Assumptions

Program Notes

In Assumptions, I try to develop a dialogic musical aesthetic.  I offer musical categories, a linear score, and a story, both to the performers and to the audience.  But I try to do so in a way that invites the engagement of others with the categories, score, and story, presenting opportunities for conversations about these musical semantics.  Words are “born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it,” the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin liked to say.  So too with notes.  At least I believe that is how it should be.

The main way that I try to engage the performers in Assumptions is through writing the piece with three kinds of notes, what I call a priori, a posteriori, and ad libitum notes.  In the a priori passages, I intend for the performers to play what I have put on the page.  In the a posteriori passages, indicated by diamond shaped noteheads, I encourage the performers to somewhat modify and embellish what I’ve written, in light of their own musical experience, judgment, and mood.  For the ad libitum sections, indicated both by diamond shaped noteheads and a dashed-line above marked “ad libitum,” the score reads that “the player should take what I written as suggestions or ideas to consider, and should feel free to play these passages according to his or her pleasure, altering, recomposing, or improvising something quite different.”  In these ways, I offer musical assumptions to the performers, but welcome their responses to the score. 

Of course, performers always have some scope for response.  This is what performance means.  Music is in the notes, it is not the notes themselves.  It is, or I think ought to be, live music in every sense of the word.  But the classical tradition, particularly during the mid-20th century, came to strictly limit the scope for a performer’s “living rejoinder” to the text: to the score and its author.  With Assumptions, I encourage a more open tonality of musical relations between composer and performer.

I also attempt a more open tonality in the relations of composer and audience.  In order to communicate, one needs to be understandable, and my musical goal is indeed to communicate.  So Assumptions uses a musical vocabulary that I hope is understandable, based in folk tradition—in this case, that of Eastern Europe—and thus reasonably familiar to the ear.  I also use other familiar means of musical story-telling: repetition and variation, consonance and dissonance, melody, and the feeling of a tonal center.  But I also try to say something new and alive.  I try to provide musical elements that are comprehensible on first hearing, derived as they are from the cadences of the familiar and the assumed, but then try to take them somewhere that the listener’s ear would not have predicted, at least not entirely.  I try to use what people know to communicate something that they don’t.  To communicate something which is not shared you need to communicate via that which is.  Otherwise you have not communicated at all.

So I bend and extend these categories of the familiar.  For example, rather than basing the harmonic grammar of the piece in what musicians call a “one-five-one” mode that establishes a unified sense of tonal center, I twist conventional major triads in ways that give them a feeling of a calling to two tonal centers, and sometimes more—what I call polyvocal harmony (which is for me a metaphor for dialogue).  But I also periodically resolve these twists back to the familiar category of the major triad, which by then I hope has come to take on extended meanings to the ear.

As for the story: The first movement of Assumptions, “First Dialogue” is an extended conversation between the flute and cello in which they discuss a musical thought first suggested by the flute.  This thought, this melody, constantly changes throughout the movement as each instrument responds to the other, sometimes taking up bits of the other’s ideas while coming up with new bits of their own.  They get annoyed with each other after a while, and start over-talking and yelling a bit.  But at the end, they patch things up and discover that, while they don’t agree completely, their final takes on the tune harmonize better than they thought.

The second movement, “Second Dialogue,” tells the story of conversation in highly structured and constrained circumstances.  This movement is based on a 14-measure ostinato, or repeating musical figure, which repeats 14 times.  On top of the ostinato, the voices sing a melody in a 4-part canon and fugue (in part a reference to the Baroque instrumentation of the piece).  After 8 repetitions of the ostinato, the instruments shout it down, opening things up for extended ad libitum cadenzas by the violin and harpsichord during the 9th repetition.  But then the ostinato returns, and develops even more structure, eventually being sounded at four different metrics at once (half-speed, normal speed, double speed, and triplets), with the melody riding on top.  One more time, the instruments shout the ostinato down, and sing the melody as a canon without the ostinato, adding in a few a posteriori variations of their own.  The ostinato makes a final, plodding effort to return, but the instruments proclaim a loud and dissonant “no!” before ending the piece in a tonic space.

The final movement, “Third Dialogue,” brings this idealism and materialism together into a possibly more realistic account of human experience.  It begins similarly to the first dialogue, with a free-flowing melody, varied by all the instruments.  After a pause for reflection, another ostinato enters (less structured then the ostinato in the second dialogue).  The opening melody is heard again in more regular cadences, on top of the ostinato, which sounds in three metrics (half-time, normal time, and double time) while the flute does it’s own thing.  (Flutes are like that.)  The instruments find that together they can take control of the ostinato, and they do, stopping it down completely to allow for ad libitum cadenzas from all four voices.  Then they allow the ostinato to return, again in three metrics, with the flute and violin singing the melody as a canon (in a posteriori passages), before the four instruments take over the ostinato one more time.  They have a bit of fun with the ostinato, leading it into a musical move known as a false cadence.  Laughing at their little joke, and confident of their collective powers, the instruments loudly speak the first four notes of the ostinato, now transformed using their own harmonic capacities, before ending the story in the togetherness of the G-major chord the entire piece has been reaching for.

Performance Notes

I have written this piece as an musical expression of dialogic theory and philosophy, and  have therefore included in it various encouragements toward polyvocality, unfinalizability, and other elements of creative mutuality.  Some of those encouragements aim to further  dialogue between the composer and the performers.  Of particular interest (and possible confusion) for players will be the three ways I mark the notes, what I term a priori, a posteriori, and ad libitum passages:  

But a player should also feel welcome, again according to her or his experience and judgment, to play the a posteriori and ad libitum passages as I have written them.

The duration of the piece is about 25 minutes.

Movement I : First Dialogue

192 bit MP3 of live performance (10 megs) by L'Ensemble Portique, Lisette Kielson (flute), Kangwon Lee Kim (violin), John Chappell Stowe (harpsichord), and Jennifer Barron (cello) on Feb, 25, 2005 in Madison, WI.

Score: PDF (first half)

Flute: PDF (first half)

Violin: PDF (first half)

Cello: PDF (first half)

Harpsichord: PDF (first half)

Movement II : Second Dialogue

192 bit MP3 of live performance (13 megs) by L'Ensemble Portique, Lisette Kielson (flute), Kangwon Lee Kim (violin), John Chappell Stowe (harpsichord), and Jennifer Barron (cello) on Feb, 25, 2005 in Madison, WI.

Score: PDF (first half)

Flute: PDF (first half)

Violin: PDF (first half)

Cello: PDF (first half)

Harpsichord: PDF (first half)

Movement III : Third Dialogue

192 bit MP3 of live performance (13 megs) by L'Ensemble Portique, Lisette Kielson (flute), Kangwon Lee Kim (violin), John Chappell Stowe (harpsichord), and Jennifer Barron (cello) on Feb, 25, 2005 in Madison, WI.

Score: PDF (first half)

Flute: PDF (first half)

Violin: PDF (first half)

Cello: PDF (first half)

Harpsichord: PDF (first half)

 

For the complete score and parts, contact the composer.

 

All content copyright © 2003 to 2006 Michael Mayerfeld Bell. All rights reserved.

Page last updated March 1, 2006