Ian A. Cook

Senior Composition Recital

On Saturday, April 21, at 7:00 PM, I will be presenting my senior composition recital in Urness Recital Hall. The program will include six pieces, four of which were completed this semester.

The program includes an aleatoric brass quintet titled The Pealing Bells, a Prelude and Fugue in B Minor for flute, horn, and violoncello, a twelve-tone piece Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano, a setting of a James Joyce poem titled O Cool is the Valley Now for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet, trumpet, and piano, a setting of a brand new poem by Sean Fleming titled Coyote Wine for SATB unaccompanied chorus, and a Neoclassical work for saxophone quartet titled Sonata Agitata.

Prelude and Fugue

I finished the last piece for my composition recital this past weekend, titled Prelude and Fugue in B Minor. It is a prelude and double fugue for flute, horn, and violoncello. It is stylistically similar to Bach’s fugues, but it adds some contemporary dissonance treatment. The fugue modulates systematically, beginning in B minor and moving to the relative major, then to its parallel minor, then its relative major, etc., until it returns to the original B minor. The piece will be performed on my composition recital, which will take place a week from this following Saturday.

A New Choral Piece

At the end of January, I wrote a piece for unaccompanied SATB chorus using a text written by Sean Fleming, a poet who graduated from St. Olaf just last year. The poem is titled Coyote Wine.

Gray hide emerges from gray mud,
your hair rusting at the shoulders
beneath the pruned vineyard rows
where old clusters turn to raisins.

The wicks of your ears piercing
the fog for a rabbit’s death squeal
tuned exactly like our corroding
chains reeling repetitiously.

The reward of civilization
is suffering, labored order
pray for our squandered abuse
yours is unconscious grace.

No mechanism to your vanishing
like wisdom bled from an old mind
like water swallowing your tracks
you have made us your wilderness.

The poet says “I wrote Coyote Wine after seeing a coyote in the middle of a vineyard while biking through southern Oregon. Coyotes are one of the few animals that have actually increased their range with the spread of humanity, so I was writing primarily about how our own proliferation helps other animals, that our civilization becomes a wilderness.” “Symmetry and order is not the law of nature, but a tool for propelling its chaotic beauty. The decay of civilization is but a reef for new life.”

The piece is going to be performed on my composition recital on April 21.

2011 MMEA Collegiate Composition Contest

This summer I submitted two pieces to the 2011 Minnesota Music Educators Association Collegiate Composition Contest. I finally received word of the results, and my two submissions, O Cool is the Valley Now and Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano, tied for second place in the chamber ensemble division. I hope that this is a fairly good sign, considering that this is the first contest I have ever entered. I am planning to enter more competitions in the future.

Brass Quintet

At the very end of first semester — in fact half of it was over winter break — I wrote a brass quintet. It is titled The Pealing Bells because it is meant to evoke a sense of the semi-random ringing of a set of bells. The work is for three trumpets, trombone, and bass trombone, and is completely aleatoric.

Aleatoric music is music which is determined by chance. In other words, rather than telling the performers exactly what and when to play notes, I gave them a general guide and am leaving the exact performance up to them. I give them their articulations and a set group of pitches from which they can choose, but for timing I give them only a range of seconds for which to hold their notes. These notes are to be played as bell tones, imitating the tolling of bells. Each individual part holds its tones for different durations, meaning that except perhaps by coincidence no parts will ever be starting or ending at the same time.

The whole piece is arranged in an arch structure reminiscent of the symmetrical shape of bells. It begins with the individual tolling of the first trumpet, which is slowly joined by the rest of the players one by one. The players are also given ever-expanding sets of pitches from which to choose their notes until the point where all twelve chromatic pitches are available, though only three from each of the bottom four players. At this point, the first trumpet has its own part to play which is slightly more structured using a harmon mute. The part uses the technique of feather beaming, a notation which denotes accelerando and ritardando without affecting the overall pulse for the other players. After this middle section, the first trumpet removes the harmon mute, and then the rest of the piece is an exact reversal of the piece, with each part having a dwindling number of pitches in their set until finally the first trumpet is left tolling a single pitch alone, just as in the beginning.

The piece is going to be performed on my composition recital on April 21. I’m very excited to hear what it actually sounds like, since my computer is completely unable to playback a piece such as this.

Saxophone Quartet

For the majority of this semester, I was working on a piece for saxophone quartet. The piece was written in a Neoclassical style. It uses modern harmonies but is organized in a Classical style. It is in two movements, and is my longest work to date, being approximately twelve minutes in duration.

The first movement is slow, quiet, and hymn-like. The movement introduces the atonality of the piece, presented in a homophonic texture imitating a hymn, though with changing meters. The movement highlights chords which are constructed with the pitch set 0-1-6, the pitch set which permeates much of the entire piece. The movement is in a large binary form. It ends with a quiet cadential phrase ending on the main pitch set. The alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones drop out while the soprano continues holding its pitch until the second movement begins attacca.

The second movement is organized in a large sonata form, though because the piece is atonal it is not organized in the traditional way, by tonal area. Rather, the form is organized by thematic material and contrasting styles and tempi. This whole movement, though particularly the first thematic area, is filled with changing, irregular meters, and the writing throughout the movement is highly contrapuntal with melodic writing in all parts. The first thematic area, which is marked allegro agitato, is defined by the quick, repeated, staccato eighth notes that begin immediately. The first few notes of both themes are based on the 0-1-6 pitch set. The second thematic area is marked andante cantabile, a slower tempo with much more legato writing. The texture is also much more sparse, with solo and duet passages interspersed with the full quartet. The section ends with a quiet statement of the same ending material as the first movement, before the retransition begins, increasing the tempo and moving back into the first thematic area. The entire exposition is repeated, though slightly paraphrased. The development, which is entirely in the tempo of the first thematic area, is filled with highly contrapuntal writing, much of it imitative, working through much of the material in the exposition. The development ends with the same material as the exposition, though ritardando rather than accelerando. The recapitulation returns to the same style and tempo as the first thematic area of the exposition, though this time the theme from the second thematic area is played instead. The second thematic area also reverses themes, with the first theme being played at the slower tempo and more legato style. The recapitulation draws to a close with material based on the end of the exposition, though with significantly quicker, more complicated rhythms. After a brief pause, the movement ends with a short, quick, loud passage marked allegro furioso which acts like an exclamation point to end the whole piece.

The piece is going to be performed on my composition recital on April 21 by a saxophone quartet at St. Olaf which includes two other senior music education students. I’m very excited to hear it performed by real saxophones, rather than just the computer playback.

Recital

On April 21 at 7:00 in Urness Recital Hall I will be giving a full composition recital. The program will include an aleatoric fanfare for brass quintet titled The Pealing Bells which I just finished a few days ago, an atonal saxophone quartet titled Sonata Agitata which is a work in two movements, the latter being in Sonata form (despite being atonal), O Cool is the Valley Now, a setting of James Joyce’s poem of the same name for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet, trumpet, and piano, Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano, a short four-movement 12-tone work for clarinet and piano, Separation, a work for string quartet and english horn from my freshman year using all tertiary motion, and two pieces that I haven’t finished yet, including a choral piece using a text by a recent Ole alumnus entitled Coyote Wine, and a piece for piano and two percussionists reminiscent of minimalism.

MMEA Composition Contest

Back in June I put two compositions in the mail, sending them in for the MMEA Collegiate Composition Contest. Surprisingly this is the first composition contest I’ve ever entered.

The first composition I sent is O Cool is the Valley Now which was performed in April for the Chamber Ensemble category.

The other composition I sent in is Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano, a newly revised version of my Three Short Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, in the Solo Instrument category. I decided that rather than calling them separate short pieces I would combine them and call them movements of a larger piece. I also added a fourth movement so that the tempi of the four movements would correspond to the classical sonata. This work is much shorter than a classical sonata is, with each movement lasting only a little more than a minute, but that’s why I called it a sonatina instead. The movements also aren’t in the classical forms, but that’s okay because it’s the 21st century and most modern sonatas haven’t been written using those forms in a century, at least. This piece is written using the twelve-tone method. It uses one tone row throughout all four movements, but it’s amazing how much contrast is achievable. I also made a concentrated effort to make the piece not be as harshly dissonant as much of the world’s twelve-tone music. Some brief moments (particularly in the second movement) even sound tonal!

I talked to one of the people in charge at MMEA, and she said that they had had some difficulties, but now they were mostly figured out, and we would probably hear back in January sometime. Also, there isn’t really much of a prize, other than a certificate, bragging rights, and something to put on the résumé. Oh well. We’ll see. I’m crossing my fingers.

Polymodality

Last year I came up with a new type of harmony in music which I have named tetramodality. As the name suggests, it involves the blending of four modes, though of course this method could end up being trimodality or bimodality, as well.  In other words, a generic term might be polymodality.

The inspiration for polymodality originally came from the technique of planing. For those who don’t know what planing is, it is a technique in which a series of harmonies are sounded such that they move in perfect parallel. In other words, Bach would kill a kitten if someone had proposed this technique to him. This technique was developed and mostly used during the Impressionism era of music by composers such as Claude Debussy. It is an absolutely gorgeous technique. It is used in one of my favorite piano solo pieces in existence: Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie.

The above example is an example of diatonic planing, in which the parallel harmonies remain within the same key signature. This means that the chords can change between major and minor. There also exists chromatic planing, in which the chord’s quality is maintained, causing the chords to leave the key signature. In my opinion diatonic planing is generally much prettier.

Every once in a while, however, diatonic planing will have its own chromaticism. This usually happens when the composer wishes to avoid any diminished chords (i.e. with a root of scale degree seven in a major scale). In such cases, the composer might make it a B♭. This will only happen with that bottom voice, however.

In other words, one could technically make the argument that the above example is bimodal. The bottom voice is in C mixolydian while the other two voices are in C ionian (major scale).

Well, I found this incredibly interesting. I decided that it might be interesting to try other modes, and perhaps try putting other voices in a different mode, rather than, or in addition to, the bottom voice. This is from where the idea of polymodality came.

Originally it was the idea of trimodality. I would put each of the three voices in a different mode and see what I came up with. For example, we could try starting out with the hybrid mode of Phryggian-Dorian in the root voice.

In this example, let’s keep perfect fifths throughout so as to avoid any diminished chords (this is exactly what Debussy sometimes did). If we find a perfect fifth above every note in this scale, we end up with the C ionian-aeolian hybrid scale.

Next we need to determine what mode to use for the third of each chord. Whatever we choose, it cannot result in any thirds which would make the chord anything other than a major or minor chord. This rules out lydian, which would disrupt the II chord, lydian-mixolydian, which would disrupt the II chord, and lydian #5 which would disrupt the II and III chords. For this example, I’ll choose to use aeolian-ionian.

I could end here, and this is originally where I stopped. I started to use trimodality in compositions in planing situations, but then I expanded it into the general harmonies used throughout the composition. When I began using it, however, I started to add sevenths and was unsure what quality they should be. Therefore, I added a fourth mode to determine the sevenths of each chord. In this example, I want to keep minor-minor and major-major sevenths throughout so as to avoid dominant sevenths. Let’s choose lydian-mixolydian.

As you can see, this technique creates incredibly chromatic harmonies (in fact this particular tetramode yields all twelve chromatic pitches), and yet it is incredibly easy to avoid dissonance. This particular combination of four modes is precisely what I used in the middle section of my composition O Cool is the Valley Now (though it is in D, not in C). I used a different tetramode during the beginning and end of the piece. It looks as though it would sound very, very strange, but I was told by multiple people after its premiere that it was quite beautiful.

In this particular piece I avoided all non-perfect fifths and all dominant chords. This means that there was very, very little dissonance except what was created by the sevenths and by suspensions and other non-chord-tones. The next time I use tetramodality, I plan to somehow involve more dissonance.

Welcome

Greetings, everybody. I would like to welcome you to my blog. This is where I will keep you up to date on my compositions and will probably make other updates about other random things related to music. Hopefully a good, fun time for all.