Year composed: 2004
Duration: 15′
Instrumentation: amplified flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion, with live electronics
Notes:
When I began Axis Mundi, my working title was Hamlet’s Mill, from a book by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend. According to their account, indigenous peoples across the world understood, in a way that contemporary cultures no longer do, the complex mathematical cycles created by the stars, and they passed along this knowledge in their myths and stories. These stories functioned as a kind of “memory theater” and governed basic seasonal practices such as when to plant and harvest crops. Tales of floods (such as the ancient myth of Hamlet) or the world tree as the “axis” of the earth, embed this knowledge in a form that could be orally transmitted to future generations. My composition draws on their vivid metaphor of the bright sky whirling and turning in
space.
Much of my recent work deals with issues of timbre and musical resonance. This particular piece uses amplification to heighten the natural resonance of the ensemble; additionally, solos for the flute, violin, cello, and bass clarinet are processed using a long reverberation. I took the acoustical construction of each instrument as my point of departure for the harmonic sound world in the composition: the flute as an instrument roughly tuned in D, the strings tuned in fifths E (violin), A, D, G, and C (cello), the clarinet in B-flat, and the piano’s lowest A, middle E-flat, and highest C. Given the overtone spectra for each of these, I mapped out a series of harmonic areas related by perfect fifths, with solo sections alternating the entire ensemble. The final section combines the harmonic partials of all the instrumental tunings.
The flute begins the piece with a dramatically noisy, overblown lowest D, and slowly arpeggiates through long held pitches with a long reverb and a lot of added air noise. Bowed crotales emerge out of the sound, like starry wavering partials. The piano, with its enormous range and power, forms the scaffolding underpinning much of the music, with long, intoning bass notes and evenly spaced repeating notes above in large circular patterns. The percussion plays mostly drums and resonating cymbals, embellishing and decorating the piano’s texture.
This composition was written for the Earplay Ensemble and made possible by a grant from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard.