In working on my latest composition, I happened to sketch a repeating eighth-sixteenth-eighth rhythm, like this:

Noticing how simple this rhythm looked on the page and how familiar it sounded, I didn’t expect that it would trigger a fit of soul-searching.

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Canon 92 is a major effort of mine that’s been in the works for three months — my summer of 2021. I named it “Ammolite” which is an iridescent rainbow-colored gemstone made from fossils of the extinct ammonite mollusk. For me, Canon 92 is indeed a rainbow of moods and feelings, arranged in a kind of kaleidoscopic pattern such as we might see in an ammolite gem itself:

There are three important technical elements at play in this piece. First, retrograde imitation is used exclusively. This means that the follower always plays a backwards or reversed version of the leader’s material (with a rhythmic skew and vertical displacement that changes from passage to passage). Second, all the themes are made from scales with five or fewer notes. Most of the themes are in the familiar major and minor pentatonic scales, but some themes use scales with as few as three notes. (I should mention that even in these three-note passages, the listener might hear four or more distinct pitches because the two voices may be playing in a different transposition of the three-note scale.) Third, the voices overlap extensively, to the point that they sometimes lose their individual identities and fuse into an emergent or compound melody. This fusion is an intentional aspect of the piece’s design, beginning with the opening passage which sounds like a single voice even though it’s formed from two.

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