Writing

Program notes for Resonant Frequencies

Syntithenai

At the Still Point of the Turning World

More than eight centuries separate the oldest music from the newest music on this program. To 21st Century ears, Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes (1198), Sederunt Principes (1199), and Alleluia Nativitas (c. 1200) may sound strange in the way they seem to defy the now familiar conventions of harmony and voice leading that developed in the centuries that followed. Tonal hierarchy among the notes is nonexistent, and dissonant intervals that composers would later try to avoid occur freely between parts. Yet there are some aspects of this music that closely resemble contemporary compositional practices. Each of these pieces, originally composed for voices, is based on a pre-existing liturgical chant. For select portions of the chant, Pérotin stretches out individual notes—sometimes for as long as a minute—and, with the addition of newly composed material, reveals an entirely new world within them. In the arrangements made for this concert, this process of transformation is taken a step further by replacing voices with acoustic and electric instruments in order to explore the variety of instrumental colors that this music suggests.

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Central to the act of creation is the assembly of raw materials into newfound forms. In the case of Kevin Hartnett’s Immiscible Figures (2019), the interactions between these materials take center stage. The piece is composed of a collection of distinct, elemental musical gestures that span the expressive range of the string quartet. Accented chords, propulsive sixteenth notes, ethereal tremolo, tenebrous glissandi, and playful harmonics exist in close proximity to one another, and their frequent juxtaposition results in a sonic landscape marked by volatility and turbulence. Despite repeated contact, the gestures largely resist each other's influence. Occasionally, however, their continued interactions produce combinations and alignments that result in the creation of something new. These moments of synthesis—however fleeting—play a major role in the development of the piece.

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GLASS THE TRADITIONALIST: SUBJECTIVITY AND TELEOLOGY IN EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH

by Kevin Hartnett

In the late 1960s, Philip Glass and several of his contemporaries—among them Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young—rebelled against the dogma of the academic musical establishment and created with zeal a music that would soon be described as “minimalist.” Due to its widespread influence in the years since, it is perhaps now difficult to imagine just how radical and innovative this music was for its time. After decades of esoteric chromatic serialism, the unabashed consonances, steady pulses, and relentless repetition of this new “minimal” music marked a bold departure from the familiar sound-world of the avant-garde. Additionally, the early music of Glass and his cohorts functioned completely outside of the tradition of conventional dialectical Western music. Instead, its emphasis was on process and objectivity. In his 1980 review of the American minimalist movement, Belgian musicologist Wim Mertens characterizes the difference as such:

Traditional dialectical music is representational: the musical form relates to an expressive
content and is a means of creating a growing tension; this is what is usually called the
“musical argument.” But repetitive music is not built around such an “argument”; the work is
non-representational and is no longer a medium for the expression of subjective feelings.

Mertens is not alone in describing minimalist music in these terms. Steve Reich’s widely-read 1968 essay “Music As a Gradual Process” outlines the composer’s preference for audible, impersonal processes. Philip Glass later echoed Reich’s sentiment and suggested that “the listener will therefore need a different approach to listening, without the traditional concepts of recollection and anticipation. Music must be listened to as a pure sound-event, an act without any dramatic structure.”

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