Here is number two of my Names and Dates for Piano pieces. I've written four so far and I have gone back and scored number one properly now so it needs re-recording (however the piano I recorded it on has gone even more out of tune now).
You can hear a rough version of number one via this previous post.
I suggested in the previous post I intend to explain the method more clearly soon (when I have more written).
I played this piece on a Fender Rhodes MkII instead, it gives a reasonable impression of what it will sound like on a real piano (also I think the Rhodes needs to be tuned, again, especially low down, it's tricky and time consuming so I have been delaying doing it)
It is the simplest one of the set so far, it's based on the name and the date of birth of my friend Al's newborn son. There are four phrases which are clearly separated, the first three are his names (first, middle and surname) and the last phrase is his date of birth. I wanted to state the facts as plainly as possible and finish (unlike the other pieces which use the usual method of transposition, inversion and complementation, and rhythmic repetition and yes, even some literal repetition).
So no manipulation of sets or rhythms are involved, it's straight through and each phrase has no particular harmonic connection to the other apart from some common intervals (tones and semitones, which can be octave displaced).
The piece is an exercise in trying to relate more or less unrelated material (unlike number one which featured two closely related sets of the same cardinal number, just happened that the name I used mapped that way onto the chromatic scale).
Also given the premise for this series of pieces I have to work with the results of the 'gematria' process (the pitches are determined by their letters and dates by their respective digits) so it's also a handing over of harmonic control to some extent, a limitation to deal with (not something I intend to do a great deal but I quite like the concept and the results so far so I will continue with it for now).
I've attached a draft of the score below (I haven't been using Sibelius very long and I need to work out how to get rid of the time signatures, they are not necessary for this piece as they just make it look more complicated than it needs to be, I can 'hide' them but can't shift the notes along into the middle of each bar)
UPDATE: I worked out how to get rid of the time signatures, better draft score now included below (awaiting some final revisions/checking and/or simplifiations possibly).
UPDATE 2: changed the fermata rests to tied whole notes (clearer than saying rest but with the pedal down, a somewhat convoluted idea perhaps).
Firstly I think this is a great piece, my 'favourite' wind quintet, as with most Ligeti I have heard (nearly all of it, I think) the music is paced just right, the overall duration of the work and its various movements are all digestible (to my ears) and even though it's a fairly 'complex' affair (at times) on first listen you walk away with an idea of the music still ringing in your ears, so to speak.
Also I think the scoring is quite practical, the ideas, however complicated, are expressed with clarity (I am not suggesting these qualities are positive musical 'universals', just my own preferences/predjudices, take them or leave them).
The element I want to look at today (listen up at the back please) is the way the music accelerates and decelerates in a precise way by means of various tuplets/groups as opposed to the more commonplace accelerando or rallentando/ritardando technique.
This acceleration and deceleration is some extent an illusion, it might be better to describe the effect as one of increasing and decreasing density. Why?, because the tempo or pulse is constant, it's the number of attacks per beat that changes. A good analogy, perhaps, are gears.
Think of a bicycle (go on, in your favourite colour), imagine that each revolution of the pedals is one beat, this stays the same, what changes is the gear on the rear wheel. For each turn of the pedals the number of revolutions of the rear wheel differs, increasing or decreasing in number (3 per turn/beat, then 4 then 5, then 7 or going in the other direction to slow down or reduce the density of notes).
Starting with the eighth bar/measure you can see/hear the flute and clarinet moving into some tuplet patterns (after some fairly slow moving polyphony), first a quintuplet and then a sextuplet (for the clarinet) then both instruments play a septuplet in unison before playing a series of straight demisemiquavers/32nd notes. This results in a 'winding up' effect, or a change of gear.
Then the clarinet holds a steady trill pattern while the remaining instruments (except the horn) play a (rather spiffing) melody over the top (in bars/measures 10-13 ish). The flute joins the trill fest with the clarinet and finally, they both decelerate or 'wind down' or 'change gear' using the same technique, first straight hemidemisemiquavers/64th notes then into a diminishing pattern, septuplet, sextuplet, quintuplet and a straight four in hemidemisemiquavers/64th notes, then down into various groups of semiquavers/16ths, then quavers/8ths then a semibreve/whole note with a fermata to end.
This technique is broadly speaking 'micropolyphonic' (one of Ligeti's inventions more or less).
Why is this worth discussing you might ask?, good question..
A more standard accelerando or rall/rit sound wouldn't sound the same at all, it would be much smoother, and arguably, considerably less interesting. The effect Ligeti achieves is something like the sound of a slightly clunky mechanism winding or gearing up and down and he achieves this via fairly simple instructions (even I can read/intepret it so it can't be that complex now can it).
It's almost an illusory effect, the tempo or speed (in one sense) remaining the same while the density of attacks changes. Whether in some ontological sense this results in a speeding up or down is something of a semantic issue (an interesting result for a piece of music perhaps).
This seems a common feature of his music in this period (ive not looked at his later music properly yet, i.e. from late 70s onwards so I can't comment on it).
In terms of the voice leading and harmony, briefly, as you can see the motion between the clarinet and flute is contrary in the decelarating/winding down section (bars/measures 14-15) and mostly contrary in the previous accelerating gesture though the relationship between the two voices is more complicated or less ordered (from a cursory examination anyway). This more- or-less-the-same-but-slightly-different effect is another 'micropolyphonic' gesture/trademark.
The harmony (referring to the flute and clarinet) is generally speaking chromatic and voices move by step, it's clear in the decelarating section that both instruments are playing a repeated semitone gesture/trill in contrary motion on the same two pitches (Bb/10 and A/9) , with the clarinet moving up to B/11 at the end and the flute finishes on A/9 (making this final gesture symmetrical, a tone or major 2nd leaving an axis tone in the middle, a Bb/10, this axis is implied not sounded, perhaps a 'pensanto' if you like, a note 'imagined, not played' - Perle - or perhaps, it's just a major 2nd).
So there you have it, apologies for the brevity of this 'analysis' and if I have made any mistakes (i'll check it again over the next few days). I only analyse pieces like this for my own compositional purposes, not because I intend to be any sort of theorist or analyst so this is something of a cursory, idiosyncratic reading of the piece, better than nothing though eh?.
The score is available here and is published by Schott, the music fragment in the video is from this CD by the Albert Schweitzer Quintet (also featuring a rather good quintet by Kurtág amongst other Hungarian quintet music including one of Ligeti's and Kurtág's teachers, Sándor Veress).
(UPDATED: 08/02/2009 to include the 'gears' analogy)
(UPDATED 15/03/09, sorted out pitches in final harmonic 'analysis' bit)
The score fragments below are marked Lento (crotchet/quarter note = 40). Also, something that caught me out, it's a transposing/conductors score not a usual concert pitch study score (*grumbles.)
A while ago some friends and I (at least two, honest) were discussing the possibility of a movie about the Second Viennese School, who should we cast in the major roles?.
Well, I've expanded the concept somewhat to include a few more composers, some 'modernists' more or less. (or perhaps a 'post-modernist' where Cage is concerned and Debussy and Mahler are more like pre-modernists or something).
I would have included more but after searching around some composers didn't seem easy to cast (Xenakis, Boulez, Feldman, Ligeti and others).
Some 'levity' for those long winter nights anyway, 'enjoy' (if you can name all the composers and their actor 'doubles' in the picture you win a special prize, click on the image above, here is a hint, match the images to the names in the tag list).
Oh and thanks to Ross's The Rest Is Noise blog for reminding me about the Second Viennese School 'movie' concept (via his post about Susan Sarandon's slip of the tongue at the recent Golden Globes).
Elliott Carter: I began to be interested in many of aspects of composition besides the harmonic structure. I felt that if I used a very - not simple, but easily manipulated harmonic structure then I could focus on other aspects of composition, like the spacing of chords and musical characterisation.
And you see one of the very basic problems of all this is I'm really writing contrapuntal music so that these chords are seldom notes played at the same time. And already this ends up causing a conflict of purpose. The problem has always been for the me the desire for a kind of contrapuntal and polyrhythmic structure, which couldn't sound the chords as simultaneous attacks. It involved all kinds of intellectual conflicts. I mean if you have one line going one way and another line coming against it, how do you decide which of the intervals you consider part of the structure?
John Link: And how do you resolve those kinds of questions?.
EC: I resolve them in different ways. Sometimes, for instance, I would just establish one chord and have all the different lines play only those notes. Or play those notes for a short time and then change one of the intervals and gradually move into another chord. I've tried every kind of thing I could think of. And in the end also, I found that the other side of it was that using many chord patterns led me to passages I didn't like.
JL: How so?
EC: I just didn't like the sound of them. So then I worked around until I found passages I did like, even if it didn't follow any of these systems exactly. All through my compositions there are moments when I did things that I thought sounded better than what this chord system produced, because it seemed more in character with what I wanted. There were many different intentions fighting together which in the end soon made me feel that maybe this system was not as useful as it had been to me and that there were other matters I was more concerned with. So I simplified my vocabulary and made it into something more restricted.
In an interview published in 1990 he said he had never seen Howard Hanson's'Harmonic Materials of Modern Music', and downplayed the influence of Forte on his own work. And while Carter may have benefited from the works he did consult, he clearly found them inadequate, otherwise he would never have undertaken the laborious task of compiling the Harmony Book.
An iconoclasitc desire to go his own way may have been one motivating factor, particularly given his attempts to distance himself from the 12-tone practice of Babbitt, Martino and others in the 1960s and 70s. But Carter had other reasons as well. One has to do with his working methods.
Carter sketches incessantly, often making a thousand or more pages of sketches for a single twenty-minute composition. Frequently he will re-copy a passage several times as it takes shape, preferring to put on paper changes that he could easily keep track of in his head. Looking through Carter's manuscripts one gets the feeling that the act of putting musical ideas on paper - of moving the pencil across the page - is his preferred method of getting to know his materials, and an important stimulus for his imagination.
Writing out the chords of the Harmony Book himself may have served a similar purpose, giving Carter the opportunity to become thoroughly familiar with each chord through the process of writing out its subsets and supersets.
In playing 'Melodien', however, all concerned must realise that the basic beat covers a diversity of metre; when he plays soloistic melodies or ornaments each instrumentalist must give a more or less independent, 'elastic' interpretation to his line; it must have an individual inner vitality and a dynamic and agogic shape of its own, which runs contrary to the barring and the beat.
In short, each part must 'breathe' individually. Exceptions, played without rubato: a) when two or more instruments are rhythmically coupled in unison, in octaves or in other intervals: b) subordinate passages such as pedal points and ostinato patterns. Entrances of the parts must occur precisely: only afterwards does the slight rubato take effect.
It's nearly a year since complement.inversion.etc went 'online', or, 'live' and as you can see above (click the picture for a larger image) the blog has been something of an international 'hit' (visited by 'folks' in 75 countries).
However, all is not well, I really need to increase my marketing spend in some areas, the Middle East and Africa are looking a bit threadbare, as is Central Asia, and something of a personal disappointment is the blog's failure to have any impact in two of the Baltic states (can you see which ones?).
Also I note that no one in Papua New Guinea has bothered to visit, and South East Asia in general could be somewhat more social (Laos?, hello?!, guys?).
Well, i'm not complaining but there is room for improvement, who knew anti-exoteric contemporary music ramblings could be so popular?.
btw, if you don't get the pun post title, shame on you, it's a play on the execrable 'Rocking All Over The World' by Status Quo (or simply, 'Status', as they are known round my way).
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