Fall quarter was quite busy - after ten months of work, three compositions, Nimbus, the UCSD Nosferatu Project, commissioned by the UCSD German Studies Program, and Grapple, for Dustin Donahue, all came to fruition within a month of each other. I had the rare opportunity to write for chamber orchestra, UCSD's Palimpsest ensemble, which, as its name might suggest, arose from the partially erased remnants of UCSD's former new music ensemble, SONOR.
(At least this is my fanciful take on the matter. SONOR was actually a faculty ensemble, but after its "death" many of those faculty performers undertook the responsibility of curating concerts of ensemble works performed by a mix of graduate students and community performers. Steve Schick suggested that student composers create palimpsests upon companion pieces on each concert, hence the actual title of the ensemble. But I like to think that the resonances of SONOR are still there...)
Aleck Karis was conducting the Fall 2011 concert, and asked me to write a piece with a similar instrumentation to Stefan Wolpe's Chamber Piece No. 2, a short chamber orchestra work that passes rhythmically charged motives between the instruments. I took the idea of a companion piece to be the creation of a complementary work, that is, one which is different enough from its partner work, so that the ear would not tire of the same types of material if they were on the same program together.
The main body of Nimbus consists of continuously bending material that is atmospheric, yet structured, as layered strands of glissandi converge and diverge from articulated tutti attacks. I think of this as a twenty-first century update on the mensuration canons of Johannes Ockeghem and Josquin Des Pres - the nod to Conlon Nancarrow's incisive temporal structures comes in the second section, which is really an attacca second movement. This movement returns to the rhythmically charged material that defines the Wolpe, although my material is substantially more groove oriented (unabashedly so - Wolpe uses contiuously varied rhythmic material, while I rely on repeated rhythmic cells that slowly expand to reveal longer and longer segments of melody). Much of the this attacca second movement steals from my film score to Nosferatu - the opportunity to hear my climactic material scored for orchestra was too good to pass up.
As the namesake might suggest, the impetus for the work was the behavior of clouds - certainly a sublime stimulant for composers since Liszt's forward-looking Nuages Gris, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, or even Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, if not earlier. Thunderstorms have effected me in various ways over the years, particularly because of my work outdoors in trails. Nimbus is certainly autobiographical in some sense.
When I was still working for the Northwest Youth Corps, my Backcountry Leadership crew weathered a torrential thunderstorm in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area one evening (really we were just south of that wilderness area, but I love the name). The next day, we were forced to hike as fast as possible out of the wilderness to avoid the Rankin Creek Fire, which the thunderstorm had started. This event is certainly still with me, as is living in Boulder Colorado for three years, with a west-facing apartment.
Watching the summertime thunderstorms build up over the Arapahoe Glacier (the only really substantial glacier in Colorado) and come down from the Indian Peaks to inundate Boulder was a regular occurrence. But the focus on cumulonimbus clouds is not really representative - maybe any vaporous activity is the inspiration. I vividly recall decending the Renfrew Glacier on the Middle Sister in Oregon in a white-out fog - luckily, my brother and I had traversed it earlier and found no crevasses aside from the Bergschrund, though there was always the danger of a hidden crevasse. But it was pure white surroundings - white ground, white air.
The realism of nature never becomes boring for me, though I suppose that writing pieces about clouds could be considered banal and pedestrian by some. There is always something abstract about nature, such as the way water etches nested curves into a landscape, the results of which pop into relief when illuminated by the evening sun, with high contrast between light and shadow. There are some very interesting updates on landscape art in the visual field afoot - we are not confined to the works of the Hudson River School any longer, and Georgia O'Keeffe has been dead for twenty-five years. What is happening now?
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