In this piece, I return to predominantly quartertonal harmonies for the first time in a few years. However, the harmonic framework also fits loosely into G-sharp minor/B major. The intent, like in much of my microtonal work, is that the quartertones go largely unnoticed by the casual listener. I build up a type of pseudo-Renaissance structure, transparent and smooth, using quartertones not to approximate just intonation, but rather to create a sort of “what-if”, alternate-reality harmonic system.

I have decided on this approach in order to dis­tance the text from any fixed nar­ra­tive. The music instead pro­vides a space for these lan­guage objects to be observed in, and in which the lis­tener can choose to create or not create his or her own nar­ra­tive. Pre­sented in this mono­lithic manner and detached from the con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of lan­guage prepo­si­tions, Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments sets up the oppor­tu­nity for a kind of mytho­log­i­cal reac­tion to develop around the pre­con­cep­tions of the lis­tener. The word-units com­bine with the music to create hints, but hope­fully hints that will take each lis­tener in a dif­fer­ent direction.

What inter­ested me about Swerve was the sen­sa­tion of the pas­sage of time con­veyed by the narrator’s emo­tions. I felt this had strong cor­re­la­tions with musi­cal form, and I wanted to try to trans­late the emo­tional form of Lang’s series into an instru­men­tal piece. There­fore, each poem in the set cor­re­sponds to a move­ment in Four Pieces, and each move­ment closely fol­lows the con­tent of the cor­re­spond­ing poem in Swerve.

Four Pieces was also my first suc­cess­ful attempt at the pur­pose­ful jux­ta­po­si­tion of dis­parate har­monic sys­tems. I wanted to be able to draw from a palette of func­tional and non-functional sonori­ties rang­ing from pop­u­lar music and jazz, to medieval, clas­si­cal, and twentieth-century West­ern music. I achieved this goal by plac­ing har­monic and melodic ideas in new local con­texts or by using the func­tion of one har­monic system with the mate­r­ial from another. Exam­ples include the osti­nato 6/3 chord in the first move­ment, trans­posed up a quar­ter­tone, and the func­tional cadence that ends the piece, dis­guised by dense pitch clus­ters and non-triadic sonorities.

listen to Viñes Passing Through

A mash-up by Steve Layton that uses Four Pieces.

Other sources: Ricardo Viñes – Menuet Spectral & En Verlaine Mineur, Christ­opher DeLau­renti – Tiger, Sara Peebles – Music for Incan­descent Events Joseph Drew – He Was a Poet