"Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music

On Journeys

on journeys The commissioning of Journeys coincided with my moving from Urbana, Illinois, to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, my wife’s childhood home. My own childhood was spent in Macon, Georgia, and Richmond, Virginia, so this move has been, in a real sense, a homecoming. My wife and I had lived in Champaign-Urbana since 1951. All of our children grew up there, so in an even more basic sense,Illinois is our home.Certainly the University of Illinois was home, and more, to my musical life. The whole of my professional life has been based there, and most of my compositions until the mid-1980s were created in Illinois. The most personal meaning of Journeys lies in this double meaning of the movement titles: “Going” and “Returning.” The folk song in the first movement sings of the lover leaving; the section (number thirteen) from Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes used in the second movement speaks of Illinois birds (they were purple martins), released in Martinique, who flew home. A much deeper meaning emerges from another coincidence, the death of Paul Fromm, theVienna-born Chicagoan patron of new music whose foundation continues to support so many of our best composers. Paul Fromm was unwilling to identify his support with any one region, group, or faction in the music of this country but lent his aid generously wherever he perceived excellence.His death was a national,not simply a regional,event.And like all deaths, his raises profound questions. It is on this level, the ultimate going, the ultimate returning, that I have wished to meditate in this music. The burden of my life’s work as a composer has been to deal persistently and in depth with acoustically pure tunings, a process that involves relying upon one’s ear rather than upon the design of conventional instruments or upon the suppositions of traditional musical theory.It is based upon a scientifically accurate description of sound from an acoustic and psychoacoustic angle. It is also the basis of most of the world’s musics other than our own. It results in a multiplicity of different scales and chords with indefinitely large 206 some compositions (or small) numbers of notes. It results also in a powerfully expressive range of familiar and unfamiliar musical nuances. It could be described as an honest treatment of artistic materials in contradistinction to our conventional musical system. In this approach to making music even the technical details of composition and performance are significantly symbolic. The line we usually draw between form and content no longer has significance, like that other imaginary line between intellect and feelings, which disappears when both faculties are brought to bear upon the same symbols. I believe that the best art is on one level immediately intelligible,but so redolent with symbolic meaning that the initial grasp of it expands almost limitlessly into a richer significance . This cannot be achieved with merely conventional artistic means, but it can also not be achieved except in relation to them. ...