Chromatose: a musical suite for five instruments

Chromatose is an original musical composition consisting currently of two separate movements (with an eventual third and final movement in the planning stages). The basic instrumentation is as follows: Flute, clarinet, horn, violin, and cello. Highly experimental, this piece explores and utilizes a broad range of diverse and unusual sounds drawn from an inexhaustible frontier of newer musical techniques and concepts. With this in mind, color (timbre), texture and rhythm have been the predominant creative considerations in its genesis. Beyond basic blending of familiar instrumental timbres, Chromatose includes many different colors derived from the fairly heavy use of extended techniques. These are sounds produced by an instrument when it is played or used in a way that deviates from its proper traditional function. Alterations in fingering, bowing, tuning, embouchure, etc. are all means through which these sounds can be produced. Tuning is the most significant innovation in Chromatose, as the intended result is a dense abundance of microtones, which are intervals smaller than any of those found in traditional Western music. The significance of microtones becomes evident when heard. They are perceived less as intervals and more as degrees of imperfection of the same pitch. An audible pulsation occurs between detuned pitches, and a fatness and dirtiness of sound results, broadening the pitch and distorting the colors of the individual instruments. Texture is to color what a fabric is to a thread; it is a somewhat wider, more distant and cumulative point of perspective. The layering of voices, colors, harmonies, and/or rhythms is what produces musical texture. Traditionally this has often meant either polyphony (several separate melodic lines or voices moving independently from one another) or homophony (vertical harmonies layered in a tonal or atonal context). The twentieth century, however, has given rise to a third option-heterophony, which is polyphony taken to such a rapid and condensed level that no individual voices or colors can be discerned. In such a context, only a dense composite color or texture is heard, as is prevailingly the case in both movements of Chromatose. Rhythm, it should be pointed out, does not necessarily refer to a consistent, symmetrical or repeated pattern. It is the phrasing, punctuation, or stitch pattern of a composition. It determines the liveliness or stagnation, ease or unease, unity or disunity of a single moment or an entire piece of music. On a larger level rhythm lends character and personality to music; on a smaller level, when several asymmetrically subdivided rhythms are layered, the dense composite sound produces heterophony. Drawing inspiration from the above considerations, Chromatose's two contrasting movements endeavor to capture, sculpt and refine musical sound in such ways as to evoke strong visceral emotions and visual impressions of light energy as it refracts, erupts and continually changes forms unpredictably. Included with the score, for further elucidation, are the individual performance notes for each player. They provide specific instructions on what certain notation choices mean and how they are to be executed. Chromatose has been a formidable challenge to be sure, but one that has also been an incalculably worthwhile venture in a direction of boundless new and exciting creative possibilities.