Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Tag: Peninsula

  • GREAT LAKES

    Five Symphonic Sketches

    2026 . . . synthetic orchestra . . . 34 minutes

    For the first 25 years of my life, my home was 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 third-largest by volume. I learned to sail on Lake Erie. But I spent the most time at Lake Michigan, the closest to Interlochen, where I lived for ten summers. All the photos below were shot nearby, around the Leelanau Peninsula and Grand Traverse Bay.

    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 (for 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.

    Great Lakes

    Five Symphonic Sketches

    (2026)

    I

    II

    III

    IV

    V

  • PENINSULA

    1984 . . . piano and recorded computer music . . . duration: 8:30 . . . . . . . . . . published by Borik Press (NC)

    Glacially-etched shorelines inspired sonic imagery for a series of pieces culminating in PENINSULA. Mappings of the natural contours of the Leelanau Peninsula provided richly varied patterns as basic coordinate numbers for sculpting sound patterns. The piano explores some of the endless possibilities for articulating a spectrum of sonorities. A surrounding environment of synthetic sounds was made by digitally analyzing timbral qualities of acoustic instruments, mostly with percussive articulations (metaphorically the rocky shore). The timbres were modified and resynthesized into a pointillistic sound texture. The density of the sound events rises and falls in waves according to changing values derived from the basic mappings. Larger confluences of waves are located in time by map points of special significance on the graph.

    The coexistence of piano sonorities and synthetic sounds is a metaphorical meeting of seascape and landscape, both animated in time.

    performance by Clifton Matthews, Winston-Salem NC, February 2007

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