Wonderment and Misgiving
for low bowed string and low brass
Ben Leeds Carson, Dog Trio, and Reidemeister Move: By a Moment and a Word
Sideband Records 8
<https://www.sidebandrecords.com/>
Wonderment and Misgiving (2018) is a pair of duos for low wind and low string instrument, meant as a kind of story-music. It was commissioned and recorded(1) by the bass-tuba duo Reidemeister Move (Robin Hayward, microtonal tuba, and Christopher Williams, contrabass). The work was a third rail of sorts, accompanying two other works, one by each of the performers, on their 2018 tour of Europe, Mexico, and the United States. Hearing it at REDCAT in Los Angeles, Los Angeles critic Mark Swed described the first movement as “a kind of acoustic acupressure”(2). They recorded the work in June of 2021 in Graz, Austria, with engineering by Ludwig Früschütz.
As I wrote this work, I imagined music for a pantomime or monodrama, and strived to think of those genres as having specific qualities of time and temporality, even before the situations, and characters, are known. Despite the modern connection of a ballet or music drama to the relentless progress of an organized plot, older precedents for this styles were often less determined to make a point, or likely to digress into broader or less transparent purposes. The sense of time, then, too, can be filled with uncanny mixtures of stasis and suspense, retrospection and a murmur-like awareness of unspent possibility.
With such ideas in mind I tried in these works to re-think some broad tendencies and assumptions about the roles of constancy and change in musical discourse. The two duos were separate but related thought experiments: in each, I imagined a solid object, with contours curving and jutting in all directions — each moving differently in a five-dimensional space, represented in the music by modal pitch, dynamics, timbre, harmonic quality (produced via a higher note’s emphasis of a simultaneous lower note’s partials), and time — with time treated, unusually, as a dimension in which meaningful qualities can be differentiated. Here, time is a dimension like any other — like hardness, like brightness, or even dimensions with less categorical clarity, like suspense, or repose. If that seems abstract, notice small rhythmic gestures in the first half of Wonderment, and allow them their individuated and momentary characters. Normally one has to find a beat before feeling a syncopation, but here, the intensities must be figured differently, figured from a quality of time that emerges freely, from unmetered pairs of timespans.
Finally, in a space conceived from those five dimensions, each of the two bodies undergoes change and movement. This body’s contours are malleable, and rotate around a fixed axis that mutes the space in that region, where, because it is an axis, movement is minimal, and stability is unavoidable. In each case, the axis concentrates information around a narrow range in one dimension, and renders it mostly inarticulate (3).
To conceive of this it might help to reflect for a moment on the metaphor, recognizing that the notes you hear are not the changing-or-moving body, rather, the body is the space or process in which the notes make sense; the notes are a trace of this body, something left over after the body and its movements have charted a course. The time of the body’s movement is not the same as the time of the work: remember, time is one of the dimensions in which the body moves, and the body’s movement leaves traces in all five of the music’s dimensions, one of them is time, but it is a dimension akin to the others.
In Wonderment, the axis of rotation crosses the musical space at middle D of the bass-clef range. (The axis is almost “perpendicular” to pitch, but not quite: the work’s notes descend in pitch, within about a fourth below D, as a direct function of reduced intensity and pitch fixity.) Its contours around that axis arise from differences in intensity, balance between timbres, shifts in degrees of syncopation, and shifts in the degree that pitch is fixed.
i. Wonderment ~ 6’
Misgiving’s axis shifts within the piece: In most phrases it steadies itself around a particular, and only slightly “unpulsed” quality of time, exploring contours in pitch and harmonicity; in others, the axis fixes around harmonic fundamentals to let the object ebb, flow, and waft into dry, weightless syncopations.
The axes in both movements should draw our attention to types of motion that might otherwise seem subservient: the first object inures us to forces of dynamic contour as though they were melody, and the second undergoes a kind of bloom, accustoming us at first to a rhythmic world, but then wobbling as it spins toward more conventional melodic gestures, bridging — in the manner of an intermezzo — some unspecified and almost “unpulsed” story, or dance, to another.
ii. Misgiving ~12’ (Lightly 0:00; With force 7:45)
How does the time of the work unfold, then? What structures it, in the absence of a special, linear role, driving your ears ever forward, expectantly? I hope there is at least some small opportunity in this music to hear time “freely”, to hear it by itself, hear it ordinarily, and yet without deference to the ordinals of modern sensibility about directive and purpose.
NOTES
- Recorded 9 June 2021 — Jenö-Takacs-Saal, Kunstuniversität Graz, Austria, by Reidemeister Move (Robin Hayward, microtonal tuba; Christopher Williams, contrabass)
Engineering, mixing: Ludwig Frühschütz Eleton Audio
Space management: Astrid Grill Kultur-Betriebe Burgenland (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung). Mastered by Chris Mercer. - Mark Swed, “Critic’s Notebook: In Fluxus — making sense of the amorphous anti-art movement’s arrival in L.A.” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2018
- Maybe inarticulate in the way that timbre might be inarticulate in a beginner’s piano etude, or dynamics mightbe inarticulate in a melody whose pitches you struggle to remember.
