The three movements of this piece are the sixteenth through eighteenth members of my brokenAphorism series. Unlike most other members of the series, the movement titles aren't shuffled versions of codenames for different musical ideas, but are (relatively) straightforward descriptions of the pitch content. Here are translations of the various Greek words:
- the word in the middle of the first movement is "phrygian"
- the full second movement is "[genus]chromatic/enharmonic/diatonic"
- the word in the middle of the third movement is "ALEA" which is Greek for dice, a term often used to describe chance-based music.
The three movements of this piece deal with pitch content based on, respectively, scales, Ancient Greek genera (explained a titch below) and contour segments or CSEGs. Each movement is itself divided into three parts—each a different variety of that movement's central concern. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense, but it might with specific examples.
The first movement is about scales, and its first section has a melody using the standard western chromatic scale. It's played by the cello using eerie artificial harmonics. The second section is based on the same basic melodic idea, but translated into the phrygian mode and notated using Ancient Gregorian Chant neumes. The final third of this movement again translates the melody into a different scale, this time the massively spaced-out "cycle-7" scale, a linear version of the circle of fifths.
The second movement's sections are each in a different genus of the Ancient Greek scalar system. These are essentially like different "flavors" of the same basic scale patterns. The first section uses the chromatic genus, which is built largely out of half steps. The second section uses the enharmonic genus which includes quarter-steps, or notes in between the keys of the piano. This section is notated using Ancient Greek notation. The final part is entirely played using natural harmonics, and features the more open-sounding diatonic genus.
The last movement has different variants of the same CSEG, or contour segment. CSEG<210> is a way to refer to a 3-part pitch pattern which starts out with its highest pitches and ends with its lowest. The three sections are texturally quite different, but follow this general pattern. As in the other movements, the second section uses unconventional notation—in this case a Morton-Feldman-esque diagram of general pitch location and length that is otherwise completely unspecific.
Other than al-Gharaniq II:}{:Fracture IV, this piece was the first one I wrote that was designed to specifically feature different notational languages. In particular, I had never tried to compose something using Renaissance/Gregorian Chant notation before, and it led me to a very different melodic style than I had explored previously. This was actually the second time I used Ancient Greek notation, but was the first time I truly tried to notate the whole section without reference to standard notation at all. I wrote this piece to be played with my CUNY Graduate Center colleague Jeff Leigh, who also composed some violin/cello duets. I love those kind of informal collaborations.
