MUSICAL COMPOSITION, WONDER, WITH DOCUMENT By PAUL BRENDAN ALLISTER STEENHUISEN Bachelor of Music University of British Columbia 1987 Master of Music University of British Columbia 1990 Certificaat Koninklijk Conservatorium 1991 Cursus de Composition IRCAM 1997 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS (Composition) in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (School of Music) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard/ THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA December 1997 © 1997 Paul Brendan Allister Steenhuisen In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of fl\ LlS) The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date DE-6 (2/88) 11 ABSTRACT Wonder is a dense, complex and unconventional sixteen minute composition for orchestra, tape and soprano voice. The tape component is divided into fourteen segments and runs almost continuously throughout the piece, concurrent with the orchestra and the soprano voice. It consists primarily of processed instrumental timbres, but also contains concrete timbres and computer-generated sounds. The soprano voice figures prominently in one section and appears infrequently elsewhere in the music, in brief episodes. The role of the voice is similar to that of the other instruments in the orchestra - it is an important contributor to the articulation of the form through its content and orchestration, but does not function dominantly as a soloist throughout the entire composition. The texts (sung by the soprano and sung/chanted by choir on tape) are passages selected from the poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73), Henri Michaux (1899-1984), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). Each poetic fragment is concerned with love, magnification, and resonance. The concept of resonance informs every aspect of Wonder, including the derivation of the prime material, the battery of compositional techniques, the form, the content and function of the tape part and the choice of texts. Material for the music was gathered by performing a spectral analysis on unique, short fragments of recorded sound produced on a crotale, a violoncello, a bass trombone and by a soprano voice. The resulting groups of frequencies (one array from each of the four analyzed source timbres) were interpreted in a variety of ways and amplified out of their originally small scale into the raw material on which Wonder is based. Each set of material is presented in its own section of iii the music, with its original orchestration and characteristic gestural iconography, and is subjected to a plethora of developmental operations, including addition, vibration, movable points of transposition/inversion and time-points. Some rhythmic figures are notated within metriproportional brackets identifying their contents as unsynchronized and ad libitum, performed with reference to the barline and active time signature. The interference form manifest in Wonder consists of three distinct strata, each layer mapping related sectional orderings. Formal layers are distinguished by their contrasting durations, and may be active simultaneously or articulated in discontinuous, isolated blocks. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 11 Table of Contents iv Acknowledgements v I. Introduction 1 II. Spectral Analyses 9 III. Compositional Techniques 16 IV. Electroacoustics 26 V. Notation 33 VI. Form 36 VII. Texts 45 VIII. Conclusion 47 IX. Quotations Glossary 49 X. Bibliography 55 XI. Score: Wonder 57 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank-you to: nathan wilkes laura, mcpheeters david Simpson bob pritchard diane loomer david jaeger larry lake dieter piltz michaela lawrence ian crutchley elektra women's choir the university of british Columbia choral union karen wilson the cbc Vancouver orchestra owen underhill Vancouver new music bob tonge fredrik hedelin tristan murail brian ferneyhough I am especially indebted to: my parents, for their support of my music throughout my life, my son brendan, for his love, humour, and kindness, keith hamel, for sharing his deep knowledge of music, and quietly to nib. wonder is dedicated to elizabeth skillings, whose presence, warmth, and insight inspired the music. 1 In 1543, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1514-64) published the first of two volumes entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica, which showed cadavers stripped of their skin to reveal their bone, muscle, arterial and nerve structures. Vesalius' goals were to learn how components of the body interact and to study the complex relations necessary for movement and circulation; looking beneath the surface unlocked medical mysteries and offered a seemingly infinite variety of explanations and avenues for further study. Musically, it seems that in this aesthetically transitional time, rather than looking outward and drawing upon other musics (the unsophisticated and crude language of popular music and/or colonized ethnic music (l)1) into art music or anachronistically adopting an historical musical language, an endless array of new possibilities is afforded by looking within sound, within form and within parametric relations. Just as De Humani Corporis Fabrica was Vesalius' manifestation of his interest in kinetics and the blending of the scientific and the creative, Wonder is the result of intuitively and mechanically applying the analyses of fragments of complex instrumental sounds and multifarious compositional techniques to achieve a new music. 1 Single numbers in parentheses are references to the Quotations Glossary found on page 49, and are not to be confused with example numbers which refer to structural diagrams and musical examples within the body of the document. The inclusion of a Quotations Glossary (containing fragments of text relating to the material discussed in the main section of the document) affords the written portion of the thesis a structure somewhat loosely related to the form of the music itself. 2 Wonder contributes to the repertoire by expanding upon the foundation of knowledge gathered from the study of western art music; by its unusual inclusion of tape with orchestra, with the addition of voice which does not dominate throughout the piece; by its radical approach to form; and through its development and implementation of an arsenal of compositional techniques. The dividends of the music are also to be found in part in the degree to which the parameters have been sculpted and drawn together. Wonder is an attempt to shatter the received "wisdom" of normative boundaries that hinder the freedom of musical thought and compositional activity. By aiming to destroy the enclave of perceived constraints and boundaries of musical imagination (conventional guidelines for what should and should not occur in music), new paths are afforded, emancipating radically fresh environs in the domains of form, colour, density, structural configuration and generative procedures for the extension of materials. This does not imply, however, that given the attempted infinite range of possibilities, everything available must be included in the final work, but rather that the scope of elements can be enlarged to enable more breadth when artistic decisions are made (2). In avant-garde music there can and should be greater range regarding colour, density, combinations of material, and rates of change, and the more extreme of these are chosen in Wonder. The goal is to breathe life into the stale and decaying genre of late twentieth century music for orchestra (3). The avant-garde nature of Wonder was determined intuitively in the initial sonic imprint of the piece and then honed over an extended gestation period. First the orchestration (acoustic and electroacoustic) was firmly established, then the form, and finally the barrage of compositional techniques necessary for the realization of this sound-world. The goal of each facet is to assist in creating a complex and colossal sound arena hosting a mine of 3 connections based on the concept of resonance (4). New ways of composing, orchestrating and generating material are added to traditional methods. Colouristically, this entails the variation of conventional orchestral forces by elimination (clarinets and bassoons) and expansion (added percussion, tape and soprano). Resonance was also the catalyst for the development of a multi-layered approach to form, in which a hierarchy of three levels articulate fundamentally similar structures, resulting in a circuitous, labyrinthine, and discontinuous path through the music. Additionally, the work achieves its primary goals using the spectral analyses of instrumental timbres, swelling the small unit of source timbre into the basic material, and by building and accumulating tightly knit lines with multiple developments of the initial material. The totality of material is amassed into a rich sound document with polyvalent levels of interpretation (5). The duration of the piece is sixteen minutes. It is scored for an orchestra (lightly amplified for balance with the tape) comprised of two flutes (both doubling on piccolo), two oboes (one doubling on cor anglais), two trumpets,