dome, arch, barrel, void for 8 instruments

74 Pages·2017·5.98 MB·English

dome, arch, barrel, void

for 8 instruments

(Volume 1 of 2: Analysis)

Zeynep Toraman
Schulich School of Music
McGill University, Montréal

August 2017

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the
degree of Master of Music
Abstract
dome, arch, barrel, void is an original music composition scored for eight instruments
with a duration of twelve minutes. The analytical paper presented in Volume 1 of this thesis,
illustrates the compositional tools and methods developed during the composition process. The
musical score is presented in Volume 2. The piece aims to investigate the construction of a large
scale form by utilizing Gérard Grisey’s scale of complexity for musical time. The pre-
compositional process involved the creation of a catalogue of playing techniques, and the
musical materials used in the piece were derived from this catalogue.
Résumé
dome, arch, barrel, void est une composition musicale originale écrite pour huit
instruments d'une durée de douze minutes. Une analyse technique de la composition, présentée
dans le 1er volume de cette thèse, illustre les méthodes de composition développés au cours du
processus de composition de cette pièce. La partition est présentée dans le 2e volume. La pièce
vise à étudier la construction d'une forme à grande échelle en utilisant l'échelle de complexité de
Gérard Grisey pour le temps musical. Le processus de pré-composition a impliqué la création
d'un catalogue des modes de jeu qui a servi pour composer des matériaux musicaux utilisés dans
la composition dome, arch, barrel, void.

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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to those who inspired and helped me in the writing of
this thesis.
First, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor and teacher, Prof. Philippe Leroux, for
his guidance throughout the creative process of this work, for my education at McGill, and for
his support through my musical projects.
To Zihua and Danniel, for their friendship and insight, and for our inspiring
conversations.
To Nina, for her generous time to help proofread this thesis.
I would also like to thank my parents, for always believing in me and supporting my
endeavors.
Lastly, I would like to thank Eddy, for his endless support, both musical and moral,
during the writing and editing of this work.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv
Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Description ............................................................................................................................ 1
1.2 Poetics ................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2: Concept ....................................................................................................................... 3
2.1 An Overview of Grisey’s “Scale of Complexity” ................................................................. 3
2.2 The Sound-world of Salvatore Sciarrino as a Point of Departure ........................................ 5
Chapter 3: The Sound-world and Selection of the Musical and Harmonic Materials ........... 9
3.1 The Sound-world .................................................................................................................. 9
3.2 The Musical Materials ........................................................................................................ 12
3.3 The Harmonic Material ....................................................................................................... 16
Chapter 4: Formal Structure and Analysis of Each Section ................................................... 19
4.1 Section 1 .............................................................................................................................. 19
4.2 Section 2 .............................................................................................................................. 22
4.3 Section 3 .............................................................................................................................. 24
4.4 Section 4 .............................................................................................................................. 26
4.5 Section 5 .............................................................................................................................. 27
4.6 Section 6 .............................................................................................................................. 27
4.7 Section 7 .............................................................................................................................. 28
Chapter 5: Orchestration ........................................................................................................... 30
5.1 Orchestrational Fragility ..................................................................................................... 30
5.2 The Role of the Piano as a Soloist ...................................................................................... 31
5.3 Unpitched and Percussive Playing Techniques .................................................................. 32
Chapter 6: Conclusions and Further Considerations ............................................................. 34
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 35

Volume 2: dome, arch, barrel, void - for eight instruments (musical score)
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Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Description
This thesis is a composition titled dome, arch, barrel, void scored for eight instruments,
namely flute (doubling alto flute), clarinet in B (doubling bass clarinet in B), tenor saxophone,
percussion, piano, violin, violoncello and double bass, and has a duration of approximately
twelve minutes. The work explores a collection of sound objects, focusing on their relation to
one another and within the context of the work’s perceptual time.
In my recent creative work, I have become increasingly interested in the concept of sonic
fragility, which is characterized by timbral complexity with a high degree of instability and
internal change. I worked directly with performers and instruments to find preparations that
slightly transform the physical reality of the instruments, and to find sounds that open the
possibility of creating unstable gestures, which are best described as sound events that are nearly
inaudible, difficult to sustain or to strictly control. In the pre-compositional process of dome,
arch, barrel, void, I reduced the palette of the instruments into a collection of sounds that are
very personal. This pre-compositional process also allowed me to shape the structural
organization of the piece, as the material informs the direction that the large-scale form of the
work will take. The way that I work with my preliminary musical material in developing the
sound-world of this work is inspired by Salvatore Sciarrino’s approach to the sudden
introduction of highly specific and complex sounds into the quiet, fragile sound-world that is
otherwise sustained as the basis of the work.
1.2 Poetics
The title, dome, arch, barrel, void, inspired by the architecture of Byzantine churches,
contains an inner dualism since it refers both to the physical structures of the church, the acoustic
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resonators, and also to the idea of the Dome of Heaven, that is, heaven is vaulted and hangs
suspended into the void. The idea came from my observations of the design elements of
Byzantine churches located in Istanbul and the choice of materials used in their construction, in
particular of Hagia Irene. Hagia Irene, a Byzantine church dated back to 4th Century, is
constructed of bricks, stone and cement; materials chosen for their lightness. The absence of
plaster completely exposes the design structure of the building, giving its form transparency. The
entire interior of the church is devoid of ornamentation except for a black cross figure placed on
a golden mosaic background.1
In this work, I apply the design principles observed in Byzantine architecture to construct
the formal structure of the piece. In my pre-compositional process, I worked on creating the
musical materials of the piece through defining a limited timbral palette for each instrument.
During the pre-compositional process, the musical materials were layered into larger structures,
whereas the idea of transparency, or in other words, “the lack of plaster” as a metaphor, was
implemented by keeping the core identities of the materials intact across their variations within
the larger work. I attempted to implement this metaphor further in the piece by working with the
concept of musical fragility, specifically in the orchestrational and structural levels of the work,
to emphasize the exposedness of the musical materials.
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1 Stefanos Yerasimos, Constantinople: Istanbul’s Historical Heritage (Postdam: H. F. Ullman, 2010), 56-57.
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Chapter 2: Concept
2.1 An Overview of Grisey’s “Scale of Complexity”
In his article “Tempus Ex Machina: A Composer’s Reflections on Musical Time,” Gérard
Grisey presents three different layers that make up musical time, “The skeleton of time”, “The
flesh of time”, and “The skin of time”, where he also makes a clear distinction between the
functions of conceptual (chronometric) and perceptual (psychological) time during the
experience of listening.
Grisey constructs a “scale of complexity” for the perception of order or disorder as a
function of the amount of saturation of information in music. He defines five categories under
“The skeleton of time”: Periodic, Continuous-Dynamic, Discontinuous-Dynamic, Statistical and
Smooth. These categories create a continuum of complexity for musical time, in which Periodic
stands for maximum predictability, Continuous-dynamic for average predictability,
Discontinuous- dynamic for slight predictability, and Statistical, zero predictability. (The fifth
category Smooth is used to describe rhythmic silence; it is not explored in this thesis.) In dome,
arch, barrel, void, I apply Grisey’s continuum to formalize the saturation of information
presented in each section of the larger form of the work.

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Fig. 1: The scale of order-disorder as a function of saturation of information (Grisey,
1987)

In “The skin of time” layer, which focuses on psychoacoustics of listening, Grisey
describes two approaches the composer can use for the organization of the musical time. The
first approach refers to the favoring of the moment and the immediate memory of the sound
event. The second approach involves trusting the listener’s ability to hear and hierarchically
organize the elements of a musical discourse. Grisey points out that both approaches can be
structural, and in this work, I employ both approaches in the design of the musical discourse.
On the local level of organization, I primarily deal with the recent effect of a sound event,
and how this event shapes the moment in music that immediately surrounds itself. My
compositional approach examines the unique timespan of sound objects. For example, a note
struck in the lowest register of the piano with the pedal down – producing a loud attack with a
fast decay, but a long sustain2– makes up a part of the musical material of this piece. I transform
such materials through different compositional processes to change their timespans. Such
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2 Tristan Murail, “The Revolution of Complex Sounds,” Contemporary Music Review 24, 2-3 (2005): 121.
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processes include: time stretching, fragmentation, verticalization, and filtering of the material,
and they are used in each section of the composition in order to implement the section’s category
of temporal complexity.
Nevertheless, the larger form of the work relies on the listener’s ability to hear relations
through the entirety of the piece, making links between sections that are not linearly connected in
time. This compositional approach fosters an abstraction of musical time, since this is the only
way we can grasp or understand time, always in an indirect and impure way.3 Temporal
representation in music demands this notion of abstraction, for the fact that a piece of music
exists only in linear time, and yet at the same time it sculpts time in its passing.
2.2 The Sound-world of Salvatore Sciarrino as a Point of Departure
Fragility, a word used very often to describe the works of Salvatore Sciarrino, refers to
the unstable or impermanent quality of the music.4 Fragility can result from different aspects of
the music, including but not limited to the categories of performance, orchestration, structure,
material and temporal. Acoustic fragility, or in other words orchestrational fragility, in music
occurs when the composer presents a piece that exists on the verge of the listener’s hearing
ability. It is almost always the case that Sciarrino’s music exists in a low-level dynamic field, and
this low-level field is present throughout the entirety of a piece. Temporal fragility, on the other
hand, refers to the musical qualities that undermine the perception of structure in a piece,
dividing the structure into seemingly separate pieces.5 Sciarrino’s music embodies different
categories of musical fragility simultaneously, resulting in a complex sound-world that exists on
the verge of falling apart or disappearing, and in which the listener can simultaneously hear the
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3 Richard Klein, “Music and Time,” in Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language and Time, ed. Johnathan
Cross (Ghent: Leuven University Press, 2004): 140.
4 Naomi Epstein, “Musical Fragility: A Phenomenological Examination,” Tempo 71 (2017): 40.
5 Epstein , “Musical Fragility: A Phenomenological Examination,” 48.!
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possibility of stability and the possibility of its eradication.
One of the most comprehensive discussions of Sciarrino’s sound-world in the literature is
Aaron Helgeson’s article “What is phenomenology in music, and what does it have to do with
Salvatore Sciarrino?”, a phenomenological analysis of Sciarrino’s piece Infinito Nero (1998) for
voice and eight instruments. Phenomenology, in the most literal sense, is describing things not as
they are, but as they appear to us. When translated into musical terms, it can be described as a
reciprocal approach to the understanding of music, encountering sound objects as they enter and
exit the horizon of audibility while also taking into account their weight in the musical memory.

Fig. 2: Infinito Nero, mm. 7-9 (Sciarrino 1998)
The sound-world introduced in the opening of Infinito Nero, beginning at measure 7 (Fig.
2), is a collection of very quiet percussive and breathy sounds played by the three woodwind
instruments in the specific order of flute, oboe, clarinet, oboe, which then repeats. This creates a
listening situation where one can barely distinguish the difference between his or her own
heartbeat and breathing, and the music. Here, fragility is introduced not only by the removal of
the visual cues, as the musicians barely move when they perform this section, but also through
the confusion created by the difficulty of knowing which instrument made which sound due to
the quietness of the music. The overall dynamic markings of this section are very quiet and
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