Announcing Canon #89, “Thulite.”
Many of my canons pursue an orderly relationship between leader and follower. As much as I want a canon to be interesting and provocative – a goal which sometimes results in musical complexity – I still want the canon’s structure to be clear. It’s not sufficient that the follower echoes the leader; this echoing must also be apparent to the ear. There’s a certain classic sound of contrapuntal imitation that I’m usually going for, regardless of whether the musical language is antique or modern. The leader announces a melody and we hear the follower reproduce it in a way that seems preordained, inexorable, “right” – like the voice of God. The leader sets an expectation and the follower fulfills it.
In writing my latest canon, “Thulite,” I wanted to try for a different aesthetic. I wondered if I could write a canon where the follower didn’t seem to be imitating the leader – where the two voices actually seemed to be antagonizing or contradicting each other – even if in fact, the follower was copying the leader exactly. Perhaps if the leader behaved in a more erratic, jagged, and unpredictable way than I usually seek, the follower too would sound unpredictable, as if it were doing its own thing altogether, even if that “thing” had been heard once before. Perhaps if the voices occasionally became entangled, the leader/follower relationship itself would be obscured.
To achieve this goal of a canon that doesn’t sound canonic, I put aside my typical writing process where I start with a skeletal outline and add detail in a series of iterations. Instead I composed the piece “on the fly,” one measure after another, without knowing anything about what might come next. The piece became a series of brief episodes, some of them having the jerky, erratic quality that I had been going for, and others having more of the classic imitative sound. The piece goes back and forth between chaotic and structured. But even in the latter case, the voices still seem to tug against each other with accents that don’t line up nicely.
The piece reminds me of the jerky, sudden, shifting movements of a cat-and-mouse game.
When I sat down to write, I intended to generate new material from beginning to end, but then I found a way to reuse some of what I had already written. One section from the early in the piece is repeated near the end with the same rhythmic structure but different melodic contours. And then, at the conclusion, we hear the material from the very beginning of the piece repeated in a different “key.” I put the word “key” in quotes because the piece is not conventionally tonal. Most of the material is in the B-C half-whole diminished scale (or octatonic scale). We hear enough material in this scale that its sound becomes familiar – a kind of tonal comfort zone – even though there is no specific center. In the middle of the piece, the leader remains in the established B-C half-whole diminished scale while the follower shakes things up, transposing material to the two other half-whole diminished scales (the A-sharp-B one and the C-D-flat one). As the piece approaches the conclusion it settles back into the pure B-C diminished scale, but then, in a surprise, the final passage is stated with both voices in the foreign C-D-flat diminished scale.
Importantly, the voices never play on the same beat, though they come as close as a 32nd-note away. I wanted the rhythms to seem whimsical and less ordered than my typical style, but I tried to achieve this without anything fancy like changing meters, complex polyrhythms, metric modulation, or the like. The score is notated in 4/4 and looks quite conventional. The imitation is strict: the follower copies the leaders intervals and rhythms exactly.
Some of the challenges in this piece were 1) keeping a sense of variety within the selected tonal material of the half-whole diminished scale, 2) maintaining a sense of gestural discord between the voices and avoiding the classic sound of imitation, 3) disrupting the beat while maintaining enough of sense of meter that the music can be heard as tugging against something, 4) creating episode-to-episode transitions that sound natural on the one hand but unexpected on the other.
My typical writing process usually leaves me with a result that seems final and unchangeable, but Thulite, written in an atypical way for me, opened so many possibilities, and could have gone in so many directions, that I feel the piece is only one of many possible manifestations of the intentions at play. Usually it feels right to name a piece after a gemstone or mineral, but with Thulite, for the first time, I wondered if I should change my naming scheme and use a more descriptive title. To keep things simple, I decided to stick with stones for now. My next steps will be to write a few more canons that explore the stylistic ideas that Thulite brought into focus for me. ■