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Musical composition, Wonder, with document

University of British Columbia

Wonder is a dense, complex and unconventional sixteen minute composition for orchestra, tape and soprano voice. The tape component is divided into fourteen segments and runs almost continuously throughout the piece, concurrent with the orchestra and the soprano voice. It consists primarily of processed instrumental timbres, but also contains concrete timbres and computer-generated sounds. The soprano voice figures prominently in one section and appears infrequently elsewhere in the music, in brief episodes. The role of the voice is similar to that of the other instruments in the orchestra - it is an important contributor to the articulation of the form through its content and orchestration, but does not function dominantly as a soloist throughout the entire composition. The texts (sung by the soprano and sung/chanted by choir on tape) are passages selected from the poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73), Henri Michaux (1899-1984), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). Each poetic fragment is concerned with love, magnification, and resonance. The concept of resonance informs every aspect of Wonder, including the derivation of the prime material, the battery of compositional techniques, the form, the content and function of the tape part and the choice of texts. Material for the music was gathered by performing a spectral analysis on unique, short fragments of recorded sound produced on a crotale, a violoncello, a bass trombone and by a soprano voice. The resulting groups of frequencies (one array from each of the four analyzed source timbres) were interpreted in a variety of ways and amplified out of their originally small scale into the raw material on which Wonder is based. Each set of material is presented in its own section of the music, with its original orchestration and characteristic gestural iconography, and is subjected to a plethora of developmental operations, including addition, vibration, movable points of transition/inversionand time-points. Some rhythmic figures are notated within metriproportional brackets identifying their contents as unsynchronized and ad libitum, performed with reference to the barline and active time signature. The interference form manifest in Wonder consists of three distinct strata, each layer mapping related sectional orderings. Formal layers are distinguished by their contrasting durations, and may be active simultaneously or articulated in discontinuous, isolated blocks.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-06-25

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9602

Music - Composition

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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