Categories
Mutes

New Music Mute Problems

I had a particularly unusual mute issue. I enlisted my daughter’s help to solve it.

Categories
Music Trombone

Alarm Will Sound at Carnegie

Last Saturday AWS played a concert of works written for us in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall. On the program were brand new pieces by John Orfe, Alarm Will Sound pianist, and Tyondai Braxton, in addition to recent works by Donnacha Dennehy and Charles Wuorinen and, at nearly eight years old, a downright ancient piece by David Lang.

John Orfe never disappoints with difficult writing (Parable of the Sower, the trombone quartet he wrote for Novus is no walk in the park, and his Chamber Symphony is quite a blow) and Journeyman is no exception. The piece is purely John. It is densely layered and uses extended harmony that will keep you guessing as to where it’s going but somehow sounds appropriate. Journeyman has great moments for the brass, including a fantastic trombone solo. Here’s a bit from the score:

Orfe, Journeyman

Increase by David Lang is intense. The opening lulls you into a sense that the piece is going to be a walk in the park with a good four minutes of long tones. Then, suddenly, the mixed meter counting nightmare begins. Three minutes of 5/8, changing from 2+3 to 3+2 every other measure or so, doubled with a percussionist.

Increase Excerpt

The ending is about another three minutes of nonstop rhythms, this time with little opportunity to breathe. I end up sneaking breaths in the repeated dotted eighths.

Increase Excerpt 2

Tyondai’s new piece, Fly by Wire, is in the vein of math rock. The trombone part, however, requires little calculation. Mostly fat notes below the staff, Tyondai asked for as much sound as he could get from the brass turning the piece into “long, low and loud.” I got the opportunity to talk to him about the piece and recorded it for the AWS YouTube channel:

Big Spinoff, by Charles Wuorinen, is what it’s title implies, a spinoff for large ensemble of an earlier work, Spinoff written for violin, bass and percussion. The trombone part covers a large range, quickly. Leaps of greater than an octave happen frequently. I found that it was effective to play pretty lightly. It balanced the ensemble better and made those fast licks just a little easier to play in time.

Big Spinoff Excerpt

The second half of the program was dedicated completely to Donnacha Dennehy’s work, “The Hunger.” Donnacha is creating an opera using The Great Famine as the subject. His depiction of it is incredible. Rather than a solely heartbreaking setting (which moments of the work definitely are), he uses the accounts of Asenath Nicholson, an American in Ireland at the time, as his source material. Her diaries are at times distinctly poignant and emotional and at other times distant and disconnected. Donnacha’s music reflects this. It sometimes sounds too “happy” to be a depiction of such sad events but somehow works wonderfully to create a vivid, effective image. Some of the movements use prerecorded music, all fantastic in their own right.

The trombone part is not wildly difficult but requires constant attention as the meter and it’s subdivision shift nearly every measure. Nearly always “in one” or “in two,” the music goes from 3/4 with four divisions per measure to 4/4 with four divisions per measure frequently. Tuning is the other challenge. Donnacha writes in a spectral style using the natural tuning of the harmonic series. The way he harmonizes these incredible pre-recorded sean-nós songs with spectral tuning is absolutely gorgeous.

 

Categories
Music Music Theory

Pitch Patterns in Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music”

Clapping Music

Alarm Will Sound will perform Steve Reich’s Clapping Music on the 16th at Stanford. (If you don’t know the piece, see here.) It will be a full ensemble performance of the piece with Steve Reich, the man himself, clapping along. Steve has never done the piece in such a way before, and quite possibly it’s the first time it will ever be done with such a large group. (Though it has been juggled before.)

Practicing it got me thinking about my past experiences with the work and particularly an anecdote that I vaguely remembered from a music theory course. What I recalled was that there was a way to map notes to the rhythm and as the pattern phased against itself it would line up in significant ways.

I did the most logical thing for me: I contacted Gavin Chuck, AWS managing director (and music theorist extraordinaire) and Alan Pierson, AWS music director. A lengthy (strange) email exchange ensued: Alan pointed out that there are twelve eighth notes in the pattern which can be mapped to the chromatic scale. Gavin took it a step further:

Gavin I

Geeky mathematics aside the short of it comes down to… yes, there exists a pattern. If we map each beat (rests included) to the chromatic scale we get this pattern:

CC#DEFGABb

which is a D minor scale starting on the seventh scale degree and including the raised seventh. OK, so what next? If we continue to map the subsequent patterns the same way we end up with all the other minor keys (natural and sharp seventh scale degrees included). Now, we can look at the way each key lines up with our original minor scale by noting which “beats” line up. I’ve done the work for you:

Table

I’m not sure if it’s much more than a novelty but I took a few minutes and created a score highlighting the common pitches. Enjoy!