Pendulum’s first concert of the year is almost upon us! This will be my first Pendulum program of all time, being a new DMA student at Boulder this year. Everyone in the halls keeps mentioning ‘Pendulum oh yeah the Pendulum concert oh you should write a piece for the Pendulum concerts I’ll totally play it.” Now is the time for me to hear what all the fuss is about.
To get the concert year rolling, I wanted to introduce a few of the composers whose works will be performed on our September concert. First up is Cole Ingraham, a currently a second-year DMA composer, whose piece ‘Lattice’ is written for saxophone and electronics. Cole is exploring Lou Harrison’s ‘free-style Just Intonation’ in the piece, which the composer tells me in layman’s terms means “music where notes are all tuned to pure intervals based on their neighboring tones rather than a fixed central pitch.” That can also translate to "only using pitches whose frequencies are multiples of all prime numbers less than or equal to thirteen”. Perhaps another translation: Just Intonation can more easily be heard than explained.
I really like to know what challenges composers, and especially about their working processes. In almost all concerts, the audience is presented with a glossy, finished work, not knowing the back story of how the piece was completed, or changes that occurred along the way. Sometimes that’s for the best; who wants to see all of the frustrations we went through along the way to arrive at this point? But sometimes insight into working process can be enlightening. For Ingraham, a challenging part of working on ‘Lattice’ has been
“trying to find ways to use the tuning system in ways that are both interesting and not too difficult for the non-computer performer. In my case, to play a fast passage involving precise complex tuning is easy, as I created a software instrument designed specifically for this task. For the sax, however this is a lot to ask for in isolation but when playing along with the computer you are able to tune by ear in relation to it, which makes it possible (albeit still very difficult).”
Ingraham is playing the laptop during the performance, but the saxophone part will be performed by a phenomenal player known for his talents in premiering new and experimental works for sax, Michael Straus (http://mstraus.net/). Intimidatingly talented, Michael hales from Peabody and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Experimental Music and Digital Media from Louisiana State.
(Above, Michael Straus, from his website.)
Ingraham senses that writing ‘Lattice’ is part of a larger grand plan of learning and creating. CU’s College of Music seems to have a sense of support for explorations that other music programs may shy away from. Cole’s ideas in ‘Lattice’ are one step for him to explore more ideas of alternate tuning systems; he writes:
“when I first got introduced to [alternate tunings] during my masters at Mills College, it fascinated me, but I had no idea how to think outside the usual twelve notes. Gradually after researching what others working in this system had done, and through plenty of my own experiments, I grew more and more comfortable with it and decided that this was a direction I wanted to keep moving in…I continue to look for new and better ways to explore alternate tunings and try to present them in a way that conveys these sometimes difficult ideas in a concise and performable way.”
What better way to hear (and be rewarded by) all your laborious efforts than to witness them live on stage.
Pendulum’s first concert of the ‘11-12 school year will be next Wednesday, September 28th, at 7:30 in Grusin Music Hall.
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