the sun must bear no name (2024) for 9 multitracked violins
photo by Bolton Howes
Program Note
There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.
-Wallace Stevens, “Notes On a Supreme Fiction”
In this piece, I contend with what has become one of my core concerns as a composer; namely, how to create a kind of formless (“nameless”) cloud of harmony out of densely layered unison canons and other self-similar counterpoint. I seek to dwell in the liminal blurring point right before distinct voices congeal into a unified mass of sound. Throughout my life, I’ve always been drawn toward music based on simple melodic ideas which are then echoed, layered, smeared, or otherwise stratified in such a way as to cross a mysterious threshold, recasting the simple idea as an overwhelming totality. This piece strives towards a similar such musical space, one that is polyphonic yet not contrapuntal in the traditional sense of having truly independent voices. Throughout the work, moments of stasis (“PaulStretched chorales”) serve to demarcate the larger sections of smeared polyphony.
In my choice of harmonic materials, I traverse a large chasm separating the extremes within my musical ethos: warm D major triads tuned in 5-limit just intonation find their way to minor-tinged, bone-crushing, spectral monoliths of sound. These antipodal materials, to my ear, meld appropriately in the context of this type of cacophonous polyphony which lives on the razor’s edge between ethereal beauty and sublime terror. Many of the words and phrases that come to mind while trying to describe this type of contrapuntal-harmonic experience veer conspicuously towards the negative. Phrases such as “harmonic aftermath” and “a cacophony of voices” all highlight an aspect of this sound world which is unsettling. There is a certain degree of trepidation one feels during the moment when the perceptibility of distinct voices diminishes, giving way to an amorphous cloud of harmony, a kind of sonic representation of the magnitude of a large crowd. In my aesthetic value system, that unsettling effect is part of the reason why this type of polyphony is desirable – I seek the musical tools which allow for sublime cacophony and harmonic luminosity to coexist.