My first of five visits to the ancient Moravian city of Brno was in 1991, shortly after the Velvet Revolution liberated Czechoslovakia and shortly before it became the Czech Republic. The old (“staré”) center of the city is a cobble-stoned plaza with tram tracks running across, surrounded by Austrian-era buildings. There you could often find a Moravian folk music group performing, fall kiosk vendors serving fermented cider, or a holiday bazaar in the snow. Local lore says the plaza and nearby green market are the center of Brno, the central city of old Czechoslovakia, itself in the center of the European continent. With a medieval castle and twin-spire cathedral, Brno was also the beloved home of Leoš Janáček, the great early modern Moravian composer, whose music provided the themes for the ostinato variation textures of this new soundscape.
Nebulas are where stars and planetary systems are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. One of the most familiar and well studied objects in space, the Orion Nebula is enormous, 24 light-years across with a mass of about 2,000 times that of the Sun.
The single generating concept of this soundscape is musical: a slow, almost timeless metamorphosis of complex 4-pitch constellations, some bright, some darker “celestial” harmony. Rather different from Debussy’s impressionist Trois Nocturnes (1892-99), the first of which, “Nuages,” depicts earthly clouds as gently undulating, colorful orchestral lines and chords.
There are many Highlands in my life. I am part Scottish, though my great grandparents are from Glasgow, not the Highlands. I do enjoy its single-malt whiskeys, though, and I went to Howell High School, the “Highlanders.” And I now live in the Texas Hill Country.
Then there is Českomoravská vrchovina. I first visited what was then still Czechoslovakia in 1991. The Bohemian-Moravian Highlands are between the two main regions of what is now the Czech Republic. The ancient town of Tabor and the massif Blaník are two points of scenic and historical interest. Highlands Sketches sound paints climbing the mountain’s rugged slope, a thunderstorm of dissonant accents, and the quiet harmonic progression of an autumn dusk.
Listening to a stunning recording of ancient choral music, I became re-interested in the rhythmic subtleties of voices executing the unspecified time flow of Gregorian chant. Using a variety of similar but slightly different note values, including the ancient semi-minim, minim, dotted-minim, breve, dotted-breve, and lunga), I composed a new plain chant. Beginning with pitches of a dorian mode, my wordless chant takes chromatic turns, providing tonal color without chords above a motionless deep drone. A high, windblown echo of the chant’s shape appears as prelude and coda to its “singing” deepness.
The title (“Earth Song”) is inspired by two great 20th-century works: Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (1909) and Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci Nominis (1955). In this era facing global crises on our blue planet, Canticum Terra is a musical homage to and prayer for Mother Earth.
The largest of Saturn’s moons is also the second largest moon in the Solar System. Its dense atmosphere obscures a unique feature: it is the only place beyond Earth on which clear evidence has been found of stable bodies of surface liquid.
That may be partly why an experimental extreme-depth earth-ocean submersible vehicle was named for it. The Titan submersible famously imploded in 2023 while headed down to view the shipwreck of the Titanic in the cold North Atlantic.
Our imaginary musical exploration of the moon Titan, its atmosphere and ocean depths, is completely tranquil, experiencing only gentle waves and currents of dark and brighter sonorities.
EFFULGENCE (the word means “brilliant, shining radiance”) was a 1984 improvisatory composition in the style of Terry Riley’s In C, overlapping repetitive patterns I call multi-phase ostinato music. It was like the rhythmic dance of a fountain.
This sequel evokes the speckled field of sunlight reflected on the surface of a body of water. My home state, Michigan, The Great Lakes State surrounded by three of those magnificent fresh-water seas, also contains over 1,000 smaller lakes. My whole life I have gazed at and studied the way sunlight reflects off their wave-articulated surfaces, sparkling in a complex ensemble dance of periodic flashes of light.
The musical construction is all about prime numbers. The melodic-cell eighth-note theme consists of successive intervals of 1, 3, 5, 7, and 11 semitones. Rhythmic values and motivic repetition cycles are all durations equivalent to 1, 3, 5, 7, 11 or 13 eighth-notes.
In 1967 I was already earnestly composing for piano, trombone (my own instrument), even for orchestra. Living beside the Shiawassee River’s glacial-moraine beginnings in rural Livingston County Michigan, my best pastime was hiking along the creek’s forested banks. I was already going to Ann Arbor for trombone lessons and Youth Symphony rehearsals. In fall 1967, after my 18th birthday, I moved to Ann Arbor and enrolled at the University of Michigan. Though not yet a music major, I began playing bass trombone in the university orchestras. For 8 years, Ann Arbor with beautiful Huron River running through it was my forested Michigan home.
“Mystic Breeze” and “Light” were my 12th and 18th completed TC compositions. “Riverbank” is from a 1967 sketch of an “interlude” for trombone and piano. They make a nice set of three, revealing that before formal study my compositional explorations were already discovering more exotic harmonies and rhapsodic forms resembling Debussy’s Impressionism and even the post-tonal possibilities of 12-tone rows.
Looking back 55 years later, it turns out that once I began studying composition at Michigan, my first teacher, American-in-Paris composer Eugene Kurtz, immersed me in studying the music of Ravel and Debussy. The next teacher, George Balch Wilson, plunged me into the newer language of atonality and the radical explorations of the Avant Garde.
Stephen Hawking, the great theoretical physicist and cosmologist, is famous for solving in 1974 the mind-boggling mathematics of black holes and what became known as their Hawking Radiation. He also wrote a fascinating book, A Brief History of Time. Now, after Hawking’s death, his last collaborator, Thomas Hertog, has published On the Origins of Time explaining Hawking’s theory of how Time itself began at the Hot Big Bang birth of the universe. The idea, in grossly simplified geometry, is that Space and Time were united as one primordial sphere that dramatically split apart at the Big Bang’s initial hyperinflation into expanding Space and progressing Time. Before that moment, there was no time, no before.
The musical challenge: how to express utter timelessness before the explosion; and how to build a sound space that sits still then explodes. You’ll hear an initial sound space of just one pitch, G, which at first quivers in color but without perceivable rhythm. While standing still, the sound space expands by octaves and eventually explodes with a fuller spectrum of chromatic pitch color.
Homage to Debussy’s monumental Impressionist work, La Mer, the four scenes of SeaSketches sound-paint waves, deep currents, wind, and sun-sparkling surfaces, employing swelling sound colors and post-modern cyclic techniques in a pan-diatonic tonal setting.
I have long admired and been influenced by the music of early 20th-century Austrian composer Anton Webern. Known historically as a member of the Second Viennese School with Alban Berg and mentor Arnold Schoenberg, the three were pioneers of so-called atonal music and 12-tone-row serial harmonic organization. I find the term “atonal” misleading and negative, as their 12-tone processes achieved new “12-tone tonalities” — not simply a rejection of traditional tonal harmony but also striving to create new and more complex tonalities.
What I admire about Webern’s mostly-quiet instrumental miniatures (his Symphonie Op. 21 has only two sparsely-scored movements) is the delicate, crystalline quality of his pitch constellations; and their gently lyric, precious setting into transparent textures, pearl-strings of delicate sound colors (called Klangfarbenmelodie).
Webern’s mentor, Schoenberg, as a Jew was compelled to emigrate to the U.S. in 1933 before it was too late. Webern, not Jewish, stayed in Vienna and survived World War II, only to be fatally shot by a U.S. Army soldier during the Allied occupation of Austria.
Miniatures I through IV are adapted from Webern Elegyand V through XII from MapLab7 – For Little Arnold. Viennese Sketches does not portray the historical European city but rather explores various musical textures and tonalities using the 12-tone serial techniques of the so-called Second Viennese School of composers associated with Schoenberg. While their music using these techniques was unfortunately dubbed “atonality,” my uses focus on creating constellations and counterpoint that is complex but much less dissonant and more sonorous, my sense of a new tonality.
While the chamber orchestra work is organized in six movements and a coda, each miniature is excerpted below to show changing pace and textures.
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 