Clyne: rewind

because i will have to start writing pretty regular program notes and studying a large variety of scores, i've decided to revive this beginning with the notes that i had to write for the upcoming concert. this is a piece that was written in 2005 by mead composer-in-residence at chicago symphony.



there is a video on the cso website in which clyne talks about the composition of this piece, but i can't get it to load under any circumstances.

this is actually a pretty cool short piece in which she is inspired by both visual imagery and dance choreography. the key image is that of an analog video tape being quickly rewound, with “fleeting moments of skipping, freezing, and warping.” she also drew a lot of inspiration from the dance choreography of her friend kitty mcnamee, whom she admires for its use of gestures which repeatedly appear throughout a piece to “build and bind its narrative structure.”
the overall sound is a pretty cool sense of electronic tension which you're hit with almost immediately. a dramatic sustained note opens the piece, colored by lurching crescendi and diminuendi. strings enter with agitated sixteenths that are accented in unexpected places, creating a tautness that repeatedly but unpredictably grows and explodes. there's that stringy, noisy sense that you get when you listen to lots of electronics.
clyne also employs a number of different techniques to recall "warping and skipping": a high whining pitch is supplied by bowed crotales (small brass disks usually struck with a mallet); brass and strings are instructed to “bend” pitches and perform slow glissandi over many bars. in the cso video, she mentions that the gesture she credits as the “kernel” for the entire piece is the piano's cluster chords, which the player is instructed to play by striking the keyboard with their entire forearm (a gesture she remembers performing in frustration during the composition process before she realized she could actually use it).

there is one part close to the end which is at about half tempo and involves some string solos. suggestions on what this part represents? maybe the rewind mechanism is stalling but continuing to try to rewind.

the part which brings the piece to a literal level (and also into clyne's specialty of electronic music) is the last thirty seconds: as most of the orchestra falls silent, a short, pre-recorded segment of the piece is played in high-speed reverse for the final thirty seconds. so i think in most score/part sets for this a pre-recorded CD is included with the high quality .aiff file. we've put this on an ipod, which will be piped over the auditorium sound system. the "press play" instruction is given to the second percussion player, so it's actually controlled from within the ensemble. the writing around the entrance is such that the recording emerges from the texture, so i think in the case of slight delays in the playback or whatever it won't matter quite so much, and the file is merely played straight until the huge chord at the end which just cuts everything off.