These are three composers whose work you really have to listen to. Each piece featured here has a distinct voice in modern music, and each composer shows merit in their well-prepared score and stellar recording.
Three composers you have to listen to
Put in order from sparsest texture, to most intense texture, to the most number of performers.
Ben Zucker – Clarke Distributions
http://www.benzuckersounds.com
https://www.westben.ca/pcr
The Clarke Distributions are part of a series concerned with composing ensemble interactions and relations between musical quality (if not the qualities themselves). The performers have a series of gestures to realize, with a gesture’s parameters linked to the playing of other members in real-time response. For this, it is named for Eric Clarke, a scholar on distributed creativity in musical settings.
What I love about this score
It is a really complex setup, but the score is presented in a clear manner. It is really easy to navigate even before seeing the setup and understanding the piece aurally. The score is textual, and through the use of formatting and grids it reads well. This reminds me of when I was performing some of Cage’s works in a mixed ensemble, but this work is much more reactive and involved, which is really refreshing and welcome. The music is consequentially more colorful and expressive.
Erich Barganier – A Drunk Man Will Find His Way Home But A Drunk Bird May Get Lost Forever
http://www.barganiermusic.com/
“A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever,” – Shizuo Kakutani.
“We start by describing the behavior of our drunkards mathematically. Conceptually a random walk is exactly what it sounds like. Our drunkard starts at a “home” vertex and then chooses at random a neighboring vertex to walk to next. We let X(n) denote the walkers position at time n. The drunkard returns home when X(n) = X(0). If the walker or bird is moving on a finite graph then there’s no way to get lost forever; there are simply not enough places to go. For simplicity of notation, we will assume that the bird never returns home at all. Don’t be bothered by this; since the bird’s past steps don’t influence his future steps beyond giving his current position we can imagine him returning home any number of times (even 0) before this final flight.” For more information, please visit http://www.math.cornell.edu/~mec/Winter2009/Thompson/randomwalks.html
What I love about this sound
Deep, pithy, and visceral, this piece is full of rich tone and dynamism. A rollercoaster ride without being excessively chaotic, the graphics in the score are interpreted masterfully in this performance to create an exciting sweep of high and low energies. The score must have been a monster to create. The unification of traditional and graphic notation is constant, and I can only imagine the time involved to create it. But, the result is truly worth the effort of engraving.
Gregory J. Watson – four textures for orchestra
https://www.gregoryjwatson.com/
As the title suggests, four textures for orchestra is comprised of four distinct formal sections or “textures”. These can be thought of as four continuous movements. Each movement was composed using a different musical texture to reflect a specific color. The colors reflected by these movements are pink, blue, black, and white in the order that they appear in the piece. The composer used the RGB numbers for each color as a basis for pitch content. The first texture, reflecting the color pink, focuses on high winds and strings and has many short, soft bursts of motion. The second texture, reflecting the color blue, utilizes the low to mid-range instruments of the orchestra. This texture focuses much more heavily on melodic, linear motion and has a more continuous character. The third texture, reflecting the color black, uses almost exclusively low instruments. This movement uses a drone on the pitch class C throughout. Other low voices move in and out of dissonant pitches, all in the low range, to create a thick and muddy texture. The final texture, reflecting the color white, uses high winds and strings in a similar fashion as the first texture. Though this texture also utilizes a drone, much like the third texture. This texture is glassy transparent. All elements of this final texture are very clear.
Why you should listen to this piece
This piece unifies really detailed orchestral writing with a simplicity a la Morton Feldman, while executing a really cool concept that, unlike many concepts, actually comes through quite evidently in the sonic representation of the idea. I can see the colors mentioned in the program notes in my head as the recording plays. This is a fascinating journey through tone, texture, and voicing. I love how the passage below allows the winds to be very quiet very idiomatically; there isn’t too much effort involved to execute the composer’s intent in this passage and as a result the music “breathes” and isn’t forced. This helps the textures and concepts come to the forefront, instead of any extreme difficulties in performance becoming dominating factors.
Three composers you have to listen to – no excuses!
These are three composers you have to listen to–no excuses! Find some time and take a listen! You will not regret it. Don’t forget to check out more articles on composerstoolbox.com for more great music.
