Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Category: 2020-

  • 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

  • Flanders Canon

    2020 . . . . . . . for 8, 12, or 16 guitars. . . . . . . duration: 6:40

    Merging two fascinations, musical canons and the contrapuntal style of 15th-Century Flemish composers, this work sets in modern style a wonderful quadruple canon of the period (composer uncertain). The style difference, though, is subtle: the 2oth-Century explorations of some American composers (Riley, Reich, Adams) involved hypnotic overlapping ostinato repetition of diatonic patterns much like this magical Medieval canon.

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

  • Canzona 1497

    Canzona 1497

    Canons for antiphonal brass . . . 2020 . . . duration: 7 minutes

    The death of the great Flemish composer Jan Ockeghem in 1497 marked the end of Western Music’s Medieval style period. The most famous composer of the late 15th century, Ockeghem’s style of choral music was intensely contrapuntal, filled with canons, and freely exploratory in harmony and form. Josquin, already emerging as the great pioneering composer of the early Renaissance, revered Ockeghem, as do I. The first part of Canzona 1497 explores such canonic contrapuntal structures in a modern harmonic setting. While the second part settles into a more Medieval harmony of simple diatonic lines, both parts of the piece indulge in a striking Ockeghem idea: spinning repetitive contrapuntal material in a texture that is paradoxically animated in surface but stationary in prolonging one sustained harmony. I hear this feature of Ockeghem’s music as an ancestor to the mid-20th-century ostinato music of American composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Coolidge Adams . . . and me.

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