Announcing Canon #85 – “Tin.”
When I started looking for a name for this piece, I thought of the process by which it had come into being. I had spent a week playing with outlines that might help me explore different concepts from my list of things to try in future canons. One idea that’s come up a few times is to write a canon where the voices move primarily in similar motion. Could the voices still sound independent even if they moved in the same direction most of the time? To explore this idea, I created a simple outline with a one-bar lag where each line ascends by a major second, a perfect fourth, a major second, a perfect fourth. Quickly, the outlines spirals up from the low end of the keyboard’s range to the top. While something intrigued me about this material, I put it aside, thinking it was a dead end: too short, and too uniform, to make into a satisfying piece.
I then went on a long excursion, abandoning the idea of a similar-motion canon to try out some other ideas from my backlog, and finally arriving at a new outline that I hoped to develop. Except, I couldn’t. I heard potential in the new material, but I couldn’t transform it from its raw state into music. There’s a process I go through that I might liken to tapping on a tin can to see what sounds it can make. The tin can is the outline, the seed, the initial sketch. How resonant is it? What can it do? Where is the sweet spot to strike it? Sometimes a beautiful shiny can makes only the dullest sound. That was my experience as I tested my new outline, “striking” it in different places to find a spot where some music might start coming out, but hearing nothing, nothing, nothing.
In the course of doing this, I tried putting the new material into 7/8 meter and I came up with rhythmic pattern that caught my ear and had a useful quality: within each measure, the two voices never hit on the same beat except the first. I couldn’t get this rhythmic pattern to work with the new material so, on a whim, I decided to apply it to very first outline I had created, the one I had deemed too simple to make into a piece. To my surprise, the music quickly took shape. It was like tapping on a tin can expecting a thud and hearing a long, shimmering ring. I think it was the simplicity and “hollowness” of the initial outline that made it resonate when combined with the complex rhythm.
I found that my initial material could be molded and reshaped in different ways, leading to a piece with three sections that is happily on the longer side for my canons (two and a half minutes). Bringing a canon’s frenzied motion to a stop is sometimes the thorniest part of the composition process. There were two ways I could go here. My first thought was to end the canon in a way that would preserve the austerity of its sound. The canon moves rapidly across tonal centers but now it would need to end in one specific place. How to do that without it sounding arbitrary? The ending shouldn’t be too “clean” or it might sound contrived, but it has to be strong enough to convince the listener that the piece is really over and hasn’t just stopped at an arbitrary point. And it has to maintain the energy and complexity that the listener has gotten used to. To make a long story short, I couldn’t write a convincing ending that seemed totally in character with everything that had come before, while feeling sufficiently final, so I explored my second option: an ending that takes the piece in an unexpected direction. I took a little strand of “brightness” that surfaces occasionally throughout the darker tapestry of the piece, and gave that brightness the spotlight at the end. So while the conclusion might sounds like it’s happier or sunnier or just simpler than the earlier material, it still derives from that earlier material. It’s as though the other elements of the piece have fallen away, the commotion has exhausted itself, and now the winds that were tugging against each other have come into tune.
As for the technical details: the piece is in 7/8 and has three sections, each consisting of an ascending half and a descending half. There’s a one-bar lag throughout. The imitation is generally at the fifth, except in the third section where it’s mostly at the octave. Section 2 is an inversion of Section 1 (bass and soprano are swapped). Section 3 is a restatement of Section 1 but with parts transposed so the imitation is at the octave in the ascending section and the beginning of the descending section; ornaments are added here.
[Note: Tin was revised in December 2021 and the ending section was extended to include a repeat and a variation. The audio preview contains the newer, extended version.] ■