Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Category: musical sketches

  • Black Canyon

    2024 . . . Meditative sound environment.

    Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison lies between narrow, tall rock cliffs of metamorphic Precambrian gneiss and schist formed 1.7 billion years ago crosscut by lighter-colored streaks of pegmatite. Due to the canyon’s depth and narrow width, its river falls from the Continental Divide in continual shadows.

    This piece takes musical counterpoint from The Book of Canons. An ancient form of Rumpelstiltskin magic, canon spins complex counterpoint out of a single melodic subject that is echoed after some delay by one or more answering lines of identical rhythmic values and melodic shape (possibly transposed).

    The art of canon pervades much of my 21st-century writing, a challenging yet stimulating and gratifying approach to texture weaving with continuous strands of material. The Book of Canons collects excerpts from these works, showing each canon’s subject as well as points and pitch levels of answers, worked out in three voices.

  • NEBULAS

    2024 . . . sound sculpture for chamber winds . . . (11:00) TC-139

    Nebulas are where stars and planetary systems are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. One of the most familiar and well studied objects in space, the Orion Nebula is enormous, 24 light-years across with a mass of about 2,000 times that of the Sun.

    The single generating concept of this soundscape is musical: a slow, almost timeless metamorphosis of complex 4-pitch constellations, some bright, some darker “celestial” harmony. Rather different from Debussy’s impressionist Trois Nocturnes (1892-99), the first of which, “Nuages,” depicts earthly clouds as gently undulating, colorful orchestral lines and chords.

  • Highlands Sketches

    2023 . . . flute, percussion, strings . . . 9 minutes

    There are many Highlands in my life. I am part Scottish, though my great grandparents are from Glasgow, not the Highlands. I do enjoy its single-malt whiskeys, though, and I went to Howell High School, the “Highlanders.” And I now live in the Texas Hill Country.

    Then there is Českomoravská vrchovina. I first visited what was then still Czechoslovakia in 1991. The Bohemian-Moravian Highlands are between the two main regions of what is now the Czech Republic. The ancient town of Tabor and the massif Blaník are two points of scenic and historical interest. Highlands Sketches sound paints climbing the mountain’s rugged slope, a thunderstorm of dissonant accents, and the quiet harmonic progression of an autumn dusk.

    Score samples:

    I. Massif (“Velký Blaník”)

    II. Storm (“bouřka”)

    III. Dusk (“soumrak”)

  • EFFULGENCE II

    2023 . . . sound sculpture . . . duration 4:40

    EFFULGENCE (the word means “brilliant, shining radiance”) was a 1984 improvisatory composition in the style of Terry Riley’s In C, overlapping repetitive patterns I call multi-phase ostinato music. It was like the rhythmic dance of a fountain.

    This sequel evokes the speckled field of sunlight reflected on the surface of a body of water. My home state, Michigan, The Great Lakes State surrounded by three of those magnificent fresh-water seas, also contains over 1,000 smaller lakes. My whole life I have gazed at and studied the way sunlight reflects off their wave-articulated surfaces, sparkling in a complex ensemble dance of periodic flashes of light.

    The musical construction is all about prime numbers. The melodic-cell eighth-note theme consists of successive intervals of 1, 3, 5, 7, and 11 semitones. Rhythmic values and motivic repetition cycles are all durations equivalent to 1, 3, 5, 7, 11 or 13 eighth-notes.

  • Arbor Sketches

    1967 / edited 2023 . . . piano or harp (6:40)

    In 1967 I was already earnestly composing for piano, trombone (my own instrument), even for orchestra. Living beside the Shiawassee River’s glacial-moraine beginnings in rural Livingston County Michigan, my best pastime was hiking along the creek’s forested banks. I was already going to Ann Arbor for trombone lessons and Youth Symphony rehearsals. In fall 1967, after my 18th birthday, I moved to Ann Arbor and enrolled at the University of Michigan. Though not yet a music major, I began playing bass trombone in the university orchestras. For 8 years, Ann Arbor with beautiful Huron River running through it was my forested Michigan home.

    “Mystic Breeze” and “Light” were my 12th and 18th completed TC compositions. “Riverbank” is from a 1967 sketch of an “interlude” for trombone and piano. They make a nice set of three, revealing that before formal study my compositional explorations were already discovering more exotic harmonies and rhapsodic forms resembling Debussy’s Impressionism and even the post-tonal possibilities of 12-tone rows.

    Looking back 55 years later, it turns out that once I began studying composition at Michigan, my first teacher, American-in-Paris composer Eugene Kurtz, immersed me in studying the music of Ravel and Debussy. The next teacher, George Balch Wilson, plunged me into the newer language of atonality and the radical explorations of the Avant Garde.

    1. Breeze
    2. Riverbank
    3. Light

  • 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.