On Robert Morris's Refrains

ON ROBERT MORRIS’S REFRAINS BRIAN ALEGANT OFFER THIS ESSAY ON REFRAINS (1995), a medium-length composition for cello and piano, as a companion to the performance on the CD that accompanies this Festschrift.1 The essay highlights aspects of the work’s structure and rhetoric that I find particularly compelling, and suggests pathways and strategies for listening. Owing to considerations of space, I have chosen to focus on just a few aspects of this complicated work so that I might explore them in (a bit) more depth. I will discuss the large-scale form and the overarching trajectory of Refrains; examine its five different types of music(s), paying particular attention to pitch, pitch-class, and set-class structure; and trace the histories of select harmonies and prominent row presentations that serve as landmarks. I On Robert Morris’s Refrains 43 THE BIG PICTURE Refrains is a fragmentary, episodic work that strings together twentyone sections that are differentiated by character, structure, tempo, harmonic rhythm, texture, and register. Example 1 uses the letters A through E and the numbers 1 to 21 to label the individual episodes. There are five iterations of A music (A1, A4, A11, A14, A21) and four iterations each of the remaining musics. The sections are organized in two palindromes, as shown by the arrows above and below the letters. The sequence of episodes in A1 through A4 is reversed in A11 to A14, and the sequence from A4 through A11 is reversed in A14 through A21. The first row of the example shows the frequent shifts among four different tempos, with quarter-note pulses at 60, 80, 90, and 120 beats per minute. The next four rows indicate for each section the number of lines in the array, the number of aggregates and length in measures, and the “aggregate rhythm,” by which I mean the duration in quarter notes in which aggregates are completed.2 All of this reflects an ever-evolving surface that exhibits tremendous fluctuation in terms of texture and aggregate rhythm, with some episodes sparse and almost “frozen” (such as B9 and A11) and others overwhelming and volatile (such as E18, C19, and D20). Additionally, as Example 1b suggests, the characters shift dramatically from episode to episode. The effect is a dizzying presentation of different kinds of music. Example 1 highlights two other aspects of the form. The first is a reliance on self-derived arrays, a type of compositional design that is rarely encountered in the literature (both compositional and scholarly). As shown by the asterisks in the row titled “sdas” at the bottom of Example 1a, self-derived arrays inform eleven of the twenty-one sections. Another aspect of note is the repetition of rows (and their musical content) among disparate types of music. These premonitions and recollections are at once powerful and sublime.3 Example 2 outlines my take on the overall trajectory. While it might be tempting to view the work as non-teleological, I would argue that the large-scale handling of aggregate rhythm, dynamics, density, registral interplay, and array formations creates a structure that is decidedly endweighted . The first three sections are expository: they introduce the row and several of its characteristic properties and set the expectation that each episode will exhibit a different tempo, character, texture, and array realization. A4 is a mini-cadenza for cello; D5 functions as a reexposition ; and B9 and C10 serve as a dynamic, textural, and emotional nadir that brings the first half to a close. The second half contains two surges that climax in the penultimate section. The first surge includes 44 Perspectives of New Music A11 through A14; the second commences with E15 and builds steadily to D20, the culmination of the work in terms of dynamics, structure, register, density, and virtuosity. The final section, A21, creates a structural frame that spans the work, which is to say that I consider A1 and A21 as bookends. (As we shall see, the tempos of these two sections differ but their array structures and realizations are similar.) THE LANDSCAPE OF REFRAINS → → → → ← ← ← ← A1 B2 C3 A4 D5 C6 E7 D8 B9 E10 A11 C12 B13 A14 E15 B16 D17 E18...