Magic Threes
I am terribly grateful to the Bowers-Fader Duo. They asked me to write songs. I did, and then they performed them! They presented my new settings of Québécois lyrics on October 27, 2018 at 8pm at Tenri Cultural Institute, again on January 27 at the American Opera Center.
I'm preparing my first CD of my compositions. I dash my works on the floor and read the entrails. I find things in threes. Threes are found in fairy tales, and so I'm concluding my music is from the same place.
Partial List of 3's
--The love riddles in my variations on I Will Give My Love and Apple
--The three roses in Various Roses
--the "trois gars" in Fraises et les framboises
--and the three harmonic tricks in the under water scene in Ziguezon
Woefully wonkish from here:
The three harmonic tricks in the under water scene in Ziguezon, in which the baron --le chevalier-- wrestles with a water sprite. It's verse 5.
The first trick is a Davidovsky trick: Dither within the chromatic tetrachord, bound within a minor third, and make the break out to the major third a big deal. That trick is followed seconds later a different kind of trick.
The 2nd and third tricks are M5 of each other. M5 of a tune or a row can be boring and mechanical; M5ing an interval vector move did not disappoint. I suspected that one very powerful interval vector move (must be a move that was does not M5 to itself) would M5 to another powerful interval vector move. I began with a move that was known to me for decades.
The Beatles, in *Mother Natures Son* makes a powerful interval vector move.
spelling from bottom to top:
B minor; D/A; G# m7b5
[ B, D, F# ]; [ A, D, F# ] ; [ G#, D, F# ]----then, after a pause, add low E.
The tune over these chords is very sweet, with the C# passing against the D in the 2nd chord.
The effect is oh most sincere hippie, right up until the goofy rising skiffle bass line beginning on E:
E, G#, B, E
The E laughs at the sincerity of the hippie sentiments, and it implicates the shift from minor thirds to major seconds in the humor. It's a true IV phenomenon.
Adding the E, below G#, D, F# (and the B lingers, still in the air) completely changes the mood. Two minor thirds are suddently overwhealmed by 4 whole tones. We switch abruptly from a minor 3rd universe to a whole tone universe.
I took this a step further in my treatment of Ziguezon.
The D in measure 110 is the Beatles move eliding into the next verse.
The Gb in measure 105 is the M5 mod 12 of the Beatles move, it revs up into the section break at 110, and it is a "ha ha".....
The impulse came from the suspicion that the M5 of the move would have its own special kind of punch.
The D and the Gb both break the octotonic.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey