I’m pleased to share Canon 93, “Meteorite.”
When I listen to this piece I can imagine a collage of scenes where we see, in one moment, a meteor traveling rapidly through space against a backdrop of stars and planets, and in another moment, the meteor ensconced on Earth, where it’s been sitting for hundreds or thousands years, with vegetation growing around it, as a group of humans discovers it and tries in vain to dislodge it and see what’s underneath. This imagery came to me after I had finished composing the piece, while I was trying to choose a name for it. The piece itself is not intentionally programmatic – each passage was not designed to represent a specific moment in a meteor’s journey – but the more I experiment with this imagery after the fact, the more it seems to click.
My canons are named after gems and minerals – is “meteorite” one of those things? Well, people do make cool jewelry from meteorites, and one can find “meteorite” listed in gemstone glossaries, even though the term does not refer to one specific substance. One of my earlier canons – so far my only one to explore an alternate tuning system – is called Chondrite and that’s a specific category of meteorite. One of the little things I go through in naming my pieces is to question whether a new name should be off limits because I’ve already used a related name. But I have a piece named Quartz and a piece named Amethyst and I consider that situation to be fine even though amethyst is a kind of quartz (yet the pieces themselves aren’t closely related). So I decided it’s also fine to name the current piece Meteorite – I really like this name – even though I’ve already used Chondrite and the two pieces aren’t closely related except for the fact that I consider them both to have elements of “weirdness,” the quality of being “far-out,” irregular, or unconventional in relation to my other pieces.
The seeds of this piece were created back at the beginning of May, when I started a long series of experiments with retrograde imitation. I would write a theme, then reverse it and superimpose it upon itself, trying different vertical and horizontal skews until something provocative emerged. In my early experiments, I worked with themes that had some element of disorder: that’s to say, they avoided a clear tonal center and a recognizable pulse. In some cases the melodic contour was jagged, eschewing a sense of line. I became fascinated by the way I could take these short, irregular themes and turn them into canons in a way that either magnified or reduced the sense of disorder. On the one hand, I could make an irregular theme sound even more chaotic and unpredictable by placing it into a canon, and then I could repeat the canon again and again with various adjustments to the vertical and horizontal skews between the parts. I could do this in a way that created sustained mayhem. You could listen to the result and never guess that it had been constructed systematically through the repetition of short unit. You might assume something new was happening at each moment. On the other hand, I could take an irregular theme and turn it into a canon that sounded clearer, more cohesive, more goal-directed than either part by itself. Assuming it was possible to displace the parts rhythmically in a way that avoided shared hits, the result might sound like a single, through-composed line, not like a canon at all. And then by varying the vertical skew between the parts, I could create many different versions of that same line, each with a distinct character, and yet each fundamentally linked to the others.
So, starting this past Spring, I began amassing dozens of retrograde canons that explored these two different extremes, using the canon process to increase the order or magnify the disorder inherent in a theme. At some point in my experiments, I changed course. I moved away from tonally ambiguous themes with unstable rhythms and started to focus on simple ideas using pentatonic scales and regular rhythms. From this later, more tuneful material, I created Canon 92, “Ammolite.” After finishing work on Canon 92 in early August I went back to my earlier non-tonal material and forged it into Canon 93. The two pieces are connected in that they emerged from the same series of experiments, and they’re both large-scale works made of many short retrograde canons woven together. They’re different in the tonal and rhythmic material they use and the aesthetic goals they pursue.
My canons always benefit from interpretation by a skilled performer – the same is true of any music – but I think many of my canons can still be understood – if not fully enjoyed – by listening to how a computer “plays” them. But Canon 93 is one piece where the computer-generated preview leaves much to be desired. That’s because the more chaotic sections in the piece are actually full of short gestures that can be heard as distinct phrases, but the phrase boundaries can be easy to miss if the performance doesn’t emphasize them. In working with this material over several months, I’ve learned to hear these phrases (i.e. my ear has learned to parse them), and so even when I listen to the more wild or disorderly parts of the piece, everything makes “sense” to me, so much so that I’m not sure I’d even call these sections wild or disorderly anymore. Without a performer to elucidate the phrases (or without a lot of MIDI editing on my part) some sections of the computer-generated preview might sound much more chaotic or confusing than I actually intend them to be.
I’ve used the word “chaos” a lot so I should say something about chaos as an aesthetic goal. There is art out there that seeks to challenge the listener by making him or her feel disoriented, overwhelmed, or confused. This has never been my goal for an entire piece though I’m becoming increasingly interested in how this goal can be pursued at the scale of an individual passage, as a way of creating contrast within a piece. In Meteorite, I often use a more chaotic passage as a kind of preparation, a way of leading into a more cohesive or tightly organized passage, so that when the cohesion arrives it can be perceived as such. I’m also interested in the idea of presenting material that sounds chaotic and then repeating the material enough that the listener can become familiar with it and begin to perceive an organizing principle within it. For me, the goal of a “difficult” passage is not to prevent the listener from perceiving a pattern or organizing principle, but simply to delay this perception so that when it arrives it can be experienced as a kind of revelation.
Some miscellaneous notes about the piece:
The ethos is similar to my earlier pieces Thulite and Thorite but those pieces don’t use retrograde imitation. And where Thorite and Thulite used the octatonic scale as a tonal framework, Meteorite makes full use of the chromatic scale without any specific framework in mind. One technical similarity between Meteorite and the earlier pieces is that they all avoid shared hits – the voices are staggered in a such a way that they never play together on the same beat, except for in certain special passages. I find that the consistent avoidance of shared hits is a feature that can add a kind of suspense (as in a tightrope walk), and a sense of order or intentional design to a piece, particularly a piece that doesn’t employ tonal hierarchies to gain these same qualities.
A few of the passages in this piece combine mirror inversion along with retrograde (e.g. the opening and closing passages), but the majority use retrograde only. As with Ammolite, the parts are often placed close together vertically in such a way that they cross, creating emergent themes and/or fusing into a unified line.
Some of the themes in this piece function almost like lego pieces: they may be presented first as discrete units, and later placed side by side in such a way that one flows directly into another, so they “snap together” into a new, longer phrase that is heard as a single unit.
One can view the piece as consisting of three sections with no pauses between them. The first section introduces lots of ideas and sets up contrasts between them. The statements in the first section tend to be shorter and more discrete and they are often arranged in a question-and-answer fashion. Midway through the piece, we enter the second section. This is where lines start to flow in a smother and more extended way. Some of the material here brings to my mind a jazz saxophonist playing long bebop lines, or a Baroque performer riffing on the organ, though of course the musical language of the piece is different from either of those styles. This second section is where we experience the greatest sense of cohesion, fluidity, and rhythmic energy in the piece. Finally the second section gives way to a third section that mostly reprises material from the first. Some of the more chaotic content from the first section is restated with some variations, representing a dissolution or breakdown of the coherence that had come to being in the second section. Only one new theme is introduced here, a plaintive tune that occupies only a few bars in between restatements of earlier material. The piece ends with the same rushing lines that opened the first section (I think of these lines as representing the meteor in flight) but the vertical displacements between the parts are changed and now the lines begin with a prefix – an extra bar of jagged material – that lets us perceive the line as a progression from jagged to smooth, finally ending on a single target note. Although the piece does not aim to establish a tonal center – in fact, it aims to prevent any candidate tonal center from lasting too long – it is hoped that the last note in the piece sounds “right” in a way that any other of the twelve pitches would not, there must be implicit tonal hierarchies at play.
At roughly eleven minutes, Meteorite happens to be my longest piece so far. It forms a trilogy with its predecessors Birdsong and Ammolite, which are also extended works made from many short canonic passages. Those two pieces are long too, in comparison to my other canons, but for me they move forward in a way that seems almost expeditious, whereas Meteorite demands my attention in a way that makes me feel I’ve spent quite some time in a labyrinth before I find my way or am delivered out. It’s a piece that I’m still learning to hear, and as I come to know it better and better, it doesn’t seem quite as long as it once did; I wouldn’t want it to be shorter. ■