COMPOSER'S NOTE

I. North

II. Canaries in the Morning, Balloons at Night

North and Canaries in the Morning, Balloons at Night were conceived as complementary portraits, opposite canvases of a diptych. Though the pieces may be performed separately, they are best understood when heard as a pair, since sonorities, details of orchestration, and formal contours are mirrored and cross-referenced between the two works. Together, they present a mappamondo of my life to the present, with various places I’ve lived and visited divided for the purposes of argument into “northern” and “southern” camps, then exploring the mentalities, prejudices, and associations of each.

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North was conceived during a trip to Western Ireland in August 2002, at the tail end of the northernmost summer of my life–-three months split between Scandinavia, St. Petersburg, and the British Isles. Long stretches of coastline, at once beautiful and barren, sparked a desire to capture a simultaneous sense of lush tranquility combined with a stranger’s skeptical distance and unease. What sits beneath the north’s rugged, reticent, uninviting (at least to a southerner) exterior? A hidden pearl of warmth, or just empty ice? A guarded secret, or nothing at all?

This tension between a surface austerity and the core of beauty or ambivalence underneath is the subject of North. The piece’s fundamental materials are rigid in the extreme: an unwavering slow tempo from start to finish, regular repeated rhythms, a harmonic grid of six modes of six notes each that furnishes the work’s entire pitch content, from the registrally compartmentalized modes at the outset to the expansive senza vibrato string chords four minutes later. Though moment to moment the music is colorful, intricate, and inventive, its constrained palette ensures that large-scale events unfold at a decidedly slow pace bordering on aimlessness. Contradictory sensations of time are explored throughout, most simply on the local level by superimposing rapid fluttering gestures against sustained tones, but also in its overall trajectory; North could be considered a measured linear journey or a tautological recycling of a single idea, but refuses to answer the question decisively. The final two minutes of the piece deconstruct earlier moments; reminiscences drift by as unhitched percussive sounds intrude as the central pitch (E) asserts itself ever more forcefully, finally closing the piece on an inconclusive note: a sudden sparkling sound which becomes duller as it fades.

In addition to the Pynchon quote that appears at the head of the score, Seamus Heaney’s poem “North” also played a part in my work. Its three closing stanzas, the imagined advice of ‘ocean-deafened voices’ that the speaker hears along a northern coastline, provided a sort of mantra during a year spent in London that kept me motivated to

      ...‘Lie down
      in the word-hoard, burrow
      the coil and gleam
      of your furrowed brain.

      Compose in darkness.
      Expect aurora borealis
      in the long foray
      but no cascade of light.

      Keep your eye clear
      as the bleb of the icicle,
      trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
      your hands have known.’

———

Canaries in the Morning, Balloons at Nightis a celebration of the south, in both a general sense as a world of sensuality and excess, and in the specific sense of the American South and the analogous “south” of Europe, the Mediterranean. The title is taken from the opening lines of Wallace Stevens’ “Academic Discourse at Havana,”a poem that discusses the role of the artist in a southern climate. How can a painter compete with the naturally bold colors of the tropics? Could a theatrical production be more entertaining than watching a crowded market or public square? Should art of the south express only the primal, elemental, and immanent, or is there a place for intellect and abstraction as well? Canaries in the Morning, Balloons at Night aims to answer these questions by being both straightforward and intricate, “in the moment” and also above it, maintaining a sly and carefree facade from start to finish.

The piece unfolds as a travelogue, a snapshot series of short episodes that visit various “southern” styles of music. There’s a New Orleans shuffle, some swing, bluegrass, blues, gypsy fiddling, klezmer, salsa, rock, a waltz, a North African modal dance, and some zydeco near the end, ushered in by a solo for the washboard. There are no actual quotations, but the piece plays with the clichés and riffs associated with these styles, often amplifying what are normally considered mundane aspects of the music (common riffs, horn hits, drum patterns) to the foreground. These stylistic episodes sometimes fade into one another, sometimes hinge on an abrupt shift of character; often they are linked with a crescendo, an emblem for overboiling excitement and a major motive of the piece. In fact, the basic musical materials of the piece are simple throughout--tonal melodies, major chords, stock progressions and cadences, repeated rhythms, familiar melodic tics. Towards the end of the piece, stylistic episodes are superimposed, fading in and out of the foreground as their function is called into question. Rising tension ultimately gives way to a crash in the bass, as a low fifth fades into the distance as its partials swirl into the treble––a return to an unmediated elemental sound.

North was premiered March 17, 2004 at the Royal College of Music in London with Clement Power conducting. Canaries in the Morning, Balloons at Night was commissioned for the 20th anniversary of the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra and premiered September 25, 2004 in Lafayette, Louisiana under the baton of Mariusz Smolij.