In Robert Frost’s poem “My November Guest,” an exquisite expression of loss and sadness, four phrases stood out expressing the gray beauty of November:
“these dark days of autumn rain” . . . “my sorrow when it’s here with me”
“the bare, the withered tree” . . . “the sodden pasture lane”
Autumn RainMusic was originally composed in Ann Arbor for oboe and piano in 1971. Decades later in San Marcos, in 2017 the music evolved into an elegy for unaccompanied English horn, and now to this duo arrangement, heard here with sound-synthesis enhanced background.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 