The Empire State and Strange Attractors
*The Empire State*
Folksongs and Scherzos
Oren Fader, guitar 1, with the composer on guitar 2
The Wedding Dress
The E-ri-e 1
Scherzo
Whistle, Daughter, Whistle
The E-ri-e 2
The Farmer is the Man (Counterpoint of Supertonics)
I'm putting the youtube notes here becasue they are not very searchable.
What one might easily miss -- In the last two songs, each in their own way, Elliott Carter's all-trichord hexachord (the ATH) is landed (briefly) as a mixed-modal phenomenon. If you blink you could miss it.
The all-trichord hexachord sometimes acts like a strange attractor in Kentner Anderson's music.
Kentner Anderson's Piano Trio "25 Decades" is another example --
The trio was written during a period of time when the US body politic was behaving like the all-trichord hexachord, whose subsets repel each other like oil and water.
Another way of looking at it: the ATH's subsets are signatures of diverse interval cycles and those are like fluids of diverse viscosities.
Schoenberg demonstrated these viscosities in his op. 9. It was Babbitt, in 2006, at his 90th birthday concert at Merkin Hall, who pointed out that Schoenberg's op. 9 offers a theme for every interval cycle. Babbitt's Swan Song No. 1, written for Kentner Anderson's ensemble Cygnus, was performed on that 90th birthday concert. Babbitt mentioned Schoenberg op. 9 to make the connection with his Swan Song No. 1, which answers op. 9 in its own brilliant way. Swan Song No. 1 treats the 12 trichords. The 12 trichords are *signatures* of those diverse viscosities. The interval cycles and the 12 trichords parse the viscosities in different ways.
And the interval cycles only tell part of the story about musical viscosities. The pitch-class set 034 is a subset of *both* the octatonic scale and the augmented scale; those are two examples of these discrete viscosities, like oil and water -- *immiscible* -- or like honey and water, which do mix, eventually. These are all metaphors that are rich for the behavior of these "musical fluids".
The octatonic is related to the 3 cycle, but far richer. The augmented scale is related to the 4 cycle, but again far richer. Babbitt clearly understood these dynamics.
A gamut I explore in my Djuna Barnes settings -- pairs of imperfect consonances. A 5th transposed through the 3 cycle makes an octatonic sclae; a 5th transposed through the 4 cycle makes an augmented scale. 0156 is a signature of the diatonic *septachord*; 0257 is a signature of the diatonic hexachord. 0167 is a signature of the octatonic scale. 0158 is ambiguous. It could be of the augmented scale or the diatonic hexachord.
https://youtu.be/sgA4c6tudAQ?si=3jW4QntcUIqTSJDc
Viscosity is only *one* metaphor. One could speak of the colors of the interval cycles. But that doesn't bring to the fore the question of
- diverse hefts
- the nap of the fur
- or the *grain of the wood* (composer Frank Brickle's choice for this)
The whole conversation is underground for the moment, but it's something that once experienced cannot be unexperienced. It can go underground, it will not go away.
--the composer
Marsyas Productions is the production unit of the Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music https://www.rogershapirofund.org
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