Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Category: 2020-

  • Great Lake

    2021 . . . percussion trio . . . duration: 10 minutes

    Horizon . . . Thunder . . . Squall . . . Sun sparkles . . . Powerful waves

    The music is fashioned out of a small set of sound resources: simple sounds of drums, bright sounds of ringing metal instruments, and deep shining sounds of tam-tams. The piece is about these distinct timbres – only the sparkles employ any pitch constellations, and then just one “chord” that recycles kaleidoscopically. Most of all, the piece is about time and its articulation in free, ametric rhythm. In Thunder and Waves, the time patterns are governed by the digits of the magical numer Pi. In Sparkles, the timed recurrence of each pitch is determined by prime numbers. Both number schemes transcend periodicity, letting time float.

    Growing up in the Great Lake State, being surrounded by three of the five Great Lakes formed a big part of my Michigander character. Since many summers working at what was then called the National Music Camp in Interlochen, my favorite was the closest, Lake Michigan. Its magnificent coast forms the western edge of the lower peninsula, stretching from New Buffalo all the way up to the Straits of Mackinac. Its waters reach from many Michigan harbor towns across to Chicago and Milwaukee. Its varied environments offer fascinating features such as sand dunes, ice dunes, and remote islands. This piece depicts three phenomena: approaching thunder echoing across the vast lake; sunlight sparkling on the cold surface; and eternal, powerful waves.

    STAGING: Antiphonal, three widely separated batteries

    LEFT – 4 low tom-toms, bass drum, orchestra bells

    CENTER – small and large tam-tams, vibraphone

    RIGHT – 4 low tom-toms, bass drum, orchestra bells

  • Mapping the Cosmos

    2021 . . . Etudes for Piano . . . Total duration: 10 minutes . . . COMPLETE SCORE

    Mapping the Music Universe produced several small etudes to illustrate the compositional potential of musical patterns explained in the ebook. The inspiration to collect them into a series came from many years of fascination with Bartók’s wonderful Mikrokosmos series of 153 piano pieces in modern styles. Some of the Mapping etudes were originally sketched for piano, others adapted from more complex textures. They range in difficulty for the pianist from the simpler 1. Pisces to the more challenging 6. Scorpius.

    The first seven are simpler, with each etude titled with an astronomical entity named for a mythological character.

    Though the whole set is 10 minutes in length, the pianist wishing to perform some of them is welcome to select a suite of three or four. Each etude is titled with an astronical entity named for a mythological character:

    1. Pisces – The Fish; 12th constellation of the Zodiac

    2. Cygnus – The Swan; a northern constellation

    3. Milky Way – Way of the White Cow in Irish myth; the galaxy containing our Solar System

    4. Pleiades – Seven Daughters of sea-nymph Pleione; an open star cluster

    5. Laniakea – Immense Heaven in Hawaiian; supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way

    6. Scorpius – The Scorpion; 8th constellation of the Zodiac

    7. Andromeda – Cassiopeia’s daughter, saved from the sea monster Cetus by Perseus; a spiral nebula and nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way

    Experience all seven in synthesized-sound color video on YouTube or audio only:

    BOOK II

    The last five Mapping the Cosmos etudes are each suitable as short stand-alone recital pieces or as a set. Beyond Mikrokosmos, they pay homage to Debussy’s revered books of Preludes. These pieces embrace the Impressionist approach to texture and form, while evolving beyond Debussy’s tonal language. Stonehenge and Lunar Litany both draw material from the 1975 four-movement piano work Geography of the Chronosphere.

    8. Moonlight – an arpeggio homage to Beethoven’s famous Sonata

    9. Deep Sky – profound mysteries glimpsed by telescopes

    10. Stonehenge – ancient site of human worship in the cosmos

    11. Lunar Litany – moon cycles governing human activity

    12. Star Map – celebrating early star catalog project Carte du Ciel

  • Sinfonia

    2021 . . . chamber orchestra (Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, 2 Horns, C Trumpet, Trombone, Timpani, Percussion, Strings)

    Duration: 21 minutes in three movements – I. 8 min.; II. 8 min.; III. 5 min.

    Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is one of his greatest masterpieces. His No. 40 in G Minor and No. 38 “Prague” are also magnificent. It makes one wonder if he had lived longer, what other stunning music would have poured forth. Back to No. 41 Jupiter, the first theme is a curving melody of such rhythmic vitality and fascinating turning shape that I used it as an example of both in my ebook, Mapping the Music Universe. Mozart makes the theme into a fugato, and I have adopted it in my obsessive study of canons. You can see the shape of its first six notes in the violin opening of Jupiter Rising, then elsewhere it permeates the contrapuntal material of the rest of the piece. The middle movement takes a break from it, setting the main themes from the opening of the G Minor No. 40 as a languid tango tune, followed by a trio in slow waltz meter that reverts briefly back to the bright Jupiter tune. The final movement actually extends our signature Jupiter theme into a 12-tone row, generating a more expansive tonality in its animated landscape.

    I. Jupiter Rising depicts the mysterious splendor of moonrise, large and deeply-hued in the eastern evening sky. This movement creates a sonic metaphor for that visual phenomenon, but portraying instead the rising of Jupiter, the largest object in the solar system other than the sun itself. It only looks much, much smaller to us than the moon because it is so much farther away. My favorite Mozart symphony is Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K.551. His longest and last symphony, it is nicknamed “Jupiter” — fitting that his lengthiest and greatest symphony is named for the largest planet, a great gas giant. A vivid musical motive begins and generates the majestic final movement. I use it as the musical subject of this movement, relentlessly canonic in deployment. At some moments, as many as 8 contrapuntal soundings overlap each other in a gentle, cloud-like texture.

    II. Tango is set in an actual key, appropriate for this venerated dance form though uncharacteristic for my writing. The harmonies flow like dancers, the musicians feeling their way through the tonalities while never seeing an actual key signature.

    III. Blue Ridge refers to the beautiful hazy curves on the horizon as one gazes out from the top of the Blue Ridge Parkway, an hour west of my former home in the Piedmont in North Carolina. I also remember a similarly mystic vista looking south from Monterrey, Mexico toward the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains. The musical fabric is what I have called an “animated landscape,” not a still postcard but a soaring flight over and through the soundscape.

  • A New Geography

    four sketches for marimba – for Kari Klier

    2021 . . . . duration: 6:30

    Excerpts from II and IV:

    The title echoes my 1975 piece for piano fancifully titled Geography of the Chronosphere.

    The world is changing, rapidly evolving geopolitically and, from climate change, physically. The tone of the music contemplates these complex changes. To figure out where we’re going as a civilization, we need to rebuild and re-understand our changing “map.” 

    To request performance materials and permission, email the composer, tc24@txstate.edu.

  • Looking for the Rainbow

    2021 . . . . cello quartet or cello choir . . . . duration: 9 minutes

    Written during the COVID pandemic for Karla Hamelin and her Texas State cello students, 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.)

    To request performance materials and permission, email the composer, tc24@txstate.edu.

  • Webern Elegy

    Vienna, 15 September 1945 – five miniatures

    2021 . . . . for the Pleasant Street Players — Ian Davidson (oboe), Vanguel Tangarov (clarinet), Ames Asbell (viola) . . . . duration: 5 minutes

    Clarinet shows transposed (not concert) pitches

    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 a new “12-tone tonality” — not simply a rejection of traditional tonal harmony but also striving to create new and more complex tonalities.

    What I admire most about Webern’s mostly-quiet instrumental miniatures (even his Symphonie 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.

    Synthetic rendering of sample excerpt from movement II:

    Synthetic rendering of sample excerpt from movement V:

  • Nocturne

    2021 . . . . chamber winds and percussion . . . duration: 11 minutes

    To request performance materials and permission, email the composer, tc24@txstate.edu.

  • Nightscape

    2021 . . . . digital sound sculpture . . . . 16 minutes

    Abridged 9-minute version:

    Back in the 1970s and ’80s, I explored images suggested by nocturnal titles (Night Songs, Dark Haven, Somniloquy) and landscape titles (Animated Landscape, Dreamscape, Icescape). Rather than depicting events in narrative form, Nightscape builds a quiet nocturnal soundscape of gentle shadows, silhouettes, and points of light, inviting simple observational or meditative listening.

  • By the Shining Water

    2021 . . . . sound sculpture . . . . duration: 7:30

    I have often gazed at beautiful bodies of water, especially Lake Michigan and, more recently, the river Vltava in Prague. This sonic sketch combines musical metaphors for several features common to these majestic waters: waves and currents; sun sparkling on the surface; deep hues of the colder water below; twinkling stars above.

    Longfellow’s famous poem, The Song of Hiawatha, though it is about Lake Superior, in the first two stanzas vividly verbalizes some of these images:

    “By the shining Big-Sea-Water”

    “Bright above him shone the heavens, Level spread the lake before him”

    “Sparkling, flashing in the sunshine”

    “Motionless beneath the water.”

  • Sacred Springs

    2020 . . . . trombone or euphonium and piano . . . . duration: 7:50

    Peaceful Spring Lake and the San Marcos River flow from ancient springs emanating up from the Edwards Aquifer in the Texas Hill Country. For centuries, Native American tribes considered these powerful springs a sacred place where they worshiped eternal spirits. In the 20th century, the springs became the centerpiece of a famous recreation resort, Aquarena Springs. Now that the park has been restored to its original natural habitat, it remains a place of beauty and spiritual contemplation.

    The main tune of Sacred Springs is based on a 15th-century English carol, a graceful tune that became the melody for the lyrical modern hymn, “O Love, How Deep.” The melody’s canonic treatment, both in somber chant and spinning ostinato, continues my modern obsession with that ancient musical technique.

    To request performance materials, email the composer, tc24@txstate.edu.

    COMPLETE SCORE