A Dance of Pattern: Towards New
Styles of Auditory and Visual Composition.
The arpeggio is the presentation of
a chord over time. As the ear perceives different frequencies presented in
temporal succession of one another, the listener’s mind synthesizes the parts into
one, consistent narrative: the chord. It is by avenue of this awareness-over-time
that C, E, and G, played one note at a time at a rapid tempo, (for instance, at
120 beats per minute, one note per beat) invoke the quality of a C Major
Chord. Yet we all know that such a quality can be invoked all at once. Were the
three pitches to be played simultaneously, either on a guitar or a piano, or by
three separate vocalists or instrumentalists, each producing a different note
in unison, the effect would be of a C Major Chord, yet it would sound relatively
“in-your-face” and “blockish” because it would require less of the listener’s
personal imagination in order to interpret it.
A similar process may be observed
visually in the phenomenon of Depth Perception. When I was a child, I owned a
toy that was a pair of “3-D Goggles”. A special disc could be inserted into a
slot within the machine; this disc contained semi-transparent, coloured panels
with images from popular cartoon movies I had watched previously. A special trigger
which rested at the top right-hand side of the Goggles allowed me to rotate
this disc at one slide at a time whilst looking through the lenses. Each slide
was represented by two nearly-identical panels, positioned at opposite ends of
the same axis on the wheel, and the Goggles’ lenses allowed me to view the
panels simultaneously as though they were two different perspectives of the
same image; this created the Illusion of Depth, hence three dimensions. The toy
required no electricity, no programming, no artificial light source or digital
content. It was purely the science and magic of optics.
A toy xylophone may be considered
the sonic equivalent of this toy. It requires no batteries and no electrical
source; a toddler can use it. So long as the toddler does not attempt to eat
the mallet, which is usually attached inextricably to the frame of the
instrument, the toddler may be amused for minutes on end by the sounds of four
tones played at different times, entirely according to player input. The magic
lies not, however, only in each isolated note. As the toddler begins to develop
the faculty of memory, the capacity to hear three notes as one melody becomes
possible, especially if those notes, like C, E, and G, for example, already
comprise a Chord. Just as the “illusion of Depth” is created by the juxtaposition
of two panels, separated only by physical space, so it is that the
“illusion of Harmony” is produced by the juxtaposition of different pitches,
separated only by temporal space, i.e. “time”.
Recently, I have had my world restored
to its former, dreamlike splendor by the acquisition of a new pair of glasses.
These glasses were tailored to the specific deficiencies in my eyeballs, for
which I assume no blame.
To take my dog out on a nightly
walk became a treat. Whereas previously an airplane flying overhead would be
registered as a series of blurs, changing colour in a fixed sequence of consecutive
phases, I could now make out the plane’s wings, each highlighted by a rich,
golden gem, and the red and green hues that would ordinarily simply “drown out”
the golden blur in semi-regular intervals (semi-regular precisely because it
would take my mind a moment to process changes in a moving object miles overhead,
each time to varying degrees of “accuracy”) now appeared as very specific parts
of the aeroplane that would come alive at very precisely synchronized moments,
not unlike a percussion ensemble playing a very delicate series of xylophone
arpeggios in a composition by Steve Reich. One might say that, whereas
previously I heard only the muddied reverb of those arpeggios, forming the impression
of a chord, now I could hear the individual notes, presented separately but, as
a result, clearly. The two golden gems were effectively two “drones” sustaining
the same pitch in different octaves, whereas the blinking lights were
presenting the other two legs of the triad in very articulate rhythmic
succession. Combining these elements over time produces an effect at once sensorily
crisp and imaginatively captivating.
Yet what hovered overhead almost
paled in brilliance to what lay before me. Many nights my dog and I would pass
a tree that had become familiar to me in childhood, for behind it lay a corner
where two walls of the adjacent house met, one belonging to the garage and the
other part to the partition which partially enclosed the patio. This corner was
the Easternmost “node” that we had designated as a “safe zone” for one of our
night-time games of tag. In later age, I bewailed that my sense of wonder had
left me with regards to this sheltered alcove, presumably because I was too old
(and not yet old enough) to keep playing this peculiar game, creeping around
the patios of my neighbours. Yet now it became clear to me, as did its
implications.
Up until this point, the sight of
the corner had been reduced to a blur. All blurs are devoid of the perception
of Depth; the absence of detail provides next to no indication of Distance. All
external objects that were outside of my Range of Clarity became equally “far
away”, and to compensate for this my mind rendered them all equally “close”, as
though they were simply an impressionistic canvas imprinted on the inside of a
snow globe. In other words, an object that lay a football field away from me
could appear to be as close as an object just outside of my Range of Clarity, for
it was no more blurry (though perhaps substantially “smaller”) than a book that
was at more than an arm’s length of my eyes, which was more or less the radius of
this personal “snow globe” that was my Range of Clarity.
Yet with my new pair of eyes I
could now make out the details in the mist. I saw the tree as though I had, for
the first time, stopped peering at the tiny panels in my cartoon wheel, slipped
them into my 3-D Goggles, and looked through the lenses. What had previously appeared
as an Impressionistic Blur was now revealed in layers of detail. Previously,
Depth could only be perceived over time, with a concerted effort. If I wished
to measure Distance, I would have to traverse that same Distance, at least up
until the nearest object (the Tree, most probably and usually) moved out of the
Filter of Blur and into the Realm of Clarity. Yet now I could take in the
entire three-dimensional scene at once, from one vantage point, and making such
a journey would be a treat in that each subpart, already clear, would become
enriched, each at its own pace, which was always a derivative of my own chosen
pace.
In the previous analogy to music, I
likened my former blurriness with a sort of muddied ambience that invoked a
chord but with less precision than an arpeggio, and my restored global clarity
was analogous accordingly to that same arpeggio. Yet in this more terrestrial
example the roles were flipped. The complete image, in all its detail, was less
like an arpeggio and more like a block chord, distinct from the aforementioned “ambience”
in that there was nothing “muddy” about it. By the same token, if I wished to
investigate the chord as a whole, I would have to approach it over time, taking
in various elements, like an arpeggio.
This brings me to my Ideal for very
precise composition, both sonically and visually:
By coupling Block Chords (as well
as chordal ambience and reverb) simultaneously, composers can create a
phenomenon known as the Polychord. The effect of this may be quite dissonant,
though at times this dissonance may be mitigated by the presentation and
representation of various patterns over time. In other words, as the listener
becomes familiar with a fundamental pattern, the introduction of new variations
upon this pattern, as well as variations upon auxiliary “overlying” patterns,
may be experienced as appropriate and “logical” rather than “disruptive”, just
as the moderate introduction of evil into a narrative such as The Godfather
or Breaking Bad is less shocking than immediate brutality. Similarly,
the process of watching a well-meaning character transform into a villain so
brutal as to rival his initial adversaries may be likened to the process by
which layers of increasing dissonance come to merge with an ambient backdrop of
dissonant noise, as in an Industrial Metal composition by Nine Inch Nails or
Mick Gordon. Yet more often than not composers elect to avoid dissonance for as
long as possible, especially in writing for a conventional audience. Chords
that might otherwise form a Polychord are thus sequestered over time in a progression.
Yet this is not very different in principle from the transformation of a block
chord into an arpeggio, and that fact creates a new opportunity for imaginative
and compelling harmonization.
An arpeggio may technically be
played at any tempo. Entire ambient works have been produced by simply
extending a phrase over abnormal lengths of time. When Michael Giacchino reimagined
and recreated John Williams’ “Imperial March” from the original Star Wars
trilogy in the stand-alone sequel Star Wars: Rogue One, some listeners
only vaguely recognized it as a variation upon the iconic motif, though others,
who had been anticipating it for over an hour, were less thrown by its length
over time as by the length of time preceding it. When music is presented over
time, it is a far more subjective experience, and as such it appears at once
more alienating and more intimate. What Giacchino managed to do to artfully
disguise the homage, thereby objectively consolidating its subjectively
fluidity, was to superimpose a new chord progression (or a new variation upon
the existing progression) over the ground bass that served as the bones
of the old “Darth Vader” leitmotif. By the same token, an arpeggio need not be
played fast in order to be recognized as a chord. It may be played slowly, and
it is this flexibility that allows additional chordal material to be
superimposed OVER it.
While C, E, and G play on the
ground floor, for instance, voices overhead may play A minor, E minor, and G
minor, for instance. By this means, what on one level, over time,
appears as a Major Chord is overscored by a progression of minor
chords. Since the chords A minor, E minor, and G minor contain the
notes C, E, and G, respectively, the progression may be considered consonant at
any one point in time, though the C Major Chord being presented OVER time would
clash (create dissonance) with G minor, though not as much dissonance,
ironically, as were the latter chord G Major, though both Major Chords (C and
G) inhabit the same pitch collection, of which C is the Tonic (most stable) Chord,
and G minor borrows a note (“B flat”) from outside of that collection which “just
so happens” to clash less with C than “B Natural” (of that collection, within
the “key of C”) does. Similarly, while G minor would clash with either A minor
or E minor if presented simultaneously with either, (or worse: both!!) it “follows
and flows naturally” from E minor over time, simply because both share a
“gender” (“minority”, the quality of “being minor”).
This same pattern may be expanded
and atomized even further, however. If we wished to remove block chords
altogether from this composition, we might express each of the aforementioned
minor chords as arpeggios. Set to a time signature of 9/8, wherein each bar
contains nine eighth-notes, we might present A minor, E minor, and G minor
consecutively as eighth-note triplets, each one hovering over a bass note that is
three eighth-notes (notated as a “dotted quarter-note”, three-halves of an
ordinary quarter-note, which is twice the length of an ordinary eighth-note) in
length. In this fashion, we would express the C Major Triad as a bass arpeggio
that is three times as slow as (or a third of the speed of) the Minor Triad Arpeggios
overhead. This juxtaposition allows for as many as four different chords,
ordinarily irreconcilable and dissonant with respect to one another at any one
time, to be evoked through only two lines, appearing as no more than two
different pitches at a time but involving as many as seven different notes, from
multiple keys, over the course of time.
Yet this juxtaposition is even more
mysterious than I have already intimated. Since A minor and E minor both
contain the note “E”, it becomes possible for that note to act as a “pivot tone”
between A minor and E minor. Expressed as a single note at a single
moment in time, it may “belong” to EITHER A minor OR E minor, and this is to
say nothing yet of the numerous other chords that use “E” in numerous other
pitch collections. Just as matter may be perceived as either a wave or a particle,
according to Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, so it is that an “E” may
be either the Root of E minor (or E Major, for that matter, in other pitch
collections, such as the “key of E”) or as the Fifth of A minor (or A Major,
also outside of our current pitch collection, though not outside of the “key of
E”, just as the “key of A” contains E Major). By the same token, Walter White,
the “hero” of Breaking Bad, may often be interpreted as the villain
“Heisenberg”, whose name is an homage to this same principle of ambiguity;
Bryan Cranston, who depicts both the hero and his villainous alter-ego, is a
sort of “pivot” between two radically opposed identities. While E minor and A
minor (as well as their parallel Major equivalents) are not as “radically
opposed” as C Major and G minor, as intimated, even C Major and G minor have a
pivot tone in “G”, so that where the C Major Arpeggio meets the G minor Arpeggio
we might even have them meet at the same exact pitch: for instance, “middle G”,
or 384 waves per second in “just” intonation.
Furthermore, C Major in itself
shares two notes each with BOTH A minor and E minor; more specifically, A minor
contains C and E, which are the first two notes in our bassline, while E minor
contains E and G, which are the last two notes of our bassline. This
means that the transition between A minor and E minor is not clearly delineated
until either “A”, “C”, “G”, or “B” (Natural) appears, the former two belonging
only to A minor in this dichotomy (“A”, specifically, only belongs to that one
chord out of our set of four) and the latter two belonging not to A minor but
to E minor. Since the bassline underscoring these two chords plays only C and
E, and since “E” belongs to both A minor and E minor, once the “C”
resolves and the bassline turns to “E”, it may be impossible to tell whether A
minor or E minor is the overlying chord, and so long as the “B” (Natural) is
omitted this ambiguity may remain until either the bass or the treble plays “G”;
even this “G”, as intimated, may belong EITHER to E minor OR to G minor, so it
is not until the appearance of either B Natural or B flat that the
listener may draw a definite line, and if the “G” is first introduced in the
bassline, that line may in itself be subject to the illusion of ambiguity,
since the “G” in the bassline also completes the C Major Chord, which is
so dissonant with G minor, as previously intimated, that the appearance of G
minor may appear too farfetched to register, just as in a dissonant polychord that
is presented over time. On top of ALL of that, the “G” acts as the “minor
seventh” of the A minor Triad, so the “G” may act as an unstable but jazzy and
beautiful pivot tone between G minor and A minor, now heard as an “A minor
Seventh”.
When I beheld the sheltered alcove
of my youth with my new pair of eyes, I saw the entire scene in all its former
Depth. I beheld it as a single, gorgeous block chord, so that if I’d had the
hand to paint it I might have produced a still life that would have rivaled
Cezanne’s fruits. Were I to have returned alone, without my dog, to creep into
that familiar corner, at once cozy and bracing, I would have seen this Depth
modulate much as a shifting soundscape; as the Tree came into closer proximity
and intricacy of detail, it would have been like a single violin string
quivering, its timbre unconcealed by its mounting volume. As I would have
ventured further in, beyond that same Tree I would have perhaps made out the stucco
patterns in the wall, previously cloaked in shadow and distance. Just as pivot
tones resolve to make room for new tones to glimmer in new forms of consonance,
so my eyes would have perceived deeper levels of mystery by moving beyond even
that which the first “chord” or “still-life” had revealed from a distance. Yet
had it been one night prior, were I armed only with my old glasses of nearly
three years, I would have only been able to piece this scene together from
creeping into it, and the pattern my mind would have produced would have been
an entirely different chord than the one I had heard in childhood, as distinct
from this detailed interactive three-dimensional portrait as C Major is
distinct from G minor in music.
I recently read that when the eye
sees it only takes in a small stream of light at a time. What we perceive as
complete, vivid images are nothing more than a collage of quick, pointed
glimpses assembled by the brain. In this sense, the entire process of finding
the node, identifying it, considering it, and then running into it, all within
the course of a single game of tag played at night, may be expressed not unlike
a series of notes, each heard as either a particle or a wave, put together
moment by moment, synthesized over longer moments into a whole that not merely
surpasses the sum of its parts but that, fundamentally, can only be divided
into “parts” for the sake of utility. It is precisely this interplay between
utility and humility, between the illusion of certainty and the imminence of uncertainty,
that makes Human Life, as a dance between the senses and the Imagination, worth
living. That is both its staunchest science and its most absorbing magic. That comprises
the Lifeblood of Art, and those are the bones of the most Artful Life. As Alan
Watts had so brilliantly summarized: “Life is a Dance of Pattern.”
[({Dm.R.G.)}]
