boulders.

    2. Glacier Gorge

    Gently changing kaleidoscopic sonorities and a slow descending progression of pitch constellations to stillness express the timeless quiet of Palo Duro Canyon.

    3. Palo Duro dusk

    Score excerpts:

    Email the composer to request a PDF of the complete 47-page full score and 14 parts.

    tc24@txstate.edu

  • Black Canyon

    2024 . . . Meditative sound environment.

    Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison lies between narrow, tall rock cliffs of metamorphic Precambrian gneiss and schist formed 1.7 billion years ago crosscut by lighter-colored streaks of pegmatite. Due to the canyon’s depth and narrow width, its river falls from the Continental Divide in continual shadows.

    This piece takes musical counterpoint from The Book of Canons. An ancient form of Rumpelstiltskin magic, canon spins complex counterpoint out of a single melodic subject that is echoed after some delay by one or more answering lines of identical rhythmic values and melodic shape (possibly transposed).

    The art of canon pervades much of my 21st-century writing, a challenging yet stimulating and gratifying approach to texture weaving with continuous strands of material. The Book of Canons collects excerpts from these works, showing each canon’s subject as well as points and pitch levels of answers, worked out in three voices.