Also, there was a lot of reading. Thankfully, we all got one course relief; the relieved courses were taught by the students who also attended the seminar. For music, it was Steve Weigt.
I prepared a one-hour lecture (perhaps to appear here at some future point) and some handouts for the others to study the week before my lecture. Then there was an hour of questions, speculations, ideas about definitions of beauty, etc., and of all things, a question about whether it was Britney or Christina who really had it goin' on. That last part is a paraphrase.
One thing I prepared to give the others a taste of how composers think (or at least how they write about how they think) was the following handout about my triple clarinet concerto Cerberus (the link there is to the Spotify album on which it appears) — a live performance is here. For the record, the piece is also copyright © by CF Peters.
The handout refers to a second handout, a detailed PDF. That is here.
With further adieu, the handout.
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Rakowski: Cerberus. Notes on the composition.
Cerberus
is a concerto for clarinet and a chamber orchestra of 13 players. I had made a
pie-in-the-sky application to the NEA for funding to write a clarinet concerto
for my wife Beth, and it was, alas, approved. So now I actually had to write one. A
premiere in Berkeley and Davis, California was promised by the Empyrean
Ensemble for May, 1992, providing I finished the piece on time.
When starting to writing a
concerto, a composer thinks long and hard about two things above all else: the
relationship of the concerto soloist to the ensemble, and how the soloist will
make its first entrance. Since Beth tends to be asthmatic with the spring and
fall changes of weather (remember the premiere was in May), I knew I would have
a hard time writing very long phrases for the soloist, as Beth would be often
out of breath; so I decided to put a clarinet and a bass clarinet into the
chamber orchestra that would act as “extensions” of the soloist, “reflections,”
“amplifications,” “partners,” etc., or as metaphorical doppelgangers. This way
clarinet lines could possibly (and magically) appear to defy wind player logic
and go on nearly forever, without the need for breath — a three-headed clarinet
— Cerberus. These über-lines would then pass from the soloist into the ensemble
and back, etc., giving the soloist a complicated relationship to the ensemble:
part of it while also superior to it, as it would be sitting in front of and
apart from the ensemble in performance.
As to the entrance of the
soloist, I decided, instead of making a big dramatic gesture, to “hide” the
soloist inside the sound of the clarinets in the ensemble, and to let it assert
itself only gradually, emerging as the real soloist only towards the end of the
first movement. To accomplish this, I could make all three clarinets play
together most of the time, each with musical lines that were not very different
from those of the others; this way the listener should not be able to tell
which part belonged to the soloist and which parts belonged in the ensemble. To
make the point quite clear at the outset, I knew I would begin on a unison (all
the clarinets playing the same note). I further decided to have only the
clarinets play for the first two minutes, with the ensemble joining in only
gradually, one instrument at a time. If I were a continental European composer,
I would add here that “this was the first time this was ever done in music”
whether or not it was true.
But which unison note to
begin on? By the time I got around to starting the piece, I was at the
Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy. Every afternoon at 3:00, a
couple of church bells just down the hill would peal loudly for about five
minutes. Those bells were pitched on G and D, and I heard them every day, so
why not start with G and D? This way if my piece were ever performed in
Bellagio on a 3:00 concert, it would blend in nicely. As is usually the case
with pairs of bells, each pealed at a different rate so that the two of them
went in and out of phase with a certain regularity, and that created
interesting rhythmic and melodic patterns. My piece, then, could begin with
each of the three clarinets playing lines that were out of phase (the
beginnings and endings of each player’s lines would not coincide) and that very
loosely imitated those of the others. Which led to the question: how do you
organize something like this? How does the composer give the listener a sense
of progression or of hierarchy? Would this music necessarily be without melody?
(these questions are not answered
below)
The decision followed to
have each phrase played by each clarinet start on G, followed by notes that
were lower; thus, even with phrases that were out of phase, the three clarinets
would have something audibly in common. Further, the phrases would overlap in a
way such that G was always sounding—at least one of the clarinetists was
playing G at all times. In effect, this would make for a very, very long G,
possibly giving the illusion that a fourth, unseen clarinetist was playing it.
And this clarinetist apparently didn’t have to breathe like mortal clarinetists.
Magic! From here, it’s not a big step of logic to decide that the imaginary
fourth clarinetist might as well play not only G, but a melody in very long
notes — it could play G for a while, move to another note, move to another
note, and so on. The idea of a melody in rather long notes accompanied by more
quickly moving notes is not novel in music: the Notre Dame composers of the
13th century did it famously, Bach’s chorale preludes do it as a central
premise. Historically, that melody in long notes came from an external source,
a pre-existing melody, often a liturgical one — which was called a cantus
firmus (fixed melody). In other words, I now knew I was going to compose with a
cantus firmus — but not a pre-existing one (unless the bells count) — whose
first two notes may as well be G and D (I was in Bellagio…the bells…remember?).
Then I composed a melody
of 19 notes (starting on G and D) to function as a “cantus firmus” for the
whole concerto. While on the surface the music would get faster and slower,
there would always be the same 19-note cantus firmus moving at a slower speed. In
the finished piece, the cantus firmus takes as long as three minutes to unfold,
or as little as 20 seconds. Sometimes the cantus firmus is obvious, and at other
times is only in the background.
But now back to the
opening of the piece, wherein we hear only three clarinets, and a phantom
fourth clarinet playing the cantus firmus. The following may be heard and
observed:
1)
The three
clarinets play individual lines that are similar in character, similar in
speed, are undifferentiated hierarchically with respect to each other, and
which loosely imitate the others.
2)
The melodic
shape Down, Down, Up describes the first phrase of all three soloists, and each
phrase also begins with at least two Downward moves.
3)
The first four
notes (or very long phrase) of the cantus firmus unfold with
the shape Down, Down, Up.
4)
The “musical
space” very slowly and gradually expands, very slowly upwards with the cantus
firmus, and very slowly downwards, with the bass clarinet introducing ever
lower notes in each successive phrase.
5)
The first two
notes heard are G and D. The first two notes of the cantus firmus are G and D.
The first three notes heard (G, D, Aflat) make the same kind of chord (theorists
call it a 016 trichord, if they can be awakened) as the first three notes of the cantus firmus (G, D, Dflat).
6)
It’s kinda
purty.
Some musicians, when told
of 3) and 5) above (something happening on the surface is closely related to
something happening much more slowly in the middleground), say, “so it’s like
fractals.” Which just goes to show you how little musicians know about
fractals. If this were truly a fractal piece, it would still be going on. It’s
really just a very simple example of how one composer thought about using
stuctural levels in one piece (the “grand structures growing out of small
details” of the indented quote on p. 239 of Consilience.).
The graph of the first 12 measures of Cerberus (here)
The first twelve measures
of the piece may be seen twice, with dynamics omitted to reduce clutter. In I. Phrase shape, one may see the
melodic shape of each clarinetist’s phrase simply, in terms the notes moving up
or down. The phrases are generally notated under a slur (an arc shape), and the
players must breathe between them. One can see very generally the loose
imitations in phrase shape and the overlapping of the phrases. In a few
instances, the composer’s notion of where a phrase begins and ends contradicts
the slur markings.
In II. By Cantus Firmus Tone one can see in boxes when a player is
playing a cantus firmus tone, and see the overlapping that gives the illusion
of long, continuous tones. Above the music, connected by arrows, are the names
of the pitches of the cantus firmus as it unfolds.
The music shown on the
graph represents the first 1:20 of the recorded excerpt. The first non-clarinet to play is the cello
at 2:13, joined thereafter by viola, violin 2, and then the rest of the ensemble
more quickly. The second iteration of the cantus firmus begins at 3:10 when the
texture reduces to one note. The solo clarinet is heard unequivocally as the
soloist for the first time beginning at 5:39, only to be sucked back into the
cerberus, and to re-emerge at 6:36 in counterpoint with a wind melody.
Here is an excerpt from
the Sacramento Bee’s review of the premiere, which is pertinent to the texts of
the Consilience Seminar: “The interplay, prior to the emergence of the real
soloist, the immensely talented Beth Wiemann, gave listeners a Heissenbergian
(sic) sense of indeterminacy, one which governed the remaining movements.”
