Analyze This
About a year or so ago I was contacted by a German scholar about writing an article for a festschrift about the music of John Luther Adams. Since that point, the scholar has put together an impressive list of contributors for a book that, from what I imagine, could easily find a publisher. After shopping it around a bit, Bernd came to the conclusion that we needed the actual article’s rather than the proposals if we were to find a publisher. The deadline approaches and I’ve been sitting down recently to try to put together my contribution.
My initial thought for an article stemmed from thoughts I developed in writing an article on for Lou Harrison, and I would basically provide a primer for listening to, experiencing or composing JLA’s music. Basicaly, if you wanted to write a piece like JLA what would you do. This I think would be a very useful contribution to the book as there is no other real overview for the music. In terms of specific pieces, essentially I’d be looking at the colorfield pieces like Dark Wind or Red Arc /Blue Veil.
My next thought was to try and put the understanding of the music in the context of the Aeolian Harp which I think is the proper metaphor for Adams’ music. I did some research on how Aeolian tones work (the work of Lord Rayleigh is particularly interesting in this regard) and thinking of that in the context of what I know about constructing JLA’s work – ultimately, I think the Aeolian harp metaphor is useful but really only applies fully to the pieces with auras: Mathematics, Veils and Vespers and the like – mainly because of the extreme high partials of these pieces.
Next thought was to understand the work in relation to the actual mechanics of creating a sound. I recall from a class I had with Robert Cogan a long time ago that bit from the Abime des Oiseaux movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and how when you listen to the long pitches held you actually begin to hear the higher and higher partials of the piece. I thought that this was aparticularly apt metaphor for the construction of Adams’ music which often begins with a wash and then adds quicker and quicker moving layers over that wash. Through the brilliant sound analysis program created by my friend Michael Klingbeil: SPEAR, I was able to encode and analyze that very sonority from Messiaen and saw that in fact as the sound increased in volume so did the higher partials of the fundamental enter in the picture.
So my next step was to look at a colorfield piece: I chose my old standby The Light That Fills the World and try to determine whether this enhancement of partials was matched by the actual mechanics of the music rather than in the abstract. I thought to borrow from Lewin’s analysis of Carter’s String Quartet in GITT, particularly his method of dealing with tempo relations by translating them into harmonic relations to sort of create an “harmonic” language of tempo. Once I translated out the tempo relationships I could build a large-scale harmonic understanding of tempo over the course of the work. My initial work suggests that I’ll find a structure similar to the pitch saturation in the tempo saturation – mainly that the same tempo relations are always in play.
I spent this morning mapping out the tempi of the various layers in the individual sections (I’m halfway finished) and from there translating those tempi into pitches. The real pitches given by the tempi are subsonic (recall Cowell’s idea that considering the fact that pitch is a function of frequency, tempo is related to pitch) so I’m simply mapping them onto a standard acoustical formation.
I’m further borrowing from Lewin in treating the timepoint and duration of events as an ordered pair: thus (29, 24/5) means that at beat 29, a pitch enters for a duration of 24/5 beats. I’m using the quarter note as normative, although Adams sets tempo at half=60.
For this to be important to the narrative of the piece I’ll need to demonstrate that pitch is unimportant – simply a coloring on the tempo map. I think this won’t be too hard to determine. Through this transformational approach we’ll determine that the piece is a realization (through tempo and gamut) of an abstract progression in essence creating an abstract generative model for a JLA piece that could be combined with the other techniques to generate a piece. From this model one could map out more and more complex progressions and from there translate them back into sound through a gamut.
As I write this, I think perhaps that this may not be what is needed for the book, probably the book will need a simple overview article instead as this could be too specific and complicated.
My initial thought for an article stemmed from thoughts I developed in writing an article on for Lou Harrison, and I would basically provide a primer for listening to, experiencing or composing JLA’s music. Basicaly, if you wanted to write a piece like JLA what would you do. This I think would be a very useful contribution to the book as there is no other real overview for the music. In terms of specific pieces, essentially I’d be looking at the colorfield pieces like Dark Wind or Red Arc /Blue Veil.
My next thought was to try and put the understanding of the music in the context of the Aeolian Harp which I think is the proper metaphor for Adams’ music. I did some research on how Aeolian tones work (the work of Lord Rayleigh is particularly interesting in this regard) and thinking of that in the context of what I know about constructing JLA’s work – ultimately, I think the Aeolian harp metaphor is useful but really only applies fully to the pieces with auras: Mathematics, Veils and Vespers and the like – mainly because of the extreme high partials of these pieces.
Next thought was to understand the work in relation to the actual mechanics of creating a sound. I recall from a class I had with Robert Cogan a long time ago that bit from the Abime des Oiseaux movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and how when you listen to the long pitches held you actually begin to hear the higher and higher partials of the piece. I thought that this was aparticularly apt metaphor for the construction of Adams’ music which often begins with a wash and then adds quicker and quicker moving layers over that wash. Through the brilliant sound analysis program created by my friend Michael Klingbeil: SPEAR, I was able to encode and analyze that very sonority from Messiaen and saw that in fact as the sound increased in volume so did the higher partials of the fundamental enter in the picture.
So my next step was to look at a colorfield piece: I chose my old standby The Light That Fills the World and try to determine whether this enhancement of partials was matched by the actual mechanics of the music rather than in the abstract. I thought to borrow from Lewin’s analysis of Carter’s String Quartet in GITT, particularly his method of dealing with tempo relations by translating them into harmonic relations to sort of create an “harmonic” language of tempo. Once I translated out the tempo relationships I could build a large-scale harmonic understanding of tempo over the course of the work. My initial work suggests that I’ll find a structure similar to the pitch saturation in the tempo saturation – mainly that the same tempo relations are always in play.
I spent this morning mapping out the tempi of the various layers in the individual sections (I’m halfway finished) and from there translating those tempi into pitches. The real pitches given by the tempi are subsonic (recall Cowell’s idea that considering the fact that pitch is a function of frequency, tempo is related to pitch) so I’m simply mapping them onto a standard acoustical formation.
I’m further borrowing from Lewin in treating the timepoint and duration of events as an ordered pair: thus (29, 24/5) means that at beat 29, a pitch enters for a duration of 24/5 beats. I’m using the quarter note as normative, although Adams sets tempo at half=60.
For this to be important to the narrative of the piece I’ll need to demonstrate that pitch is unimportant – simply a coloring on the tempo map. I think this won’t be too hard to determine. Through this transformational approach we’ll determine that the piece is a realization (through tempo and gamut) of an abstract progression in essence creating an abstract generative model for a JLA piece that could be combined with the other techniques to generate a piece. From this model one could map out more and more complex progressions and from there translate them back into sound through a gamut.
As I write this, I think perhaps that this may not be what is needed for the book, probably the book will need a simple overview article instead as this could be too specific and complicated.
posted by Todd Tarantino at
2:34 PM
