Announcing Canon #83, Fulgurite.
This is my first new canon in roughly a year. Like all my canons, it’s abstract music that has nothing to do with current events. But the need to get my mind off the pandemic is what motivated me to start work on this piece. It worked. For a few days, finishing the piece was my all-consuming obsession and all the bad news about the virus receded into the background. Of course, those few days of “flow” were preceded by many days of struggling to get started, fiddling around with ideas that seemed to go nowhere. An analogy came to mind: starting a new piece is like trying to start a fire with a few sticks on a rainy day. You keep rubbing the sticks together and nothing happens. You go to sleep cold, having failed to create even one spark. Then you try again the next day. It rains again. The wood is all wet. A few days go by and the routine of futile struggle becomes familiar. You feel guilty about wasting time. You think of other pursuits where you could be more productive. You think of obligations you’re ignoring, messages you haven’t responded to, chores you haven’t done. You wonder if you’re missing something: is it time for a new approach? Is it time to quit? You think of the fires you’ve kindled in the past, and wonder if the magic is gone forever. These thoughts arise because you’re hoping for a shortcut. But there are no shortcuts. The only path that leads to a new fire is the path through discomfort: some boredom, some monotony, some doubt. The only way to start the fire is to show up in inclement weather, day after day, so that at some unpredictable moment, when there’s a window, an opening… when conditions are right for the fire to start, you’ll be there, rubbing those sticks together and making it possible for the first sparks to form.
The names of my canons, which I take from lists of minerals, metals, and gemstones, are somewhat arbitrary, but I do try to find a loose connection between the composition and the title where possible. Fulgurite is a material formed when lightning strikes the ground, fusing sand and soil together. Canon 83 is a dissonant piece where the parts seem to be “fused” together rather than seamlessly blended. Also, I had been hoping for something like a lightning strike, and it came. For those reasons, the title seemed appropriate.
The piece is in 5/4 and continues a series of canons I’ve been working on that explore odd meters. The subdivision pattern (3+2 vs. 2+3 vs. 4+1) switches from measure to measure. Imitation is at the octave with a two-bar lag. Dissonances like major seconds, perfect fourths, and minor sevenths are emphasized on strong beats; however, the tonality of each line is fairly centralized around A minor and doesn’t stray too far afield. So the piece explores how a dissonant sonority and an anchored tonality can happen together.
When I first started work on the piece, I thought I would experiment with extreme ranges, with the leader confined to the lowest end of the keyboard and the follower confined to the highest. That experiment will have to wait for another piece; it didn’t quite work out here. However, the piece does start with the leader quite low, entering on an A2 and returning to that note repeatedly, while the follower stays relatively high. And the piece did get me thinking about range in some new ways. A major second sounds very different from a major second plus an octave, a major ninth, but what about a major ninth versus a major sixteenth? Do we consider those compound intervals as equivalent or are they different experiences, with the intensity of the dissonance reducing as the distance between notes increases? How might this reduction of intensity with each added octave change one’s contrapuntal choices?
In working on this piece I found that the soprano and bass interplay only “worked” for my ear when those parts were separated by several octaves; move them closer and they didn’t sound right. However, when I inverted the counterpoint to create the second half of the piece, the opposite was true. The inverted voices did not make sense to my ear when separated by multiple octaves, but when I moved them closer so they almost touched, I was delighted by the result. Why? I’m not sure.
The second half of the piece is not something I could have ever written from scratch. It only came about by my writing the first half, then inverting it, then experimenting with the range of the parts, and finally making a few modifications to avoid certain jarring coincidences. The second half straddles the line between order and chaos in a way that I really like. The voices are hard for the ear to untangle, but they still assert independence, making clear, assertive gestures that the ear can latch onto. It’s chaos, but it’s controlled chaos; it’s noise but it’s purposeful noise. I wouldn’t know how to sit down with a blank page and compose that kind of purposeful noise directly, but I was able to discover it in a rearrangement of the components I had already created for the first half of the piece. ■