So if you keep up with my Daily Log posts (odds are you don't; they're quite boring) (no joke, they are), you'll know that my first composition that I wrote for my 20th-Century Counterpoint class ended up crashing and burning. Not because the concept wasn't excellent (Dr. Asplund said it was great), but because I didn't have firm understanding of the Webern inversion canon and did not successfully follow all of the directions of the prompt.
Fortunately, the next piece we were required to write was much more open-ended. We simply had to write a pointillistic piece. Pointillism, as we had defined it, meant that there could be no audible melody or counterpoint. The texture had to be thin and spread between several different instrumental timbres (in the case of this assignment, there had to be at least five instruments) in small two-to-three-note "points" of sound. Dynamics and articulation also had to be heavily regulated as well.
It was implied that we could create a rule or serial sequence if we desired, but our procedure could also be intuitive, without much pattern or organizational concept. While I was thankful that there was no arbitrary rule I had to follow, I found myself a little confused as to how to go about writing a purely intuitive piece that would have no melody, no harmony, and no counterpoint. I can't hear any of it in my head before I write it down. The only thing I could be very sure about was which timbres I wanted at certain times.
So I began writing my piece simply by throwing dots onto empty staff paper. I didn't think about clefs, instrumentation, or even rhythm. I just focused on pitch groups that seemed to "go" together visually on the page. I then stuck those notes into a notation document on my computer and started playing around with different rhythms. I hoped that the piece would turn out a bit disjoint, like you couldn't hear where the downbeats were, so I included triplets, sixteenth notes, and various durations to keep the listener guessing and free it from any sense of pattern.
One pattern, however, does arise. The piece is almost entirely palindromic. The first nine measures are played backwards (with some edits for articulation and attack) in the following nine measures. However, while interval relationships and rhythm remain an exact retrograde version of what was played initially, the pitches in the second half of the piece are raised by two semitones. Thus, when a G was originally played, now an A is played instead. The only instance in which the palindrome is not exact is at the very end of the piece, which includes a bar of rest followed by two chords, one fff and one pp. This acts as a coda to the piece, existing outside of the rest of the piece's formal structure.
As I put the piece together, I considered some of the conceptual implications to such a design. Immediately, I realized that this sporadic, pointillistic, palindromic piece seemed to mimic the movements of a boomerang. If you don't know much about the physics of the device, throwing a boomerang seems like a pretty miraculous feat. It travels in a somewhat skiwampus arch, made up of spinning circles that seem disjoint, but it still ends up returning to the point from whence it came. Thus, in this piece, I begin by throwing the boomerang, which sails in its unpredictable trajectory for nine measures, and then returns. It is then "caught" in the last two measures, with a satisfying fff catch followed by a quick breath of relief (ppp).
The raising of pitches by whole step invites a deeper layer of conceptual thinking, this time touching on the inevitability of change. Other things in our lives return to us like boomerangs, but something we come to realize as we gain experience is that while things do return, they most likely never return exactly as you first left them. While the trajectory of the boomerang in the second half of its journey is generally in the same direction, its return path is surely not identical to its initial course.
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