Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Category: 2020-

  • Hawking’s Time

    2023 . . . orchestra . . . 8 minutes

    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.

  • Sea Sketches

    2023-24 . . . sonic meditation . . . 21 minutes

    Homage to Debussy’s monumental Impressionist work, La Mer, the four scenes of Sea Sketches 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.

  • Viennese Sketches

    Twelve Miniatures in Twelve Tones

    2023 . . . chamb. orch: Fl, Ob, Clar, Bsn, Hn, Trp, Tbn, Timp, Vibraphone, Strings

    12 minutes

    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 Elegy and 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.

  • Passing Storm

    Animated Landscape No. 4

    2022 . . . sound painting (4:30)

    In 1973, I composed my second orchestra piece as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. The title was inspired by John Cage’s famous Imaginary Landscapes No. 4, which we performed as I was an ensemble member of Contemporary Directions. 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).

    So many great American landscape artists of the 19th century painted fascinating panoramic scenes. One of my favorites, who captured the grandeur of Western, mountainous landscapes, was Albert Bierstadt:

    Albert Bierstadt: Passing Storm over the Sierra Nevadas (1870) – San Antonio Museum of Art

    You can see stark contrasts in brightness and in sense of motion between the mirror-smooth water and roiling clouds. Even the word “passing” in the title suggests change, a necessary ingredient of an analog musical landscape.

    While not trying to actually map the physical composition of any painting, my musical inspiration came from considering this painting’s features of background, foreground, and highlights of strong visual focus. Musical gestures started with distant swelling sonorities, which as they crescendo feel like they are emerging forward toward us. After deciding to name the piece Passing Storm after the Bierstadt, however, I realized I had no storm in the music, just gentle sprinkles. Thus was created a stronger sonic rendering of the sprinkles to provide a more aggressive introduction. The following four minutes overlaps sound masses animated in time, contrasting dark vs. bright sounds, loud vs. soft, and timeless sustained sound vs. busy points of “light.”

  • Aristotle’s Elements

    2022 . . . four sound sculptures for orchestra (15:30)

    One feature of my modern-music and composition e-book Mapping the Music Universe is a set of composing experiments called MapLabs. Each provides lab instructions to gather material and make compositional choices, and each provides an example piece built step by step along the path of the lab instructions. The sample pieces for the first four MapLabs fit together here as the metaphorical elements, fire, air, water, and earth, of Aristotle’s concept of the world’s physical matter. My mostly abstract photo images provide a visual background for listening.

    Where the amber atoms in the fire gleaming
    Mingled their sarabande with the gymnopaedia.     (Latour)

    Fresh wind weds the land and water,
    Sun warms bright sails and sailor.

    Where tiny Otter Creek trickled out onto a more secluded sandy beach
    Offering northward a spectacular view of Empire Bluff    .

    The Black Canyon of the Gunnison, named for the ever-present shadows
    The narrow canyon’s steep, sheer, tall rock walls cast on the river flowing far below.

    Aristotle’s Elements

    These images are set in motion by the magic of various Ken Burns effects for a video version on the TClark Art Music YouTube channel.

    In another arrangement transcribed for wind ensemble in 2023, the order is changed:

    I. Amber Atoms (FIRE) 4:46
    II. Fresh Wind (AIR) 3:40
    III. Black Canyon (EARTH) 3:12
    IV. Otter Creek (WATER) 3:04

  • Yin Yang

    2022 . . . voice and piano (4:10)

    A visit to the shores of Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula inspired me to write a poem:

    Peninsula upon peninsula upon grand peninsula,
    Lee upon Leelanau upon Lower.
    Cove from bay from great lake,
    Suttons Bay off Grand Traverse Bay off Lake Michigan    .

    Land curves in myriad shore shapes,
    Reaching out to blue water.
    Fresh wind weds the land and water,
    Sun warms bright sails and sailor.

    Setting it as lyrics for an art song made an example for MapLab 2: Sketch a Song. The lab instructions include a step-by-step explanation of the compositional process. (The synthesized audio rendering below is not capable of pronouncing the words.)

  • Night Songs

    1969 . . . trombone (8 minutes)

  • Amber Atoms in the Fire Gleaming

    2022 . . . Gymnopédie (5:00)

    This musical sketch is titled with a translated line (“Où les atomes d’ambre au feu se miroitant”) of a French poem by de Latour that may have inspired Erik Satie — the poem ends with the word “gymnopaedia.” In keeping with Satie’s radically sparse, (one could even say) minimalist style in his Trois Gymnopédies for piano (1888), this homage generates entirely from one modern harmonic constellation, arpeggiated repeatedly in a gentle, almost imperceptible meter, then growing colorful “amber” sustained highlight sounds. Eventually the arpeggios begin to spin and swirl in a layered, kaleidoscopic texture that is “minimalist” in the 20th-century usage as the description for repetitive ostinato music.

    Go to Lab 1: Genesis of a Gymnopédie in Mapping the Music Universe for a complete step-by-step explanation of the process of composing Amber Atoms in the Fire Gleaming.

    Since this is modeled on a piano piece, Gymnopédie, here is a playable piano version:

  • Nuages

    (Clouds)

    2022 . . . sound environment . . . (8:30)

    Quoting Debussy as homage to the first of his beautiful Nocturnes, musical patterns float, repeat, morph, disappear. Many of my earlier compositions are titled under the category of “Animated Landscapes,” referencing a musical analog to landscape painting, sketching musical textures of moving, evolving pitch constellations and colors. Perhaps that makes Nuages a “skyscape.”

    Much of the musical material is shared with the third movement of my string orchestra work, Three States of Water.

  • Summit Ridge

    2022 . . . digital sound sculpture (7 minutes)

    Composed after reading Ed Viesturs’ book, No Shortcuts to the Top, his first-person account of the successful quest to climb to the summits of the 14 tallest mountains in the world, all taller than 8,000 meters (26,247 feet) above sea level. My most vivid personal and photographic experience with glacier-topped mountain ridges includes several visits to Rocky Mountain National Park, where the Continental Divide rises to a spectacular ridge of 12,000-ft. peaks beside 14,259-ft. Long’s Peak. My son Owen and I once hiked to the summit of 12,234-ft. Flattop Mountain — less than half the elevation of Viesturs’ 8,000 meters. As its name suggests, Flattop’s summit is not dramatic but connects with the string of ridges between spectacular Hallett Peak (center of photo) and Otis Peak (left of Hallett).

    Musical patterns are all based on constellation streams of four complex 8-pitch interval arrays, as explained in Mapping the Music Universe. The chords are first presented as tall monolithic blocks separated by silence in the style of Morton Feldman:

    Then they become rhythmically steady arpeggios, constantly repeating in the style of John Adams. Out of this continuous ridge of arpeggios emerge the individual pitches of the four sonorities, rising to sonic summits.

    Other majestic mountain ridges I’ve admired include the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains on the southwestern horizon of Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, as seen from the Macroplaza. Then there is the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, where we once lived just an hour from the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. Neither as high as the Rockies, both these sloping ridges change their deep blue hues with clouds and the sun’s progress through a day. Finally, though the Texas Hill Country is not really mountains at all, we live on its eastern edge on a road named Summit Ridge Drive.