Here’s my eightieth canon, Mellite:
This piece continues my exploration of odd meter. It’s in 9/8 but instead of subdividing the bar as 3+3+3, it uses 3+2+2+2.
Uptempo compared to many of my other pieces, Mellite is an invertible canon at the fifth above / fourth below. It’s in a three-section format where the bass is the leader initially, then the material repeats with the soprano as the leader, and then it repeats again with the bass as the leader, now transposed lower while the soprano is higher. The first section has some voice crossings. In between sections there’s a deliberate “fusion” of the voices in parallel octaves for one bar. The lines constantly alternate between simple and compound melody. The tonality is F major with an excursion in each section to the dominant key of C and a return.
Looking through the score note by note, you would see lots of similar motion between the parts but if you look at the skeleton of the piece, it emphasizes contrary motion. This is a tension that interests me.
The audio is different from any of the clips that I’ve included in my “Canon Previews” album so far. Typically, when I release a software-generated preview clip, I use the same basic piano sound and I put minimal effort into tweaking the musical “interpretation” that the software produces. I like it this way. I don’t really want my preview clips to be too refined. That’s because I want each piece to someday fall under the care of a (human) performer, and I want to leave room for them to make their own choices and for me to hear the unexpected in their approach. But in the case of Mellite, I did a little more work on the preview audio than usual. I couldn’t get my notation software, Finale, to play the piece with the accents how I wanted them, so I opened the piece in a MIDI editor and started changing note velocities, and from there I experimented with different virtual instruments.
The mineral Mellite is also called honeystone. I was initially attracted to this name for Canon 80 because the upbeat energy of the piece makes me think of the color yellow. While honey moves slowly, and Canon 80 does not, I do like to imagine the bustling activity of bees making honey as I listen to it. ■