Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Tag: Peninsula

  • 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:

  • 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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