Time's "Suchness" in Robert Morris's Clear Sounds

TIME’S “SUCHNESS” IN ROBERT MORRIS’S CLEAR SOUNDS DAPHNE LEONG Sound files for the examples in this article may be found at http://www.perspectivesofnewmusic.org/soundexx/. EXAMPLE 1: Section 18 (mm. 113–118) EXAMPLE 4: Section 1 (mm. 1–16) EXAMPLE 5: Section 17 (mm. 103–112) EXAMPLE 7-9: Sections 34–36 (mm. 202–215) 196 Perspectives of New Music BOUT HIS COMPOSITIONAL PRACTICE, Robert Morris writes: Details of local gesture, touch, and nuance arise in the process of implementing the potential properties of units. These moments of “suchness”—William Wordsworth’s “spots of time”—animate the compositional structure . . . (2010, 175). This essay seeks to illumine the “suchness” of time—showing how “details of local gesture, touch, and nuance . . . animate the compositional structure”—in Clear Sounds. I came to Morris’s Clear Sounds among Hills and Waters as a pianist. Around 1990 I asked Morris for a piano piece of his to perform; he gave me two or three to choose from, and I chose Clear Sounds (1989). Various events intervened, and I did not return to the piece until recently when I premiered it (2013).1 What attracted me to it initially, and increasingly as I learned it, was its sense of time. In this essay I explore how Clear Sounds intricately unfolds time: time in many dimensions, and with different qualities of depth.2 I begin with a favorite passage (Example 1) as an illustration.3 Marked suelto, the passage is indeed quick and slight. It occurs in a relatively transparent range of the piano, in roughly 2.5 octaves from Ab3 to E6. Its harmonies articulate the E hexachord [014589] in a chromatic chain: as shown in Example 1b, the hexachords step “up” by T1 in pitch-class space through each measure, then “drop” by T−1 at the beginning of each measure before beginning the upstepping once again. (E0 = {014589}, E1 = {12569T}, E2 = {2367TE}, and E3 = {3478E0}.) Due to the E hexachord’s intervallic structure, each successive hexachord retains an augmented triad from the previous one. The chain of hexachords is thus intricately interlocked. The music is built on basic pitch-class units called blocks, comprised vertically and horizontally of hexachords. In this passage, each block corresponds to a measure (with a slight shift at the beginning of m. 115) and takes approximately 3.3 seconds at the q = 72 bpm tempo. The vertical hexachords occur at a roughly steady pace of one per quarter note (Example 1c). This is an even and quick harmonic rhythm. Over, under, and through this evenly-structured pacing, surface details weave time. The bracket in Example 1f shows what I consider to be the passage’s first musical unit. Through this phrase, discrete quarter-note units gradually become less discrete, and fast, constant surface rhythmic activity slows subtly. As indicated by Example 1e, at the beginning of the phrase the quarter-note units are relatively distinct: the first is defined by the right-hand (RH) figure which A Time’s “Suchness” in Robert Morris’s Clear Sounds 197 repeats A4 and Bb5; the second begins with a new left-hand (LH) long note G and continues with the RH staccato flurry. The third begins to connect to the following beat, with its concluding LH quintuplet sixteenth tied to the next beat; the RH figure on beat 4 seems to articulate a new unit, however. The LH 32nd notes at the end of the bar do clearly lead into the next bar. And now connections between quarter notes are more freely made: the RH three-note figures in m. 114 beats 1 and 2 swing into the following beats. As shown in Example 1d, the phrase’s surface rhythm begins by alternating slower and faster subdivisions of the quarter note in the first bar (5 – 8/5 – 6/5 – 7/8),4 then, in the first beat of m. 114, slows back to an uncounterpointed 5-subdivision. In the second beat of m. 114, it further slows with the LH triplet eighth, and, in the third beat, with the durational space preceding the RH quintuplet sixteenths. The slight elongation of hexachord E0’s duration into the beginning...