Pat Muchmore, composer

Most of the brokenAphorism pieces are duets that I've written to be played by me and my various Anti-Social friends. Although each individual Aphorism is a mini-Fracture piece ramming together (mostly) unrelated sections, almost all of them belong as movements to larger groupings. For instance, the first six are a single group, as are the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth. The musical sections being juxtaposed are generally shared between the different Aphorisms/movements of the larger work. The effect I'm going for is to make it sound like there are a few short self-contained pieces, but they have been shattered into chunks, shuffled amongst each other and distributed quasi-randomly throughout the movements.

For example, there might be a slow lyrical piece (p1), an angry piece (p2), and a quirky piece (p3). Each of these is smashed up into five shards (let's call them p1.1-5, p2.1-5 and p3.1-5). Let's say that the final composition is to be a group of four brokenAphorisms. bA_1, the first aphorism/movement, smashes together p2.3, p1.1, p3.5 and p2.2. bA_2, might have only p3.2, p1.2 and p3.3. Et cetera. Each individual shard might occur more than once or not at all, but most shards will only happen in unaltered form once. It is also fairly common for two or more shards to happen simulataneously, often without any particular interaction.

Each individual Aphorism has a name—essentially a movement title of the larger group of pieces—that reflects it's structure in terms of how these "original pieces" are distributed within them. Each of these ur-pieces is given some descriptive title; perhaps p1 is "austere", p2 is "grunge", and p3 is "phéres" (this last a reference to Ligeti's composition, Atmosphéres). Then the fictional bA_1 from the previous paragraph would be titled bA_1..grunge/austere/phéres/grunge and bA_2 would be called bA_2..phéres/austere/phéres. If our ficitional bA_3 were in two parts, the first a simultaneous presentation of shards from p1 and p2 and the second a presentation of shards from all three original pieces, then it would be titled bA_3..agursutnegree/paghurésurtneegsree. In this example I'm using bold and italics to elucidate the origin of the title, but this is not normally part of the actual title, you have to figure it out from other clues (except for brokenAphorisms_12-14, which uses such devices for a different reason).

Wow, as I reread this, it's very hard for me to imagine that anyone would care at all. For some reason, it's a big part of these pieces to me, but it's admittedly pretty obscure and may be of only personal significance. My main hope is that people can listen to these pieces and get a vague sense that, if only they could filter and rearrange these brokenAphorisms, simpler and more coherent works could be reconstructed. The tension between the relative chaotic form of the actual compositions and the hypothetical platonic structures that now lie in ruins is a big part of these pieces. It's like visiting Pompeii or Ephesus and imagining what once was, even while enjoying the look of the ruined structures as they now are. Or, more accurately, like some of Rodin's "incomplete" sculptures which imply a state that was once whole, even though that state never existed. Except that I'm nowhere near as cool as Rodin or the architects of Ephesus. I bet my tattoo is cooler than theirs though.