Announcing Canon #86 – “Tiger’s Eye.”
I named this piece “Tiger’s Eye” because it makes me imagine a tiger prowling through different environments, some sunny and plush, some barren, some dangerous, some tranquil. The piece creates a sense of shifting terrains – for my ear, at least – even though it consists of the same six bars of core material, repeated over and over (with variations).
In Tiger’s Eye I was finally able to apply some technical ideas I had been wanting to explore for some time. The first idea is to have the leader play with a pronounced staccato articulation, while the follow plays the same material legato. I had experimented with this in earlier pieces but it never seemed to work: my melodies always seemed to demand one articulation or the other, not accepting both. Here, the situation is different: the piece only sounds good with contrasting articulations. The bass has to be played staccato or the piece starts sounding too muddy, and the upper part has to be played legato otherwise the piece starts sounding too choppy. When I started work on the piece, both parts were legato and I wasn’t happy with what I heard, thinking the material itself was a dead end. It’s quite possible I would never have continued writing this piece if I hadn’t tried making the bass staccato on something of a whim; once I did that, I immediately heard some magic happening and I felt an uncontrollable urge to develop it.
The second idea I was able to try here is to freely double the lines. The doubling happens most often at the fourth, fifth, and octave, and occasionally at the third. This gives the piece a much fuller sonority than any of my previous canons. In my earlier pieces, the option of doubling the parts at the octave always seemed superfluous, and doubling at any other interval seemed to wreak havoc on the harmonic design of the piece. It works here though, because the core material is so simple melodically, and because the rhythm is structured so that the hits are staggered between the parts.
Note that the doubling in this piece does not follow strict imitation: for example, in one passage the leader might be doubled at the fifth while the follower might be doubled at the fourth. This freedom is also allowed for transpositions that happen after each six-bar cycle of core material: when the next cycle begins the leader may enter higher or lower, as it wants, and the follower too might enter higher or lower, as it wants (or rather as I wanted when writing the piece).
The piece consists of an opening section and a repeat where some melodic variations are introduced, registers are shifted for variety, and the leader and follower are occasionally allowed to stray from each other (with the follower exploring some ideas that were not previously stated by the leader). Each section begins with the bass leading one bar ahead of the follower, but towards the end, the follower splits into two separate parts, playing a “stretto” with a two-beat lag, while the leader continues as usual. After this stretto, the roles are reversed, with the top part leading and the bass following.
The foundation of the piece is a rhythmic cycle consisting of 6 bars in 7/8. What’s special about this cycle is that, when played in a canon with a one bar lag, the parts never hit simultaneously except at the onset of each measure. It’s not quite a “rhythmic tiling canon” like the ones I explored in Escher’s Drum where the parts only come together at the beginning of each full cycle, but it’s similar.
To create this particular rhythmic cycle, I started by looking at all the ways I could fill the space of a 7/8 measure with three quarter notes and an eight note. There are only four possibilities depending on where the eight note falls with respect to the quarters. After listing these out, I looked at the complimentary rhythms for each possibility: another pattern of four beats that can be played simultaneously, such that the only shared hit is at the measure onset. This image shows the initial possibilities on the upper staff and the complementary rhythms on the lower staff.
I noticed that the first and last patterns are complements of each other. I chose to put those aside and build a cycle consisting of the items in the middle, the one I’ve labeled A above, followed by its complement A′, and then B followed by its complement B′. To separate each section I added some “glue” material that acts as a phrase end. Here’s how the complete cycle looks:
Played raw, without any interpretation, this rhythmic cycle might not seem immediately arresting. So the next challenge was to take the cycle and make some music from it, repeating it over and over, finding out what kind of melodies it can accommodate and what kind of variations it can accept. How to manifest its potential? How to make it sound good? Canon 86 was my answer. ■