Music by Dave Seidel
Passacaglia and Fugue State
Posted 6 March 2005, 21:56
Description
An electronic work inspired by La Monte Young’s sine-tone installation The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119.
Written and realized with Scala, blue, and Csound.
Dedicated to La Monte Young in his 70th year.
Duration: 10 minutes 45 seconds.
Background & Technical Details
This is the third and final piece in what has become a series inspired by La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations, following Symmetrical Melodic Variation on the Romantic Symmetry and The Gemini Nebula.
I used Scala to build a 31-note microtonal “scale” based on the complete set of unique pitches in Young’s The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry, in essence recasting Young’s carefully-selected group of prime-numbered harmonics as generalized interval ratios rather than absolute multiples of a fundamental. This allowed me to use the pitches in any register — similar to the strategy I used in The Gemini Nebula. However, whereas in the latter piece I kept everything constrained to the range of a single octave, in this piece I use a broader registral pallette (though not as broad as Young’s).
The piece consists of four layers:
- a set of five drones on 1/1, 9/8 and 7/4, using the Risset harmonic arpeggio effect to sound slightly tamboura-like;
- a sort of obbligato built from two complex waveforms that together encode the cluster of harmonics at the registral “center” of Young’s piece, using a much slower version of the Risset effect to create a sort of looping cascade that sounds almost like intersecting glissandi;
- a repeating three-note bass motif: 1/1, 7/4, 9/8, …;
- a sine-wave “chorale” on 12 pitches within the range of an octave, starting as two voices diverging in pitch, then slowly gathering into a cluster containing all 12 notes plus two more, creating complex binaural beating patterns.
The piece starts with the drone, then adds the obbligato, then the bass motif, and finally the chorale, which builds in intensity and density almost until the end, when suddenly only the done remains to fade out.
The title comes from the repeating bass motif, which reminded me of one of my favorite musical forms, the passacaglia. The rest of the title is, of course, a joke. At the same time, I hope that the piece has a kind of ambient hallucinatory quality, so the phrase fugue state seemed appropriate.
Thanks yet again to Kyle Gann for his article in Sound and Light, without which I could not have embarked on this project.
Copyright & Licensing
Copyright © 2005, Dave Seidel. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Files
- MP3 audio (23MB)
- Ogg-Vorbis audio (10MB)
- Archive containing blue project file, Csound unified score file generated by blue, and Scala Base974 scale (7KB)
Tags
drones, just intonation, la monte young
I enjoyed your latest piece. It builds nicely, and I like the way it just dissolves and trails off at the end.
The harmonic glissandi reminded me of choruses of crickets and frogs, and of course I love “nature music.”
Take care – Art H.
— Art Hunkins 8 March 2005, 22:18 #
The image I got after the piece finally came together was that of a field at the edge of a wood, just after twilight. But in a place where the atmosphere is much thicker than ours, almost liquid.
— Dave Seidel 9 March 2005, 19:34 #
this is quite interesting, a nice tribute to LMY, and a joy to listen to. . . hope to hear more in the future
— vanessa 23 September 2007, 21:44 #