FOLIO – Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

2025 . . . wind ensemble . . . 13 minutes

In the midst of my recent Impressionistic “Sketches” series, the 2024 piece Folio (TC143) was a throwback to the more abstract sound mass style of the 1960s and ’70s. Its percussive attacks and inert masses of sound were all synthesized, also throwbacks to my early days of electronic tape music. (One of the earliest electronic compositions, Stockhausen’s 1960 Nr. 12 Kontakte, was full of sounds like giant steel beams hitting a concrete floor!) The other retro feature of Folio is suggested in its title: homage to Earle Brown’s 1952 FOLIO, a collection of abstract art scores in stark, proportional graphic notation.

A wind and percussion transformation of Folio was challenging. Folio (TC143) was composed in the abstract avant-garde style of the ’60s. It carved sound sculptures of solid, hard-edged sonorities in expansive pitch/time space. Now colored with cool woodwind sounds, radiating brass, and sparkling percussion, GEODES animates Folio‘s solid sound masses in surging and fading rhythmic textures.

The chaotic boldness of rocks . . . my own collection of many found on beaches and hikes, but also splendid displays at three places: Dick’s Rock Shoppe in Estes Park, Colorado; Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Elmhurst (now in Oak Brook), Illinois; and a wonderful gallery of geodes at the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas. A geode is Nature’s sculpture, an inscrutable gray rock sphere that, when sawed open, reveals a magical world of dazzling-colored crystals. Different minerals make crystals of varied hues of pink, purple, umber, or cream, reflecting new light.