Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

Recording: 

Panic-and-Repose.mp3

If you listened to the recording, you might be tempted to say that in naming this piece Song and Dance: Panic and Repose, I got the subtitle backwards. After all, the "Song" is calm and relaxed for the most part, while the "Dance" is nervous and agitated. That's because the subtitle refers not to the mood of the music, but rather to the mood of the composer.

In the spring of 2004, during my second semester at Tufts, I was working on a piano sonatina, to be played at a concert in April. I made a promising start, but as the concert got nearer, my progress slowed down. In fact, when I had my weekly composition with my professor, John McDonald, about two weeks before the concert, I had not written a single note since the previous meeting, and wasn't even close to finishing one movement of the sonatina. I had two weeks to somehow triple or quadruple my output from the previous month. Less than two weeks, really, since I'd need to give the pianist a chance to rehearse everything. I considered cancelling my lesson since I didn't have anything to show for my efforts, but in the end I decided to go and tell my professor about my predicament.

John's response was quite refreshing. "Forget about the sonatina," he said. "Put it away. If it's in you, you'll go back to it and finish it another time." Well, that's nice to hear, but what about the upcoming concert? "You don't have to have anything for the concert, although I agree it would be nice if you did. Why don't you try writing something that you can play on the piano yourself, so you don't have to worry about giving a performer enough time to practice?" In two weeks? I couldn't write a single note all last week! "Well, let's see. Maybe I can help you get started."

John took a blank sheet of staff paper, and wrote down a few notes. One chord at the beginning of the top system, two chords near the middle of the page, and one more chord close to the bottom. He then urged me to fill in the rest of the page myself, starting right then. I had never had to compose written music on the spot -- though I have done a lot of improvisation, in many different contexts -- and although I was sitting at a piano, I decided to compose without touching the keyboard. By the end of the lesson, I had filled about a third of the page, and only then did I play back what I had written. It sounded pretty good.

Encouraged by this start, I went to a practice room to keep writing. By the time I went to the NME rehearsal later that afternoon, I had filled almost the whole page, and though my notation was rough and incomplete, I had a good enough idea of the piece in my head that I could play it all the way through. It was a complete movement -- not as long as the planned sonatina, but enough to stand on its own. In a few hours, I may not have quadrupled my output from the previous month, but I'm pretty sure I exceeded it. A heavy weight had been lifted my shoulders. I was so relieved that, in the next weekend, I composed a companion movement, using a theme I had jotted down in the laundromat a few weeks earlier, but had ignored in favor of the now-forgotten sonatina. This second movement was fast and rhythmic, a bit off-kilter but definitely dancelike. I decided that the first movement, being slow and freely moving, was therefore a song, obviously lacking words, and perhaps less tuneful than Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte, but a song nonetheless. The song was written while I was stressing out over not having anything for the upcoming concert, while the dance was written precisely because I was no longer worried. So there it is: song and dance. Panic and repose. It makes perfect sense when you look at it from my perspective, though of course I also relish the apparent chiasmus of the title.

Score: 

Natural Blues.pdf

Blues in Natural Time is the second of my Rhythm Etudes for solo violin, which for me are exercises in organizing, perceiving, and generating rhythm. Blues in Natural Time uses a concept which I dubbed, surprisingly enough, "natural time". The idea of natural time came as a response to various temporal signifiers in music which I felt to be overly arbitrary. In particular, I was troubled by the usage of precise numbers of seconds to denote durations in certain pieces. Now, the use of seconds, or metronome markings, or any other precise standard of measuring time is not in itself overly arbitrary: if the composer feels that a particular sonic event should last a particular duration, they should indicate that duration through whatever means they consider most appropriate, and this can include specifying some precise number of seconds. However, I must note that the number of seconds, or minutes, or microfortnights specified is in itself irrelevant to the listener. Nevertheless, in works such as George Crumb's Black Angels, many durational units are chosen for their numerological significance, and there are many notes and rests with indicated durations of 7 or 13 seconds¹. Now, I have no problem with incorporating numerological elements into a work, and there are many other audible musical (and linguistic) ways in which the numbers 7 and 13 are reflected in Black Angels. However, to the listener, a note lasting 7 seconds is not 7 of anything. For the most part, durations are only meaningful relative to one another; seven seconds is "some amount of time," while 13 seconds is "a longer amount of time, about twice as long as the first". In fact, due to our usually fuzzy perception of time, the listener may in fact decide that the 13-second note is meant to be exactly twice as long as the 7-second note, even though one of the most fascinating (to me) things about the use of 7 and 13 as recurring elements is that 13 is 1 less than twice 7. Seconds are arbitrary units, and absolute measurements in arbitrary units can't hold meaning in and of themselves.

But nearly all standards of measuring duration that we have are arbitrary. Seconds are arbitrary, and metronome markings rely on the minute, which is also arbitrary. The only non-arbitrary standards of time that we have are either too large or too small to be musically useful: the day and the year², the decay of various particles, the frequency of various well-defined wavelengths of light³. However, there are at least two common durational signifiers which are musically useful, readily perceivable, and not arbitrarily defined: our heartbeat and breath. Now, these are not standards of measuring time: two people will have different pulse and breathing rates, and even for a single person, both pulse and breathing rate fluctuate greatly over time. But the heartbeat and breath are common to all listeners, and their cadences are easily recognizable to all. While a silence lasting for 7 of the performer's heartbeats may not be clearly perceived as exactly 7 heartbeats to the listener, I think it is a more compelling way of representing the number 7 as a duration. With this in mind, I devised a concept of "natural time", in which shorter musical durations are organized around a quarter-note pulse aligned with the performer's heartbeat, and longer durations are marked by their inhalation and exhalation. In this particular case, the violinist plays long, drone-like notes on one or two strings, bowing and sliding between notes in time to their breath, while playing left-hand pizzicato notes on the open strings in time to their heartbeat. In this way, the two pulses are presented concurrently, though since the number of heartbeats per breath may vary according to the performer and their mood, I have to give the performer some leeway in aligning these two pulses. Since inhalations tend to be quicker than exhalations, and the resting heart rate is approximately five times the resting respiratory rate for adults, I assigned half notes to the inhalations and dotted half notes to the exhalations, but this is only an approximation, and should not be read as an exact correspondence with the quarter-note heartbeat pulse.

Now, music incorporating biometric units of duration is not in itself a new idea; the heartbeat is a natural starting point for determining tempo, and melodies tend to fall into phrases demarcated by breath. Many modern composers, such as Pauline Oliveros, have explicitly used breath as a durational and organizational unit. But I feel that I arrived at my concept of natural time independently, and that it has its own worth. In particular, I was struck by the potentially self-modifying aspect of natural time: the performer's pulse and breathing rate may go up if they have to play particularly fast or strenuous music, and slow down when they have sustained notes. Thus, in Blues in Natural Time, I contrast sections of natural time, featuring slowly-shifting drones and occasional plucked notes, with more active sections of fast rhythmic and melodic activity. I had at one point hoped to have the faster sections defined by subdivisions of the heartbeat, but I found that my particular musical ideas did not fall neatly into heartbeat-length groupings, so I went with more conventional tempo indications for those sections. As a whole, these sections outline a single chorus of a 12-bar blues form, though the concept of "bar" doesn't really apply here. The sections in natural time give a skeletal outline of the harmonic progression of the blues, and the faster sections fill in the gaps with melodic elaborations. Although the exact pace of the natural time is unpredictable from one performance to another, I had a pretty solid idea, based on my own pulse and breathing, of what these sections would sound like. In the premiere performance, violinist Dana Price surprised me by just how calm she was: her natural breath length seemed to be almost 50% longer than mine, so the drones last much longer than I expected. At one point, I considered asking her to breathe faster, but decided against it.

I think the concept of natural time has a lot of potential for exploration. One idea that I would especially like to try out, if I can become proficient with the technology, would be a concerto-like piece where one performer, probably a percussionist, wears a heart monitor which is then electronically processed to generate an audible pulse for the piece. I could then induce a faster pulse by having the monitored performer play complex passages, or even have them running across the stage from one instrument to another, and then give instructions for breathing exercises or brief meditation to slow things down. Or maybe I could try to manipulate the pulse through psychological means -- what would happen if the pulse-performer was listening to an audible pulse which had been processed to be 10% faster than their own? Would that create a positive feedback loop? What if it spirals out of control? What if the performer just can't keep up with themself? What if -- oh, now I'm drifting into an Andy Kaufman performance.

Footnotes

¹Another instance of this can be found in A Resurrection Series by Andy Sauerwein. In this piece, which contrasts the corporeal and spiritual aspects of Jesus as depicted in a series of drawings by artist Randall Speck, the intervals between movements are multiples of 3 seconds, successively decreasing from 24 seconds down to 3 seconds, while important structural moments are marked by passages of bell sounds whose durations are multiples of 7 seconds, increasing from 7 seconds up to 49 seconds. In this instance, I do not consider these durations to be as arbitrary, as the persistent patterns allow the durations to be perceived relative to one another, and in proportion. The "3" and "7", both chosen for their theological significance, may not be directly perceived, but it is my understanding that the composer did not mean for them to be literally perceived. What did irritate me, however, was how the patterns were executed in practice. In dress rehearsal and at the premiere, the conductor would precisely count off 27-3n seconds after the end of movement n, and then beat off an empty measure to cue us into the next movement. As a result, the interval of silence between movements was not 27-3n seconds, but longer by an amount which depended on the tempo and meter of the ensuing movement. The overall pattern of decreasing intervals was still present, but the durations were no longer in proportion, and the sense of the number 3, if it was ever present, was in my mind lost.

²Yes, I know that the rotation of the earth and the revolution of the earth around the sun are not fixed standards of duration, but I am looking at the issue from the standpoint of human perception, and the variability of the day and year fall well within the acceptable tolerances to be perceived as standards. In fact, our perception of the length of one day probably has less relative variance than our perception of the length of one second.

³Yes, I know that a second can be defined in terms of any of these standards, and is thus not arbritrary in the sense that, say, the standard kilogram is arbitrary. However, these definitions are not meaningful to the perception of the performer or listener in the moment. Can you even imagine, in the absence of any mechanical contrivances, how to take a full day, and divide it into 86,400 sub-intervals of equal size? Or, worse yet, how to perceive "the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom"? I think it's safe to say that, from a perceptual standpoint, seconds are arbitrary. If you took a (human) listener who had never encountered any form of mechanized or digitized horology, and set your metronome to click at 60 beats per minute, they would probably perceive the beat as something a little slower than a typical heartbeat, which is part of my point.

Score: 

Blues Drone.PDF

Blues With a Drone is the first of a handful of etudes for tenor and/or bass trombone. These etudes were written with my own capabilities in mind, focusing on one or more elements of trombone performance. Blues With a Drone focuses on multiphonics -- the technique of singing while playing, so that two notes (or more, if overtones are involved) sound simultaneously. In particular, this etude aims to improve the flexibility and lyrical capabilities of the singing voice. In the existing literature, multiphonics are often used chiefly as a coloristic effect, and I wanted to use multiphonics melodically. Furthermore, I wanted to use multiphonics in a piece that might be accessible to trombonists of intermediate skill level. All too often, extended techniques such as multiphonics are relegated to pieces whose other technical challenges leave them unapproachable to student trombonists, and I see no reason why this should have to be the case.

To these ends, the melody in Blues With a Drone is given entirely to the voice, while the trombone itself is relegated to a tonic drone on G. This presents a slight challenge to the trombonist, as holding the trombone with the slide extended in one position for the duration of the piece is mildly fatiguing. Nevertheless, by simplifying the trombone part, the performer can focus on executing the vocal line. Although the melody proceeds slowly, hitting the notes accurately can be a challenge, as intonation, especially in dissonant intervals, tends to be somewhat unstable with multiphonics.

Blues With a Drone has proven to be effective in its original purpose. In the fall of 2008, shortly after I premiered Blue With a Drone, I was invited to compose and perform a piece at a memorial concert for composer Jennifer Fitzgerald. My composition, Lyric Homage, was loosely based on Jennifer's Lyric II for solo tuba. Lyric II had a number of challenging multiphonic sections, which I had been unable to play when she first showed me the piece several years ago, but I chose to leave those sections intact. Blues With a Drone gave me the opportunity to practice dissonant yet lyrical multiphonics in a controlled environment, and I was able to successfully reproduce Jennifer's multiphonic passages in performance. Similarly, I hope that Blues With a Drone can be a vehicle for other trombonists to learn about and develop multiphonic techniques.

Score: 

Morningsong.pdf

Recording: 

Moanin' Low.mp3

You may have noticed that I play a number of very different instruments. Today, my main instruments are trombone, flute, piano, and clarinet, in rough order of proficiency, and in days past I have played several other instruments, including trumpet, tuba, and tenor recorder. I have been playing the tenor trombone since 6th grade, and the bass trombone since 9th grade, but not long after that, I decided I wanted to learn another instrument on the side. My father had played the flute for a few years in middle school, and he still had his instrument, unplayed but still in good shape after 35 years, so I decided to give it a shot. The basic rudiments of flute-playing came fairly easy to me, and by my senior year of high school I felt I was reaching the limits of my flute proficiency without taking lessons -- which I was determined not do to for any instrument except trombone -- so I branched out even further and started in on clarinet as well. My bass trombone, flute, and clarinet all accompanied when I left for college in 1997, and the great musical triumph of my first semester came when I covered four and a half books (trombone 1 and 2, horn, woodwind 2, and the bits of woodwind 1 that the other flutist couldn't transpose) on three different instruments as part of a 7-person pit "orchestra" for a production of Pippin.

Now, bass trombone and flute is not such an unusual combination for one player as you might think. Both instruments require a large lung capacity, and embouchures for the two instruments are actually rather similar. Unfortunately, the embouchures were similar enough, without being identical, that playing the flute for extended periods of time actually started to interfere with my ability to play the bass trombone. The clarinet embouchure, on the other hand, was sufficiently dissimilar to the trombone embouchure that it did not adversely affect my trombone playing, and as a result, my extracurricular woodwind activities were almost exclusively restricted to the clarinet.

In the summer of 2001, my friend Rebecca Sadun learned that my flute-playing had fallen by the wayside, and encouraged me to give it another try. I did, and I found that my trombone embouchure was now sufficiently well-developed that playing the flute did not have a detrimental effect. I was very glad to have the opportunity to rediscover such a beautiful instrument, and I was determined to write something for the flute, as a thank-you to Rebecca. Additionally, her birthday was November 1, which gave me a good deadline to work towards. I started experimenting to see what material would work well for me on the flute, and discarded many ideas, including a feeble imitation of a raga. Quite by chance, I discovered that I could produce multiphonics on the flute by singing into the aperture while playing -- I was familiar with this technique on the trombone, but unaware that it would work on flute as well. This yielded a wonderfully smoky sound, with octaves and major sevenths shining through the haze. Clearly, I would have to make use of that sound.

September came, and October was right on its heels. With the semester going in full force, I had a limited amount of time to devote to composing. To save time, I decided to work in a form I was already familiar with: the 12-bar blues. My new multiphonic technique would really bring out the blue notes to great effect, and I could probably whip up another one or two movements for a more standard flute technique. The multiphonic movement came first, and from the haunting sound of the instrumental technique, speaking best at a quiet dynamic, came the title, "Moanin' Low". I followed that up with a repurposing of one of my previously rejected ideas. I started with a six-note chord, which I had originally wanted to use as a piano accompaniment figure in a reharmonization of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood". This chord already had blue notes built right in -- G against G# in the key of E -- so I started by arpeggiating the chord, and followed its contours in a multitude of directions. Echoes of the opening chord kept popping up unexpectedly, so I figured I was onto something, but I didn't know what to call it. I played a draft of the movement for my friend Faith Drickamer, and she said that the rising lines of the flute reminded her of morning. I was heavily into alliteration at the time, so "Morningsong" seemed like a good title to go with "Moanin' Low". By this point, it was the last week of October, and I while I had two movements I was really happy with, they were both slow and somewhat melancholy. While there is nothing wrong with slow and melancholy, especially for the blues, I wanted to have something more upbeat as well. With little time remaining, I thought it might be easiest to write a tune and "improvised" choruses in the style of a jazz master I admired. Also, a name starting with "M" would help preserve the alliteration. My first thought was Miles Davis, but I had already alluded to "All Blues" in a few measures of "Moanin' Low". My next thought, Thelonious Monk, turned out to be a winner. I was familiar with many aspects of Monk's music -- his angular melodic lines, his paradoxical ability to swing with straight eighth notes, his tendency to paraphrase the main melody in his solos -- and all of these aspects found their way into the score. The translation from piano to flute was smoother than I had thought, and "Mr. Monk" was finished with a couple days to spare. I wouldn't have the time to record the pieces, but I printed out the movements along with a dedication page, and mailed it all to Rebecca, who was then a senior at Brown University.

Rebecca was pleasantly surprised by my gift, and I continue to be surprised at how well Three Blues Moods turned out. They are the first of many blues-inspired pieces I have written, including Midnight Blue, "Serenade" from my Bass Trombone Sonata, Blues in Natural Time, and Blues With a Drone. In fact, at one point in my compositional development, I considered putting a cap on my blues output, by allowing myself to write only one blues piece in each key -- a restriction which I have not followed, as "Moanin' Low", Blues in Natural Time, and Blues With a Drone are all in G. Of all these pieces, the three Moods are by far the most conventional in their treatment of the blues -- they are all built in 12-bar choruses, with almost no deviation from the traditional harmonic rhythm of the blues. Within those confines, however, each movement carves out its own niche quite effectively. Morningsong and Moanin' Low complement each other in interesting ways. Both of them are heavily concerned with the implications of the "blue" notes; Morningsong explores the melodic aspects of the blue notes, as the opening chord unfolds over three choruses, while Moanin' Low, with its unusual technique, treats the blue notes vertically, creating simultaneities out of the major and minor third scale degree, or the fourth and flat fifth degrees. These two Moods are also opposed in mood: Morningsong is sunlight tinged with sadness, while Moanin' Low has dark clouds tempered with the gritty optimism that is so often at the heart of the blues. "Mr. Monk" is, for its own part, a nice little romp in homage to one of jazz's greatest pianists and composers. The flutist gets to play the part of the whole band, almost, as foot stomps and key clicks recall the contributions of drummers like Max Roach and Frankie Dunlop. Although "Mr. Monk" is in 4/4 time throughout, it is hardly constrained, as Monk-like rhythms and accents cut across the grain of the beat.

Although the Three Blues Moods are not intended to be technically demanding -- they were written with my own intermediate flute-playing ability in mind -- they do offer many interesting challenges to the flutist. "Morningsong" requires a good deal of lyrical expressivity, and the ability to find what is suggested but not stated ouright by the notes on the page. The multiphonic technique of "Moanin' Low", while having precedent in works such as Vox Balaenae by George Crumb, is still unfamiliar to many flutists, and the many "blue note" dissonances in the piece demand that the flutist have a steady ear for singing. This movement was originally written for my own bass-baritone voice, and though I wrote in some alternate pitches so that tenor-voiced flutists could also play it, it remained inaccessible to altos and sopranos. It was suggested that I simply transpose the voice part up an octave, but I felt that many of the dissonant intervals simply had to be sevenths and ninths, and turning them into seconds would not have the desired effect, so I would simply have to write a completely different movement for higher-voiced flutists. I never got around to writing an alternate movement, and when I actually ventured to try playing "Moanin' Low" while singing in falsetto an octave higher, I was pleased with the results: clearly reminiscent of the original, but a different set of characteristic intervals gave the version its own profile. So now, flutists of any vocal range can try to replicate the eerie multiphonic effects which caught my ear so long ago. And in "Mr. Monk", the typical classically-trained flutist faces an unusual challenge: they must not only swing convincingly, but also "unswing" convincingly. Thelonious Monk's idiosyncratic rhythmic phrasings are difficult for even seasoned jazz musicians to master, and none of the other flutists to whom I presented Three Blues Moods were able to get the feeling right. Unfortunately, a handful of measures in "Mr. Monk" have remained beyond the reach of my feeble fingers, so I feel that this last movement has not yet been given an authoritative performance. Who wants to be the first?