Riding the Railing (Emptying the Desk Drawer #2)

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I might start posting some ephemeral multimedia things I'd only posted on Facebook as a way of preserving/exploring them a bit more. I have a list of dozens of such items, though oddly enough, new topics have been popping up here more often than usual, so it's taken me some time to finish this post. This pattern actually goes back more than a decade with the blog. Once I post one or two things, I'm much more likely to start posting more.

About two years ago, a friend posted an image of a staircase with two bars of music designed into the railing. The treble clef actually looks pretty good, although there are some peculiarities about the music shown - especially the lack of a clear meter. It's a common theme for musicians to be annoyed when musical symbols are deployed as if they only exist for their appearance. (I was recently shown some designs for signs at my school in which quarter notes were used to decorate a page, with multiple stems on the wrong sides.)

Surely, the best response was from a friend of the friend who wrote:

But maybe there’s a REAL bar at the top of those stairs. The designer obviously knew where one was.

My own response was predictably more...well, I invested a lot of time in it. Here's what I wrote:

 A friend (h/t David) shared this image of music in measures of 13/16 and 10/16 designed into a staircase. At first I just wanted to hear this musical nonsense, but then of course I felt compelled to make something of it. Those lovely implied 7th chords! The challenge is to use that 13+10 meter to some "advantage." 

I'll add that though the original design might well have been conceived with no sounds at all in mind (at least as suggested by the durations), in addition to the implied arpeggiations of 7th chords in each bar, the second bar inverts the intervals of the first bar, and we get two motivic perfect fifths (all of those things are related, of course) - and perhaps most *notably*, the tune begin and ends on E. Because of natural patterns and symmetries in musical design, all of these things could easily have happened by chance.

You may hear the musical notes shown via this nifty little player (note that the music won't play if your phone is set to Do Not Disturb.) 

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Before long, this had turned into a short little composition. You may hear a digital rendition here.

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My thought for the blog was that I'd record myself playing this VERY SIMPLE piece, and I'd be done with it. Well...if I thought the unusual additive rhythms in Messiaen's O sacrum convivium! were tricky, this definitely takes thing to a new level. This is actually a good example of a very widespread phenomenon: composers writing music using computers end up writing stuff that is much more awkward for live performers than the computer and/or notation might lead you to believe.

In this case, it's not so much the irregular meters of 13/16 and 10/16. (I've actually gotten pretty comfortable with irregular meters as shown here, here, and here.) Because I wanted the original piece to have a lazy, but hazy flow, I wrote a left hand part with metrical groupings mostly out of sync with the right hand. This looks really straightforward on the page (and there's a lot of repetition, because I wanted to suggest everything was evolving from the staircase motif), but to a 4/4 classical player like me, it's quite a mind stretch to combine the grooves.

Often, one hand will have sets of dotted eighths which subdivide into three sixteenths while the other hand plays eighths which subdivide into two sixteenths. But unlike many 2 against 3 situations, the places where the parts align do not necessarily have a strong metrical feel. I could have used ties and dotted notes to make the alignments more clear, but the point is that each part should be in its own little world. Also, it looks better this way. 

The result of all this is that, like every blog project I conceive, this took a lot more time and effort than I'd expected! (My wife doesn't even laugh anymore when I say something like that.) But, it was fun and gratifying to play. I think I mostly have the combined grooves down, although it's still tricky for my mind to perceive both at once. (I did write in little reminder cheats to help align things and practiced along with the synth performance as well. It is not metronomically perfect, but the flow feels right to the composer.)

And here's the result. Some soothing, but slightly unnerving music for late on a fall afternoon.

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This is certainly an unusual inspiration for a composition, though its kernel is a fully formed motif, whether its designer knew that or not. It's not so far from the idea of writing a fugue based on a pre-existing motif and no less random than writing music based on letters as J.S. Bach and Shostakovich enjoyed doing. I've explored decorative markings on a score as suggestions for improvisation. Someone wrote a concerto to go with a cat's nuzzling at a keyboard. People write music to go with bird and whale songs. Perhaps next time I'll go for a true challenge and write a concerto based on a cup of coffee or a rock.

P.S. By the way, this genre of musical railings has many more examples than I'd have expected as this simple Google search shows.