This is an example of what I sometimes call “rainy day composing.” It is about writing music to discover an idea rather than to express something. Since there’s no artistic agenda, it can be very freeing and reveal new materials that might have surprising value.

There are two small sets of materials here, each one based on a different sequence of intervals. I chose to work with them since they seemed to be relatively neutral materials and would facilitate exploration.

An ascending (and descending) sequence of M3+m3 (Major thirds alternating with minor thirds). Link here …

2. An ascending (and descending) sequence of m3+m2 (minor thirds alternating with minor seconds). Link here …

At the moment, the sound files are all played via MIDI.

Major & Minor Thirds

For the most part, the reason we take on exercises is to acquire ideas and skills that will help with our practical and creative work. So I often end an exercise sequence with a small creative application, and this is what I’ve done with the exercise above. The little jazz ballad on page 9 (measure 87) arises as a direct expression of the interval work on the preceding pages, that is, the ascending sequence of alternating major and minor thirds as it finally results in a succession of 5-note chords. The style of the music is arbitrary and could have been almost anything else; but the unbroken succession of 9th-chords certainly suggested the feeling of a light jazz ballad.

I thought it might be useful to those who are visiting this post to see how such materials might play out in a more developed creative project. The link here is to a commissioned twenty-minute piece for three-pianos based on a 1953 award-winning fantasy novel by Theodore Sturgeon, “More Than Human.” The plot is described on Wikipedia. “The novel concerns the coming together of six extraordinary people with strange powers who are able to "blesh" (a portmanteau of "blend" and "mesh") their abilities together. In this way, they are able to act as one intelligence. They progress toward a mature gestalt consciousness, called the homo gestalt, the author’s proposed next step in the human evolution.

SPECIES

[a 20-minute piece for three pianos written on commision for choreography based on Theodore Sturgeon’s book, More Than Human.

The piece linked below (Species) was composed using this and a couple of other interval sequences, almost to the exclusion of any other compositional processes. This idea is not new in music; composers have been using intervals as the basis for composition for a long time. What might be new is how these longs strings of intervals are left intact in order to represent characters, events and situations.

The commission for this piece came with an interesting requirement that we could not begin until we were actually together in Toronto. I was in Maine and the choreographer was in Newfoundland, and postponing the creative process until we were together would leave only a few weeks to formulate a dramatic and musical narrative, experiment with materials, compose music for three pianos, notate legible scores and get them to the musicians so that they could learn and play it for the dancers, and so on.

So some amount of writing had to be completed with sufficient lead time for the pianists to learn it and record the three-piano music for the dancers to work with. No MIDI, then. With so little time to put this all together, I needed an approach to the composing that would be not simply a rough sketch but somehow very modular—not only modular in form but also in materials. I saw that, rather than try to begin with any notions of a fixed piece, it would be more efficient to compose a set of materials that could be reassembled in different ways, perhaps something like changing patches on a Moog synthesizer, or gathering all the best ingredients before even deciding on the dish to be cooked. This interval exercise which was formulated years before—in what was then only a “rainy-day” composing exercise—turned out to be the fulcrum around which the whole process would evolve.

Each character could have a slightly different interval sequence by combining major and minor thirds in various combinations. I anticipated that it would be more subtle than the associative use of motifs in other productions of dance and opera, and I could only hope that it might support the narrative something like the way a good lighting designer can influence the mood of the story. The playfulness of the five-year old teleporting twins was best energized by simple alternations of M3+m3. Other characters or events were represented by sequences such as M3+M3+m3 or m3+m3+M3, and so on. I did not really anticipate how effectively the very varied different characters of the narrative would be characterized by the different interval sequences. A preponderance of major intervals sounded more energized and optimistic and, conversely a greater number of minor thirds gave a more somber or negative feeling. And Janie—who embodies and functions as the Conscience of the new multi-organism—is the only character represented by fourths, specifically the Cycle of Fourths (Fifths). Only in the slowest section of the music (mm.240-280) does the rigour of the interval principle give way to a poignant lyrical section.

Here is a PDF of the score… Species

and a copy of the premiere (no video) Species live performance

And a MIDI performance … Species (M