Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Tag: Great Lakes

  • GREAT LAKES

    2026 . . . Symphonic Sketches . . . 34 minutes

    My home for the first 25 years of my life was in the “Great Lake State,” Michigan. It is surrounded by three 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 the third-largest freshwater lake by volume.

    I spent the most time at Lake Michigan, the closest to Interlochen, where I lived for ten summers. All the photos below are of it, shot around the Leelanau Peninsula and Grand Traverse Bay. I learned to sail on Lake Erie.

    The music of this five-movement symphony took shape over five years in five other musical sketches: Three States of Water, Shining Water, Great Lake (percussion), Leelanau Sketches, and Dancing Water. Perhaps it all began, though, way back in 1984 with PENINSULA for piano and computer music, my first work published on a CD by Centaur Records. In it, you can “hear” the rocky shores around Northport, the point of the beautiful Leelanau Peninsula, shown here in the first photo.

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  • 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.

  • Great Lake

    2021 . . . percussion trio . . . duration: 10 minutes

    Horizon . . . Thunder . . . Squall . . . Sun sparkles . . . Powerful waves

    The music is fashioned out of a small set of sound resources: simple sounds of drums, bright sounds of ringing metal instruments, and deep shining sounds of tam-tams. The piece is about these distinct timbres – only the sparkles employ any pitch constellations, and then just one “chord” that recycles kaleidoscopically. Most of all, the piece is about time and its articulation in free, ametric rhythm. In Thunder and Waves, the time patterns are governed by the digits of the magical numer Pi. In Sparkles, the timed recurrence of each pitch is determined by prime numbers. Both number schemes transcend periodicity, letting time float.

    Growing up in the Great Lake State, being surrounded by three of the five Great Lakes formed a big part of my Michigander character. Since many summers working at what was then called the National Music Camp in Interlochen, my favorite was the closest, Lake Michigan. Its magnificent coast forms the western edge of the lower peninsula, stretching from New Buffalo all the way up to the Straits of Mackinac. Its waters reach from many Michigan harbor towns across to Chicago and Milwaukee. Its varied environments offer fascinating features such as sand dunes, ice dunes, and remote islands. This piece depicts three phenomena: approaching thunder echoing across the vast lake; sunlight sparkling on the cold surface; and eternal, powerful waves.

    STAGING: Antiphonal, three widely separated batteries

    LEFT – 4 low tom-toms, bass drum, orchestra bells

    CENTER – small and large tam-tams, vibraphone

    RIGHT – 4 low tom-toms, bass drum, orchestra bells