The Emperor’s Music was composed for the brass section of the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra. It is an antiphonal piece comprised of four groups:
I. trumpet, horn, trombone;
II. trumpet, horn, trombone;
III. trumpet, horn, bass trombone; and
IV. trumpet, horn, tuba.
The four groups should be spread across the stage as far apart as possible. This two-minute excerpt occurs a couple of minutes into the piece.
Good Morning. I just shuffled off my daughter to the bus stop on this cold and still morning. We may call it Fall but by the feel of it nature has hunkered down for winter. The deer’s coats are gray, the leaves on the big oaks are gone and unless I put out some bird seed in the feeders, I will rarely see or hear a bird, save a gull here and there. Gulls can be found soaring high above searching out for food, instinctively they know the creeks below, where they find so much easy prey, will soon be frozen, and rather than floating on those creeks they will be sleeping on its frozen surface for months to come. The sound I already miss at this time of year and welcome in the Spring is the distant whirr of outboard motors. It is a sound that can affect me like a suggestive word in hypnosis.
This sound file is the ending of A Fool’s Journey. The material for this piece was inspired by the sounds of laughter— all types of laughter. When I began composing this piece I would sit by an open window in my apartment ten floors above Fifth Avenue and listen to how people laugh. I would listen to how people laugh everywhere I went. I would listen to how their laughter would affect me and I would also notate their laughter in my mind and later put it down on paper. A Fool’s Journey is not intended to be a catalog of laughter by any means but it is a collection of laughter. It was also liberating to use laughter as musical material. Different types of laughter have different types of energy and so can be used for different purposes throughout the composition. This excerpt contains various giggles, wails, and guffaws.
This is a midi realization of the first one minute of Wheel of Fortune for hi hat and contrabass. The piece is ten minutes in duration.
[audio:https://www.markgustavson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/wheel-sounding.mp3|titles=Wheel of Fortune excerpt]
[audio:https://www.markgustavson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/new-turkey-ringtone.mp3|titles=Turkey Ringtone]
Here is a photo of Walden Pond at dusk.
I composed this one minute piece in 2002 for Chinary Ung’s 60th birthday concert. The piece is titled for chinary and it is for clarinet and percussionist (marimba and vibes). It’s really a study but I would like one day to work the piece out into something substantial. Would anyone like to commission such a piece?
[audio:https://www.markgustavson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/sound12.mp3|titles=for chinary]
[audio:https://www.markgustavson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/sounding-11.mp3|titles=Sounding #11]
This is the opening of a piece I composed in 1981 titled A Ray of Rattle, performed by The Performer’s Workshop Ensemble. The piece explores transforming a simple and pure sound, the octave, into a complex sound. As the octaves reappear they diminish and music increases in complexity. The end of the piece, the final sound, is a unison Bb of flutter tongues and rapidly repeated notes—a Bronx Cheer of distortion in contrast to the beginning’s pure whiteness.
[audio:https://www.markgustavson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/sounding-11a.mp3|titles=sounding #11a]
Using a bit of text out of “The Ponds” section from Thoreau’s “Walden” for a new song titled As Above, So Below for my Fisherman Songs cycle:
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me, — anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/26831677″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ff5c00″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ]
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/26018625″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ff5c00″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ]
This is a short study of an attempt to create material for a drone based on multiple levels of sound and how volume in one layer can take the ear away from the other layers for moment. Such an activity can lead to “What will sneak out from under the more prominent sound the next time?” Can a drone remain a drone, for example, under this type of change? This is an area that can be explored.
I’ve always been interested in drones and have used them in my music. I don’t limit a drone to being a single pitch, interval, complex sound or of repeated short sound patterns that sustains for a period of time (how long is that period of time to arrive at drone and not feel like it is something unintended?) with or without another layer of sound. I also don’t limit drones to aiding in the withdrawal of the senses. I want full sensory perception!
There is territory in drones that can be deeply explored. Drones can be transform. Drones can organically grow from drones and drones can be of multiple layers and each layer can operate independently. The tight rope walk in exploring drones will most likely involve when is a drone not a drone. At what point is a drone no longer a drone but a melodic line or harmonic support? How to keep two or three drones operating without a hierarchy?.
I am aware of the nontraditional approaches that have been taken place over that last 60 years. I am not interested in drones non-musical use. But I am approaching drones as a composer and exploring new musical territory, not to put listeners to sleep or withdrawal them from their senses. Some serious questions that I will need to address are, are drones transitional? Because if an event is introduced that has too much contrast, for example, it will draw the ear to it and interfere with the drone. If the introduction of a contrasting sound occurs often enough, however, will it too be perceived as part of the drone and weaken our feeling that it is interruptive? Where is that threshold or what are the elements involved in that threshold? What are the energy levels in a drone that make it engaging to listen to? Is there something else happening in the balance of musical energy that makes a drone? Does the composition of drone need to be regular or can it be consistently inconsistent?
