This week continues my trend of writing pieces that were influenced by specific writers or compositions. “Another Noon” was heavily influenced by a piece called “Hi Noon” by Justin Morell, a guitarist that I’ve been playing with in the Damian Erskine Project. Justin’s composition uses a set of drop-two voicings (I’m not going to go into the theory here, but the technique leads to chords that cover a wide range and have a fairly open sound to them) that sound rather melodic on their own, with another melody that seems to float on top of it.
For my composition, I employed the same technique of drop-two voicings with an additional melody, and then filled out some of the inside parts using a woodwind choir made up of flute, soprano sax, alto sax, and bass clarinet. The result is a simple but lush harmonic foundation for the piece — so simple, that you might not even notice that it’s in 7/4 at first.
In the second half of the composition, the piano part gets rhythmically and harmonically more intense, while the woodwind parts turn to more long, held-out notes than the melodic phrases they were playing earlier. On top of that, we added a second piano track that has no written part — it’s a sort of abstract solo on top of everything going on with the woodwind and piano ostinato figures.
Seventeen weeks to go and we still have plenty of ideas we’re looking forward to trying out.
This week’s video was shot at the home of a friend who has a very nice Steinway piano and some colorful artwork. Location recording can be more tricky logistically, but having done this for a few weeks now everything went surprisingly smoothly.
There is a theme of dualism this composition. First the two alto saxophone tracks. Then in the solo section trading between the piano and alto. I relate this to idea of memory, whether long-term or short-term. How accurate is either really? is memory tied to experience? Does that change over time? Really depends on personal perspective I guess.
Music definitely triggers memory and vice versa. I have listened to a piece of music that I haven’t heard in a while and heard it quite differently. Maybe hearing new things. One thing is for sure, even though music is experienced in a linear-based timeframe, memory can be timeless or even fragmented jumping from place to place.
Have any of you listeners had experiences relating to music and memory?
Most of the time, when I hear music, I have initial feelings about whether I like or dislike it and down the line (maybe next time I’m at a record store) that may influence my decision to buy or not buy the album. A couple of weeks ago, I came across the EPK for Brad Mehldau’s newest album, titled “Highway Rider,” and hearing the music provoked a much more immediate reaction — I knew that I had to buy the album and listen to it immediately. After buying and downloading the album from iTunes, I started digging around on Mehldau’s website and found an animated score for one of the songs.
This seemed like the perfect way to present the Duo Chronicles material. We already provide videos and sheet music files, so why not combine the two?
After quite a bit of research and planning, I came up with what I thought would be the best method to create that sort of video using the tools at my disposal. The final product was made with Finale 2010 (for the sheet music itself), Gimp (to edit the sheet music into separate image files), and Final Cut Express (to animate the image files and combine them with the audio track).
I chose to use the technique on “Twenty Seven,” a piece from a couple of weeks ago that was completely through composed, meaning that the score represented everything that was played — no improvisation to deal with. “Twenty Seven” also had a few instruments (melodica, soprano sax, tenor sax, and piano), making the five-staff score more interesting to represent than just a piano/sax duet with only three staffs.
Without going into too much detail, the basic process for creation of the video was:
Create a score that fit on one page (about 110 inches long and 5 inches tall)
Cut the score horizontally to make separate files for each instrument
Cut those resulting files vertically to break up the piece into sections (the result was about 50 separate image files)
Line up the different sections of the score with the audio track in Final Cut and add animations
The amount of time that it took to create the project makes it prohibitive to do for each Duo Chronicles piece, but it’s definitely something we’d like to explore further for the occasional video.
When I was thinking of possible titles for this piece of music, flow is a word that kept coming to mind. Flow, in how it relates to water and also the flow of information or knowledge. By definition the word cascade fits perfectly. One of the definitions for cascade is: “a small waterfall, typically one of several that fall in stages down a steep slope.” I imagine this slope might be slippery as well. The flow of water is also linear, like a live music performance. There is no going back. Each decision leads to the next musical moment. The flow of water is a also seamless in a way that makes time seem irrelevant.
A four-part chorale-like section bookends this piece. I was imagining a 20th century version of a Bach chorale if you will. Instead of a vocal choir, I orchestrated for soprano saxophone, flute, tenor saxophone and bass clarinet. John adeptly creates this woodwind choir through overdubbing. in fact, I think this is his Duo Chronicles debut on bass clarinet. Such a cool sound.
This week’s video is once again the product of some recent inspirations that have been working their way into both my writing and my playing — everything from playing Terry Riley with Third Angle to playing Damian Erskine’s music for his upcoming CD release.
The piece starts with a simple piano motif in 5/4. The motif varies slightly through the written sections of the piece, but stays fairly static — something that serves a roots for the piece while the tenor melody floats on top. In a larger group setting, I’d love to hear the piano part be accompanied by some sort of constant-8th note percussion, like tabla.
The tenor melody is made up of simple melodic fragments that use rhythms like triplets and groups of 4 over 3 to, like I mentioned before, float above the piano part without being too firmly rooted with the 8th-note motion below it. Thus, the title: “Surface Tension.”
The solo section breaks away from the piano motif set up at the beginning and brings the piece down to a much more simple and sparse feeling. Clay builds intensity in his solo until he cues on to the sax solo, which continues to build rather than coming down and starting another melodic arc. Eventually, the last melodic section is cued and one by one, tenor parts are added until the melody is being played in four part harmony.
Clay and I have been experimenting recently with overdubbing woodwind parts to achieve different colors. You can hear that in last week’s Twenty Seven where I wrote for a combination of saxes and melodica and you’ll hear it in an upcoming piece of Clays as well that involves an interesting combination of soprano sax, flute, tenor sax, and bass clarinet. For Surface Tension, I took a different route -- instead of layering different woodwinds to provide a new color, I choose to overdub four of the same instrument — the sound of one player being overdubbed against themselves (rather than a section of four different tenor players) was a color that I wanted to explore for this piece. I’ve been hooked on the sound ever since hearing Brecker use that effect on early Steps Ahead records.
As usual, you can check out the score by downloading the sheet music below.
