Composed 2024
The immediate inspiration for my ‘Fragment 16 (Xenogothic Triple Canon)’ was a piece by the composer Matt Barber (soundcloud.com/brbrofsvl ) titled ‘Prelude and Canon for Wind Quintet’ ( which you can listen to here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhKDdcFm8l0 ). The title belies his piece’s compositional virtuosity: the canon is in five different superimposed speeds, and uses late romantic tonal language. It caused quite a stir at Eastman when it was first played there, despite its short length. So I also wanted to write a polytempic canon in a historical contrapuntal style, and Avignon around 1370 was my target.
I failed, quickly: my piece is not strictly in three different consistent speeds (much too difficult), but the melodies in each voice, otherwise all direct copies of one another, do get pervasively pushed and pulled like taffy into and out of shifting speeds. I partly attribute my failure to my beloved teacher, Jean-François Charles, who suggested “Why not write a canon at the [melodic distance of a] 7th? ”, suggesting that canons at the 5th and octave were rather passé. I took him up on this, but it made life harder. For example, for technical reasons, descending scales were now basically off limits, and descending sixths become sort-of necessary as an escape hatch, both features which were uncommon in the melodic style of the medieval period. Nevertheless, it was great fun getting the piece to sound as ‘medieval’ as possible given these constraints.
Thanks to the JACK Quartet for this wonderful performance.