Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Category: musical sketches

  • Blue Ridge

    2022 . . . wind sextet . . . 6 minutes

    On fall Saturdays driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway, an hour from our Lewisville NC home, autumn’s golden colors were spectacular. Stopping at an overlook around sunset in 2007, I took a set of 12 photos of distant ridges as they faded into dusk. Fifteen years later, in 2022, the visual and sonic impressions of serene majesty still reverberated in my memory. I composed this sextet, inspired by the sloping shapes and cool colors of those distant views atop the Blue Ridge Mountains.

    View a YouTube podcast of the music and images together.

    –

  • IMAGINED WORLDS

    serial music

    surreal images

    YouTube podcast

    2026 . . . abstract serial music and surreal digital images . . . 13 minutes

    While the Belgian Magritte began making surrealist art in 1920s Paris, the Russian Kandinsky was at the Bauhaus in Weimar making abstract art. In 1923 Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg unveiled his newly developed “method of composing with twelve tones related only with one another.” This serial 12-tone row technique became a prevalent compositional method through the middle of the 20th century.
    A hundred years later, IMAGINED WORLDS synthesizes music from VIENNESE SKETCHES, which draws on material from my earliest 12-tone work in 1975 through 2023.

    12-tone rows

    The five rows generating each of the tableaux are distinct but subtle variants of each other.

    Standard Pitch Class numbers (C=0) are identified.

  • Great Lakes Symphony

    2026 . . . orchestra . . . 25 minutes

    For the first 25 years of my life, my home was the “Great Lake State,” Michigan. It is surrounded by four of these five enormous bodies of water, some of the most recognizable map shapes on the entire globe.

    Magnificent Lake Superior, the deepest, is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area and third-largest by volume. Growing up in the southeastern lower peninsula of Michigan, I learned to sail on Lake Erie. I spent more time at Lake Michigan, the closest to Interlochen in the northwest lower peninsula, where I worked for ten summers. All my photos were shot nearby, around the Leelanau Peninsula and Grand Traverse Bay.

    The music of this symphony took shape over the last five years in other musical sketches. It all began, though, in 1984 with PENINSULA, my first work published on a CD (Centaur Records). In it, you can “hear” the rocky shores around Northport, the point of the beautiful Leelanau Peninsula.

    All that musical sketching has finally coalesced into this four-movement symphony for chamber orchestra, a grand celebration in which you can hear wind and waves, ice-cold stillness, and glorious sun sparkles on restless blue water.

    Great Lakes Symphony

    (2026)

    Sample score pages:

  • LIGHTFORMS 6: Vespers

    2025 . . . multimedia sound, image, text (12:00)

    Musical impressions of dusk, with text and images by the composer. Quoting one mellifluous phrase (boldface below) from Robert Frost’s “Waiting Afield at Dusk” (1913), the VESPERS text is like a Haiku:

    Streams of crimson streak the sky

    above tree silhouettes.

    Dusk settles “in the antiphony of afterglow.“

    A new night consumes the shadows.

    View video here – YouTube podcast

    Listen here (audio only)

  • Montage

    2025 . . . multimedia, computer music and digital images (6:45)

    Original music and visual images are assembled in a manner inspired by quilts, layers of fabric in small swatches pieced together. The Amish of Lancaster County Pennsylvania were known especially for quilts of contrasting colors of repeating geometric shapes.

    In MONTAGE, layering is applied to both synthesized musical textures and to digitally enhanced images from my Nikon Z50 (NIKKOR 16-50 lens). Three musical textures — flutters, swelling chords, and an ancient-style canon — are quilted onto an unchanging broad harmonic background. They overlay each other in four different combinations.

    Video here – YouTube podcast

    Listen here (audio only) –

  • LIGHTFORMS 6: Vespers

    2025 . . . musical impressions of dusk (12:00)

    The video version of VESPERS reveals a Haiku-like text, quoting one melliflous phrase from Robert Frost’s “Waiting Afield at Dusk” (1913).

    Streams of crimson
    streak the sky
    above tree silhouettes.
    Dusk settles
    “in the antiphony of afterglow.”
    A new night
    consumes the shadows.

    View the video on YouTube in

    LIGHTFORMS – Radiant Music podcast

  • Lightforms 5: SPECTRAL LIGHT

    2025 — digital sound painting (11:00)

    Revisiting my 1988 improvisation sketch for the New Music Performance Lab at University of North Texas became a prequel to a recent composition. FARBEN (2025), variations on the first movement of Webern’s Symphony, isolates instrumental colors as “prickly-pear” points of sound separated in time-and-pitch space.

    Julian Onderdonk, Blue Bonnets and Cactus in the Rain (1914)

    The recomposed 1988 music beginning SPECTRAL LIGHT takes another approach to sound color, layering canonic textures of thicker sonority in a gentle Impressionistic blur, like the brush-blended blur of a Monet painting.

    Claude Monet,Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect (1903)

    Timbres emerge, echo, and fade in a floating, slow-moving distant landscape of color.

    Lightforms 5: SPECTRAL LIGHT – FARBEN

  • Ancient Images

    Mucha’s Light

    2005 . . . wind ensemble (13:40)

    In 1991 I made my first trip to Czechoslovakia to perform at the International Music Festival in the ancient Moravian city of Brno. It was on a side trip to the nearby town of Moravsky Krumlov that I first saw Alfons Mucha’s series of epic paintings depicting the history of the Slavic world. The stories expressed in these 17 enormous unframed canvases were intriguing, but I was most inspired by his dazzling rendering of light, the hallmark of truly great artists. Five stood out and became my challenge to complete the transformation of their depictions of light into music.

    ANCIENT IMAGES

    Star Light
    1. Dawn of the Slavic People
    Green Light
    16. Mount Athos Monastery
    White Light of Learning
    9. Simeon’s Manuscript
    Lantern Light of Hope
    15. Komensky by the Sea
    Fire Light
    19. Dancing Circle under the Linden Tree

  • Belle Péninsule

    Five symphonic sketches

    2024 . . . orchestra (Picc, Fl, Ob, Cl, Bsn, 2 Hn, Trp, Tbn, Timp, Perc, Pno, Strings)

    Homage to Debussy’s Impressionistic masterpieces, La Mer and Nocturnes

    Debussy avoided the label “symphony” or “tone poem” by calling them each “three symphonic sketches”. The first sketch of Nocturnes, subtitled “Nuages,” is musically quoted in IV “Nuages blanc”.

    Adopting his French language also recognizes the early explorers of the Great Lakes region of North America. The first decades of my life began there in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (the “mitten”). It has its own smaller Leelanau Peninsula in the northwest corner (the mitten’s “little finger”) near Interlochen’s National Music Camp, where I spent many summers. Nearby Grand Traverse Bay has its own even smaller Old Mission peninsula, where I loved to visit its lighthouse. The Leelanau has a grand lighthouse at its northern tip and a scenic drive, state highway M21, winding for 64 miles all the way around the peninsula’s shoreline, through forests and past the Great Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes.

    In 1984 my piece titled PENINSULA for piano and sound synthesis was a more experimental work that traced a map of the Leelanau and its landmarks to determine by their spatial coordinates the timing and pitches of sound constellations. Moving forward from that mapping phase of my compositions, my Impressionistic phase produced the sound sculpture Leelanau Sketches in 2022. Some of its musical material reappears now in these five symphonic sketches, Belle Péninsule.

    I. “Grand sable”

    dune breeze

    II. “Chemin sombre”

    forest trail

    III. “Brouillard”

    fog snow ice

    IV. “Nuages blanc”

    clouds and sky

    V. “Mer brillante”

    shining water

  • 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.