"1918" (Word of the Wind)
Dear Players,
"1918" or "The Word of the Wind", for clarinet, violin & piano, was commissioned by Ebb & Flow Arts for Veritas Musicae, to be based on the poem "Word of the Wind" by Mah Jonggi . I am grateful to Robert Pollock & Shinhee Park for instigating this work. It's been developing for something like 10 years. It's taken on a life of its own, becoming something that that surprised me in many ways. I am grateful to the excellent musicians working with Veritas Musicae.
To record this, the challenge is to make the windy passages shimmer.
The mood is often picaresque.
The poem by Mah Jonggi provided the image of wind and things shimmering in the wind -- rippling leaves and water. I was in Korea in 2010 (?) for Hyo Kang's Great Mountains Music Festival, where I got to know Korea & Koreans a bit, but I will not claim that I understand Korea. I'm grateful for the opportunity to think from the far away place, Korea, where the ideological battles that confuse and distract us in New York feel abstract, remote and possibly irrelevant. The project, as Veritas framed it, brought me to a planetary musical perspective. The postwar US was the naturual center of a planetary musical perspective, especially when great European composers took refuge in the US. Hindemith, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Krenek and Wolpe, in various interesting ways, changed perspective when they crossed the Atlantic. The example that is most poignant here is when the supranational composer Igor Stravinsky championed Isang Yun.
The heart of the middle section of "1918" is a Dresden Amen. (see Mendelssohn & Wagner). It is a prayer to conjure sympathetic players.
Measure 45 -- boiling down through Brahms op. 114-type process: to A, Bb, D, Eb
This is the 1, 4.... cycle
Measure 69 -- Ionian to Lydian:
extending the 1,4 cycle
....E, F, A, Bb, D, Eb......
Again, Ionian to Lydian:
And at the end of the exposition the counterclockwise move, Ionian to Mixolydian or Lydian to Ionian:
Brahms op. 15 thing:
The Op. 15 process acts on the op. 114 process.
Measure 438 distills G#, A, D, D#, E
Call it 01678
or call it
01267
extending 0167
"1918" does this --
f(A(x))
where x is an adaptation of Brahms' op. 114 procedure and f is an adaptation of Brahms' op. 15 procedure.
x generates 0156.
0156, as scale degrees 7, 8, 3, 4, holds sway in the the first 2/3rds of the piece.
Doing f to x generates 01267, aka, 01678
01678 and its tetrachrodal subsets hold sway from the recap to the end.
The large scale doings of the piece, it's large-scale reason to be, comes from f(A(x)), the exposition reminds us of traditional groundings of binary form as they are seen in the 1, 4 cycle, but performs or enacts their structual insufficiency.
Ionian
0156
A, Bb, D, Eb
Lydian
0178
A, Bb E, F
The Word of the Wind by Mah Jonggi (1939-)
After all of us leave,
if my spirit passes by you,
don’t think even for a moment it is
the wind that sways the spring boughs.
Today I will plant a flower
on a corner of the shadow
where I got to know you;
when the flower grows to bloom,
all the distress that stemmed from our acquaintance
will turn into petals and fly away.
It will turn into petals and fly away.
Though it is unbearably distant
and futile,
how can we measure all the things in the world
with only a small ruler?
When every now and then you turn your ears toward where the wind blows,
my beloved, don’t forget even if you become tired
the word of the wind that comes from faraway.
바람의 말 /마종기
우리가 모두 떠난 뒤
내 영혼이 당신 옆을 스치면
설마라도 봄 나뭇가지 흔드는
바람이라고 생각지는 마.
나 오늘 그대 알았던
땅 그림자 한 모서리에
꽃나무 하나 심어 놓으려니
그 나무 자라서 꽃 피우면
우리가 알아서 얻은 모든 괴로움이
꽃잎 되어서 날아가 버릴 거야.
꽃잎 되어서 날아가 버린다.
참을 수 없게 아득하고
헛된 일이지만
어쩌면 세상 모든 일을
지척의 자로만 재고 살 건가.
가끔 바람 부는 쪽으로 귀 기울이면
착한 당신, 피곤해져도 잊지 마,
아득하게 멀리서 오는 바람의 말을.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey