"Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music

The Genesis of Knocking Piece

the genesis of knocking piece 1983 In the early 1960s Wilford Leach,with whom I had collaborated on Gertrude, or Would She Be Pleased to Receive It? and was later to collaborate with on Carmilla, approached me about doing incidental music for his play In Three Zones, subsequently produced at Lincoln Center. I proposed to Leach that the music be composed of every degree of tonal organization from musique concrète shading into literal sound effects,through non-pitched percussion to conventionally tuned instrumental music and just tuned microtonal instrumental music held together by a microtonally tuned piano. I further proposed that the action be framed by the orchestra and sound speakers: on one side the just tuned piano and the pitched instruments , and on the other the non-pitched percussion and noise sources. The first act of In Three Zones consists of a retelling of the same story C. F. Ramuz designed for Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, a variation on the Faust legend. In Leach’s version, refugees crowd the bombed-out, muddy, rutted roads of a defeated, war-torn country. A young soldier, separated from his regiment, falls in with a sinister general, also separated from his troops. Uncertain whether the war is over or not, the soldier feels constrained to obey the general, who proceeds virtually to enslave him. The general is actually an incarnation of the devil. At a crucial point in the action the two build a campfire and settle for the night. The soldier sleeps while the general, who never sleeps, watches. The soldier dreams,and we see his dream as a film in negative print.In the dream he reaches his home village and finds it demolished entirely except for one house,which miraculously is his home.He finds it locked and climbs all over it seeking to get in. My idea was to have two percussionists cross the stage to the piano just as the soldier goes to sleep.They would then play on the inside of the piano.For this spot I composed Knocking Piece. The idea of a negative transformation pervaded the conception, suggested by the Faust theme, the film in negative, 188 some compositions the bitter homecoming. The image of the most elaborate of instruments, and in this context the most perfectly in tune,seemingly violated by two percussionists with sticks and mallets, concentratedly focusing like surgeons, bore out this theme of destruction. I was interested, moreover, in exploring a transfer of the ratios of the pitches in a just tuned composition to ratios of superimposed metrical patterns in a percussion piece. I had recently composed a setting of Shakespeare’s A Sea Dirge from The Tempest in which I used just intonation to control microtonal transpositions of a twelve-tone set which was accompanied by a series of freely varied twelvetoned sets. The principal set, a Webern-like segmented row composed of four trichords with identical pitch construction,was subjected to only two types of permutation: rearrangement of the order of the three pitches in each trichord, and rearrangement of the order of the four trichords. Since the principal set’s trichords utilized three consecutive half-steps, a chromatic texture was ensured throughout. Because the intervals made by the combination of this set with its accompanying free sets were restricted to perfect octaves, unisons, fifths and fourths, and just tuned major and minor thirds and sixths, a relatively conservative level of dissonance was also ensured.Microtonal inflection was limited solely to the transposition levels used from one statement of the principal set to the next. The pitch levels of the principal set sequence are determined by an interrelated pair of seven-tone diatonic sets, the pitch of which is determined by an interlocking superposition of just tuned major and minor triads. A few notes have been displaced by a syntonic comma, due to their harmonic context , and in two successive cases flat and sharp enharmonic nonequivalents have been mixed. The conversion to metrical ratios was made as follows. Perfect unisons were interpreted as 1:1; perfect octaves as 2:1; perfect fifths as 3:2; perfect fourths as 4:3; major thirds became 5:4; minor thirds 6:5; major sixths 5:3; minor sixths 8:5. There is a metrical modulation in every bar. While one player maintains a constant note speed,the other fits different superimposed patterns onto this referential base (Figure 38). The instructions on the score read: “For two percussionists to play...