Last week, I started a series that shares everything about and that went into my tour-de-force percussion chamber concerto This Could Be Madness (2022) in anticipation of a new, high-quality video recording of the piece that will be ready to release in the coming weeks. In this second installment of this series, I focus on one of the most experimental elements in the piece: its unconventionally structured, aleatoric opening section in which the soloist leads the performance. You can listen to Cameron Leach and the wind ensemble’s incredible rendition right here, in the excerpted clip from the upcoming video release I’ve embedded below, before reading about where this material comes from:
Another goal I have with this post, and the others that focus heavily on the content of This Could Be Madness, is to demystify my compositional process. I believe writing music is a skill any motivated person can learn and get better at, even (or, especially?) when it involves non-traditional techniques. This Could Be Madness is long and full of rich detail, but it isn’t a magic trick or miracle. The piece emerged from my experiences in 2020 and builds off of the music I had written before it. The story behind the aleatory that opens This Could Be Madness represents this straightforward, linear progression hidden behind the music’s excessive expressiveness very well.
Drawing on Noa (2017)
There are several details in This Could Be Madness that I can trace to a piece I wrote in 2017 called Noa, which is scored for marimba duo. I had the chance to write Noa, and work with percussionists Mayumi Hama and Christopher Froh, because Gabriela Lena Frank asked me, among a couple dozen other composers, to participate in the inaugural year of her Creative Academy for Music, which is now a full-time program offering professional development services to composers. Follow this link to watch Mayumi and Chris perform Noa for the first time at the 2017 Festival of New American Music hosted by Sacramento State University.
In March 2017, my sister-in-law, Adina, and her husband, Joe, welcomed Noa, their first child and my first niece. One night when Noa was five or six weeks old, my wife and I volunteered to watch her for a few hours so her parents could sleep, and we made a fascinating musical discovery: Noa would only stop crying if we played Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No. 1. Yes, this veritable newborn was obsessed with the most abstruse, modernist music the mid-twentieth century has to offer, and for weeks afterward my sister-in-law requested referrals for more offerings in that same style.
I had just started writing the music that would become Noa around this time, and planned to dedicate it to our new niece. That babysitting experience helped me crack the piece open: her fondness for intense modernism informed the music’s style, which is very dissonant and a little systematic. I was also fascinated by the relentless unpredictability of a small child, which I had never experienced before. I wanted the piece to convey the tension, unease, and lack of certainty a caretaker feels when the infant they are watching makes a sound that could lead to nothing or a fit of crying. When I talked to Gabriela about my initial sketches, she liked my concept but worried about my approach. That embryonic version of the piece was strictly notated, and Gabriela wisely warned that this method could lead to a very tightly-wound performance when what I really wanted was something looser. She suggested I consider aleatoric techniques that would give Mayumi and Christ more freedom and agency in the performance, and recommended a couple relevant works by Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski for me to study.
I really ran with her suggestion, more than either of us anticipated when that lesson ended. The images below show an entirely new visual presentation style I developed to fully embrace the semi-structured quality of a new, aleatoric score. I entered a whole new world of music composition:
While it can manifest as many different things, the term ‘aleatory’ generally refers to notated music that provides only partial information to the performers compared to traditional sheet music. The composer may specify some things, like a set of notes, rhythmic ideas, or the contour of a melodic gesture, but, otherwise, the performers get to decide what they play. In addition to Gabriela’s guidance, Mayumi and Chris made enormously important contributions to Noa’s notation scheme. At first, all the written instructions were in the score’s front matter, which Chris told me was a terrible idea. He suggested that I find a way to present the instructions and musical information in same place so they could see it all at once. So, I figured out how to do that (with Sibelius 6 notation software, no less!).
There is a lot of variation in Noa. The aleatoric passage pictured above works differently than the one pictured below, which is more of a ‘choose-you-own-adventure’ section. Some parts of the piece engage musical time in a traditional manner, some parts of the piece are totally free, and others are somewhere in between. The result, which I loved, was a performance in which Mayumi and Chris listen and react to each other intently. The audience at the world premiere loved it, too, and, after the concert, I found myself surrounded by attendees eager to see the score.
Another chance to play with control
As I have already mentioned, This Could Be Madness opens with material that uses these same techniques. I was excited to attempt this kind of music with a larger ensemble featuring a more diverse range of timbres, and the thematic play aleatory has with respect to the power dynamics of a concerto appealed to me. Here is an excerpt of the ensemble part from the first page of the score:
And here is what the soloist sees:
You may notice some similar symbols to what I used in the score to Noa, as well as an identical approach to layout: the instructions and musical information are visible in one place. The premise of this section is that the solo part cues the other players, which are themselves divided into different groups. The boxed ‘!’ icons that appear in the solo part are something else I first developed for Noa that signifies the denoted player is supposed to interrupt what is going on with a specific musical idea. So, as This Could Be Madness begins, the soloist has the power to cue other instruments and direct the flow of the music with an interruption.
The above excerpt of the solo part from the second page of the piece shows how this scheme gets more complicated as the section continues. Not only are there more instruments in the overall ensemble than there were in Noa, but the percussion battery is also much larger (I essentially wrote for every piece of gear Cameron had in his basement). I took advantage of this range of timbres to devise a more sophisticated communication system between the soloist and the ensemble: the bongo drum performs like a coxswain on a racing shell, barking out orders to the other instruments.
The above image comes from the next page (please excuse the typo sixteenth rests in the percussion part!), and more clearly illustrates what the soloist can control with the bongo drums. Throughout this section, the upper bongo cues the flutes and the lower bongo cues the clarinet and bassoon. The soloist only plays them together in a set of three accented strikes that represents an interruption, and ends the current ‘episode’ to move to the next. The soloist has full freedom to choose when the other instruments enter. One bongo strike cues the first box of music in the respective wind parts, and a pair of strikes cues the second. This system makes the bongos a linchpin in the aleatory that opens This Could Be Madness, though most of the soloist’s performance in these first few minutes involves other materials. They are empowered to create a vibrant part ex tempore out of various gestures, demonstrated in the score excerpt below, that involve more and more percussion instruments as this part of the piece moves towards its conclusion.
The music here evolves gradually and broadly from something that is more spacious to something that is characterized by faster rhythms and greater agitation. You can see in these images that the wind players are instructed to transition towards synchronizing their entrances from playing totally freely and individualistically at the start of the piece. In the overall form of This Could Be Madness, it is important for this passage to attempt a coalescence but not succeed, as this failure motivates the subsequent section.
I think it is fair to say the musc in this opening section sounds very abstract and, though I’m not sure it sounds blatantly aleatoric (if that is even possible). Regardless of whether the audience can tell how I notated the score, the aleatoric techniques I employ aid enormously in the expression of disconnectedness I seek at this point in the piece. Exactly as in Noa, this approach requires the performers to listen, react, and play in a much different way than they would in a more traditional setting. The music feels scattered because the musicians are scattered. Lacking traditional means for coordinating their performance, torn asunder by my meticulously designed notation boxes, we hear their effort to bring the music together under the soloist’s leadership.
I am very attracted to the sound and feeling that results for this kind of writing, and I love how it works in This Could Be Madness. As I look back on the experimentation I pursued with Noa back in 2017, I feel confident that piece marked some kind of turning for me as a composer. Expressively, aleatory generates a kind of spontaneity and tension that is hard to reproduce with other means. Moreover, I found with both Noa and This Could Be Madness that de-centering my control over the final performance makes what could be inaccessibly abstract music feel welcoming and intriguing to audiences. The uncertainty sewn into the score puts everyone present for the performance in a more equal position than they would be with normative practices: the player(s), listener(s), and composer witness the music’s fruition at the same time.
Aleatory also seems wonderfully well-suited for concertos, which is a type of composition traditionally defined by the soloist’s struggle for power and agency against a much larger group. I hope I have the chance to explore aleatory more in the future, especially in another concerto; but, I’ll take any opportunity that comes my way.