The director was looking for something relatively dissonant, or at least unsettling, for the main texture of the piece. To that end, I whipped out George Perle‘s Twelve-Tone Tonality, which is, after 15 years of stealing (and mostly misusing) its ideas, still one of the most difficult/rewarding music theory texts I have ever read. Perle is so pithy that there’s nary a single wasted word in the entire text–every bit is crucial.

Aaaanyway, working from the “Inversionally Complimentary Cycles” section of the text, I worked out a tone row for the piece, and then transposed it into four additional voices, moving in parallel, which gave me some nice tonal blocks to play with. After orchestrating these blocks a bit with some sounds I liked, I recorded them and then cut up and arbitrarily pieced the shards back together, which produced the “glitchy” sounds you hear. I then worked out a little melody with an inversional relationship to the original row, and started flying that over the top. This is shaping up to be a fun little piece, methinks. Anyway, have a listen, and let me know what you think!

Download audio file (stephens_20090309.mp3)

P.S., As I was writing this post, I found out that George Perle passed away in January at his home in Manhattan at age 93. To a guy like me, who’s still at heart a music theory geek, this was heartbreaking to learn. He will be missed.

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• George Perle, a Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93 (nytimes.com)

This score has, for whatever reason, proved to be a difficult one to get a bead on–it’s gone through multiple iterations, each one evolving significantly from the last. The piece is in roughly four contiguous segments, with two themes evolving gradually throughout the piece’s 15 minutes. I’ve been attempting to strike a balance between harder rhythmic elements and more free-floating melodic sections, with varying degrees of success. On a purely technical level, I’ve been separating out rhythmic elements for more clarity, stratifying snares, bass drums, and cymbals in separate layers rather than mixing them together all at once, as I would normally tend to do.

Anyway, here are some excerpts. Hope you enjoy them!

Excerpt the first:
Download audio file (listening_e1.mp3)

Excerpt the second:
Download audio file (listening_e2.mp3)

Aaaaanyway, I’ve pretty much been writing music almost nonstop since then, in preparation for the upcoming performances of “Dance for a Small Room” with Cornfield Dance (see the Events page for more information on that). So here, with little fanfare, is some very new music that you will be hearing as part of the new piece. It’s super-new (less than 24 hours old!), so please forgive the fact that it cuts off, seemingly right in the middle. That will be fixed later. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Added an ending, sort of.

Download audio file (Improv%20Section_20080604.mp3)

Download audio file (Small%20Room%20Draft%2020080405.mp3)

The piece ended up being called “Get This To My Mother.” My dad laughed when I told him the title, because I think he assumed that it was another typical Koven J. Smith non-sequiter. Howeva, the title actually comes from the recording that you hear throughout the piece, which is a WWII radio broadcast of transmissions from the American troops stationed at Corregidor right before the island fell to the Japanese. I’m not entirely sure how this broadcast came to be, but it sounds as if it is a broadcaster reading decoded Morse messages as they come over the wire. The sound of that, of passionate messages being read in an entirely dispassionate way, really struck me. That in the midst of unimaginable chaos, this man just wants his mother to know that he was thinking of her. It’s not really that important that you know all of this context to enjoy the piece, but knowing this certainly makes it all a little richer for me. At any rate, I hope you like the piece, and happy 5th of July!

Anyway, my second act upon becoming well was to finally get to work on this new piece for Ellen Cornfield. She’s going to be doing a solo piece called Fault Lines as part of the Merce Cunningham Studios faculty concert, and graciously asked me to write something for her. As it’s shaping up, I think the music will be called Get This To My Mother, the title being based on this WWII radio recording on an old record of my grandfather’s (Koven R. Smith, incidentally). So this is where the piece stands currently. It’s a little bit too chaotic for my tastes just yet, and I feel like maybe I haven’t found the piece’s center yet, but it’s a good start. I’ll post more as it gets closer to completion…