Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Tag: Great Lakes

  • 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:

  • 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