Seven Words, Seven Worlds

Please note that the recording begins with two or so minutes of intoning as the singers process into the performance area and is very quiet.

Seven Words, Seven Worlds is a piece for 12 singers that was premiered by OSSIA New Music on Oct. 25th 2008. The following are the program notes from the premier.

The germ of this piece, the all-influencing cell from which the piece was birthed, is the ‘sameness’ of dissimilar things. Traditional ideas of unity and harmony are largely abandoned in favor of a piece-view that sees unity and harmony in the sameness of everything, no matter how disparate. This means that there are, amongst the musical organs of this work, those that are traditionally constructed using, for example, the idea of canon, and those that are generated by far less conventional methods. These sections, however, are not viewed as contrasting or conflicting, nor are they viewed as superior or inferior. The sameness value-system that informs this work stipulates that from note-to-note and section-to-section, sounds are simply sounds and pieces are pieces, and everything that exists is a measure of itself and nothing more.

I must rely on the acceptance of a zen precept of immediacy if I am to make any further attempt to define this ‘sameness’ beyond the above. The precept is something like ‘That which is true and immediate is true, and that which is true, but is labored over is likely to lose its perceived trueness.’ As concerns this piece, trueness simply defines the honest creation of a self-reliant and self-fulfilling bit of music. While I cannot say that I did not labor over parts of this work, I can honestly attest to my willingness to get out of my own creative way. The individual sections of the piece were all composed from beginning to end individually before contemplating the next, and only after all were composed were they placed together in as honest a sound-universe as I could conjure up for them. Practically, this honesty is embodied in the transitionless nature of the whole.

The piece is, at the end, a putting-together of seven sections of music with five ‘interludes.’ The material for the larger sections was composed with no thought for what came before or after. They are self-contained musical worlds that exist and operate under their own, unique set of conditions. They share one common element; each is motivated by only one condition or state. As a mundane example, a section’s MO could be “gravity”, where all of the notes could only go down from where they started. On a more interesting and larger scale, this idea could be expanded to control sound objects in a 3D virtual space where gravity would mean that the pull of one musical idea affects that of another in a rule-based sound environment like planets circling a sun. A ‘state’ that is employed in one of the sections of the work is controlled chaos.

The Interludes were constructed differently. The basic pitch material for the interludes was generated by an algorithm I wrote in a computer synthesis language called SuperCollider. This algorithm, when supplied with the appropriate information (number of voices, number of notes desired) spits out a string of pitch class numbers. I then took these numbers and employed them in different ways to achieve different musical textures and styles from interlude to interlude.

Some of the musical material, the constructive ideas and realization thereof, are very simple. Some are very complex. I hope that in experiencing this work, the listener will gain some insight into the ideas of sameness as described above. More than this, I hope the listener will enjoy the piece from moment to moment.