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Eight Patterns (Montserrat)

by Miguel Mathias

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The structure for this piece is modeled on time-stamp-based scores such as Alvin Lucier’s “In Memoriam Jon Higgins.” Lucier’s piece concerns acoustic phenomenon rather than narrative semantics, and I turned to this example as an alternative to the normative morality of dissonance and consonance in the church. In order to subvert the semantic trope of a climax, I organized the moments of greatest density at the beginning of the piece. All of the sound material is extracted from two excerpts from an organ field recording I made at the Montserrat monastery this summer. The 1) left to right diagonal lines and 2) forward and backward slashes indicate the first and second organ field recordings in the left channel, respectively (transcribed on the first staff). The 1) right to left diagonal lines and 2) parentheses indicate the first and second organ field recordings in the right channel, respectively (transcribed on the second staff). The third staff combines the first two. The piece consists of four events in each channel. The events are always staggered so that the left channel precedes the right. The first pair of events is simply the first excerpt from the organ recording, beginning on the left, followed by the right. I was curious about this simple staggering as an extreme case of church reverberation, where dissonance might be created out of even the most consonant melodies due to the echo in the church nave. The second pair of events is the second excerpt from the organ recording, beginning on the left, followed by the right. In this case, however, the left channel’s playback is set to ninety five percent of normal speed. The left channel thus progresses more slowly, despite its head start, leading to more acute echo, as well as acoustic beating (in the spirit of Lucier) due to a slow sliding of the pitches past one another. The second half of the piece is restricted to individual pitches in each channel, without any overtones. I used Michael Klingbeil’s SPEAR software to analyze the field recordings and extract fundamental frequencies. The augmented fourth, perfect fifth, and minor second generated (in that order) all appeared as intervals within the original field recordings.

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released December 9, 2018

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Miguel Mathias Hartford, Connecticut

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