Canon #87, Barite

Announcing Canon #87 — “Barite.”

Work on this piece started in a typical way for me. I spent a week exploring various ideas from my canon to-do list, but I couldn’t get any of my sketches to take flight. I kept working through Memorial Day weekend; still nothing. It was hard not to think the long weekend would have been better spent on something else entirely – maybe I should have given up and tried again later? – but I know that every day that seems fruitless is an investment in what’s to come. In a sense, you can’t get something done unless you’re willing to accept the feeling that you’re getting nothing done, and keep going anyway. Finally on Monday evening, I noticed a simple technical option that I hadn’t yet explored in any of my canons. I’ve written a few canons in 3/4 time where the lag is one beat, but I hadn’t written a canon in 3/4 where the lag is two beats (leader starts on the first beat, follower starts on the third beat). Why not? Although Max Reger isn’t my model for canon writing, I notice he used this construct in a good number of his 111 Kanons durch alle Dur und Molltonarten. Ready for something new to work on, I abandoned the other sketches I had been struggling with and started a canon in 3/4 with a two-beat lag.

As with most of my canons, the first step is to create an outline, not one that I like, but one that I love. Why is this step so important? After all, the quality of the outline doesn’t necessarily dictate the quality of the finished piece. It’s totally possible to transform a lackluster outline into a great piece because as you’re working, you can revise the outline or simply throw it away when it stops serving you. The problem for me is that when I don’t start with an outline I absolutely love, it’s hard to find the motivation to keep struggling to reveal its potential. If I do love the outline, then that love propels me: I feel an overwhelming resolve to do whatever it takes to transform the outline into a full piece of music. So while I could probably start with cursory outlines that take a few minutes to throw together, and maybe I’d produce more pieces that way, I’m more inclined to spend hours or days creating an outline that totally captivates me, because once I’m hooked, I’ll never abandon the piece even when the going is rough. You could say I have a kind of perfectionism about my outlines, but I take the view that perfectionism itself isn’t evil: one just needs to be realistic about what one chooses to be a perfectionist about. Outlines are the good things to be a perfectionist about because they’re simple enough that you actually can make them perfect.

So I started making an outline for Canon 87, and managed to get something I loved. During the outlining stage, I don’t really know what style the piece is going to land in. My outline for Canon 87 was full of unprepared and unresolved dissonances, suggesting it would take on a modern style, but the melodic material was firmly tonal and full of diatonic sequences, and the implied harmonies all seemed to fall within the realm of “common practice.” As I developed the piece, this duality persisted: in a melodic or “horizontal” sense, the piece started sounding like something from the 18^th century but in a “vertical” sense it seemed much more modern. Towards the end of the piece, the interval palette becomes more consonant, with more thirds and sixths on measure onsets; the sound is less conflicted in spirit and style. I considered revising the latter part of the piece to keep the style more consistent with the dissonant opening, but I decided instead to embrace the piece’s progression from a dissonant to a more consonant palette, and from a severe to a lighter mood.

To bring the piece to a satisfying conclusion, I knew I’d have to break out of the canon and write some free counterpoint. I was ready for ending to be a struggle as it often is. But then I came upon the idea of having the voices move mostly in parallel at the end (after all, they had established their independence by now, right? What more did they have to prove?). I brought them closer together and had them converge into a unison at the final beat, and that worked.

A few details: the piece uses diatonic imitation at the fourth above. It opens in D minor, progresses to G minor, moves back to D minor, and finally progresses to B-flat major. The imitation is fairly strict, but the bottom line takes various ornaments that the top doesn’t repeat. I chose the name Barite because, for whatever reason, the piece brought the color yellow to mind, and Barite is a mineral that can look yellow when cut as a gemstone (all of the other more familiar yellow gemstone names are taken by now). Unlike many of my pieces, Canon 87 has only one section and doesn’t go through an inversion. (It’s probably possible to get this material to work in an inverted form, but it would take some rewriting, and although I always wish my pieces were just a little bit longer, I think this one reaches a natural stopping point and doesn’t call for an extension.) The piece is based on the simplest of melodic figures: on almost every measure onset, in the bass, you can hear a note, followed by its lower neighbor, and then the note again. I like working with simple figures such as this — I like seeing how much they can do.

 

Canon #86, Tiger’s Eye

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.

Rip, Slam, Blast

I understand that people who write news headlines face a challenge. The headline should be compact, gripping, and easy to understand. So it’s natural that editors would prefer active, monosyllabic verbs. But this leads to an inequity of sorts. I see a ton of headlines of the form:

X rips Y!

X slams Y!

X blasts Y!

Typically, X is a loud, obnoxious individual who has done nothing more than go on Twitter and post a derogatory and unfounded comment about Y. In other words, X hasn’t really done anything aside from spouting off. And yet, for not doing anything particularly hard, X gets the benefit of having their actions described with some of the most powerful verbs in the English language.

To rip, slam, or blast something suggests an act of great force and great consequence. One assumes that that the person doing the ripping, slamming, or blasting possesses great energy and is motivated by great conviction to use that energy in service of a cause. Superheroes blast things.

If all you’ve done is type some nasty, possibly misspelled, and probably false words about someone you don’t like, you’re not a superhero, and your actions don’t merit the powerful descriptors we attach to the heroic. You haven’t done anything to deserve the strength of a word like “blast.”

Journalists, if you must report on the fact that X wrote something nasty about Y on Twitter, how about not saying “X slams Y?” Instead just say what happened:

X tweets about Y

Or do you not want to do that because a matter-of-fact description would reveal there’s no story here?

 

Canon #85, Tin

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.]