Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Category: Ann Arbor

  • Animated Landscapes

    Nocturne

    1976 Interlochen with Prof. Bassett

    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).

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

    Animated Landscapes

    Nocturne for orchestra

    1971 (TC-25)

    U.Mich. Symphony Orchestra

  • Autumn Rain

    2024 . . . flute and viola (alt. clarinet) . . . 5:30

    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 Rain Music 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.