Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Tag: La Mer

  • FARBEN

    2025 . . . 17 wind/perc. instruments . . . 6 minutes

    Three pieces of the early 20th century, which I studied deeply in the 1970s and later used extensively in my teaching of modern music, were each masterful explorations of musical sound color:

    • Claude Debussy’s La Mer (1905), an iconic tone poem of Impressionistic musical painting with an orchestral palette
    • Arnold Schoenberg’s “Farben (Summer Morning by a Lake: Chord-Colors”, the third of his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909) — a gentle study of orchestral sound color
    • Anton Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21 (1928), whose first movement is a delicate gem of pointillistic color canon built on one enormous, static, symmetrical 13-pitch constellation

    After fifty years, these works are embedded more deeply than ever in my musical consciousness. Farben pays special homage to Schoenberg’s masterpiece, layering kaleidoscopic wind-instrument colors to build massive, morphing constellations, echoing Webern’s hidden chord-color symmetry.

  • 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

  • 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.