Stephen Andrew Taylor

Translating Unapproachable Light:

How do composers write music?

In May 1995, I was asked to write a ten-minute piece for the American Composers Orchestra. Fortunately I was able to get to work right away, since for some time I'd been thinking of ideas for an orchestra piece. Almost any music you can imagine stems from an idea, an initial flash of inspiration--the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony ("Fate knocks at the door") is an unforgettable example. On the other hand, without an idea, composing is more or less impossible. By using myself as a sort of guinea pig, I would like to show how some composers work these days--how they get ideas, and how those ideas turn into dots on a page, which musicians magically transform into musical sound.

People can get ideas from all over the place. Beethoven used to get his during long walks in the forest, sketchbook in hand. Sometimes he would let an idea sit for months, or even years, before it emerged as a piece of music. All of us have probably had the experience of walking and suddenly stopping because we've been struck by a thought. That thought can be an inner voice, figuring out how to solve a knotty personal problem, or it can be a more abstract idea, such as an image or a sound. Just as we can hear voices in our head, we can also hear inner music; that's how Beethoven could continue composing, even after he went deaf.

Most people, I imagine, can hear music in their heads at least part of the time, and occasionally it's music that has never been heard before. Musicians are people who've been trained to play or write down these sounds they hear in their heads. When I got the idea for Unapproachable Light, I was sitting in a church. For me, churches are great places to get ideas. You can sing, then quietly sit and leaf through the Bible, one of the great works of Western literature. The environment is beautiful and spiritual. While I was sitting there reading, a passage from I Timothy struck me like a laser: "...Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see..."

"Permeating Blue" by Hua Nian, www.huanian.com

Even though, as comedians say, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," I often try to describe musical ideas with words. These ideas usually don't have a melody with chords underneath, but instead have many lines weaving in and out, with many instruments contributing to the overall effect. So I sometimes try to convey a feeling with words, and then "translate" that feeling to music. (Some other present-day composers, including Harrison Birtwistle and Brian Ferneyhough, have been known to work out their musical ideas in prose.) Here's what I wrote that morning: "starts out high, like a powerful lamp being thrown on, slowly moving through the gloom, illuminating it, throwing shadows which have a definite shape and contour, reaching out and coming back in, lengthening and narrowing as it slowly moves about--then gradually, we become aware of our surroundings, a rosy, stained glass, warm, richly glowing environment in which we are floating..."

In musical terms, this passage, lasting about two or three minutes, is a journey from the highest registers and instruments of the orchestra--violins, piccolos, flutes, oboes, clarinets, and chimes--to the lowest, with basses, bassoons, horns, trombones and gongs. It's also a kind of fugue (a musical form in which melodies imitate each other), with different instrumental groups following each other, like groups of searchlights circling in the dark.

As soon as an idea arrives, I start looking for ways to realize it. Just having the idea isn't enough--you need to spin out the idea into a piece of music. Throughout history composers have invented many ways of elaborating ideas, and I use several of them in any single piece. As I work on Unapproachable Light, I find myself relying on two basic techniques: serialism, and a mathematical proportion known as the Golden Section.

In the early 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg invented serialism as an elegant way to get a lot of material out of a single idea. You invent a series of notes--just pitches, no rhythms-- and manipulate it in one of four ways: by playing it in its original order, backwards, upside-down, or upside-down and backwards. Also, since you can transpose any of these four versions to each of the twelve steps of the chromatic scale, you get a total of 48 possible versions of a single series of notes (4 versions times 12 transpositions equals 48 possible versions). If all these details don't make complete sense, think of it this way: you get 48 ideas for the price of one. A series can contain any number of notes, although most have twelve. For the series in Unapproachable Light, I'm using fourteen notes (since there are only twelve pitches in the chromatic scale, two pitches repeat). Fragments of this 14-note series form the high, piercing "searchlight" melodies at the beginning of the piece.

Serialism helps me figure out how the piece will sound. I have a general idea of what I want to hear, and I search my charts of pitch series until I find something that fits my intuition. Often, the charts give me ideas that I wouldn't have found "on my own". This way of writing music may seem mathematical, but to me it works as a marriage of logic and intuition, ensuring subtle relationships between ideas.

To forge these subtle relationships into the rhythms of the piece, I borrow another idea from mathematics, a proportion known as the Golden Section. This proportion, which appears in the natural world as well as visual art, architecture, and music, was discovered independently by the Greeks and the Japanese, among others. Its formula appears below. The numerical ratio is an irrational number, approximately 0.6017....

a/b = b/(a + b)

Like Claude Debussy and Béla Bartók did in their pieces, I use this proportion to time the lengths of notes, and of whole phrases and sections. If you don't have a calculator, the easiest way to find the Golden Section is to use a Fibonacci number series, in which each new number is the sum of the previous two numbers: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89... The farther you continue the series, the more closely the numbers approximate the Golden Section ratio. Without going into too much detail, I use these numbers to make the rhythms of the opening section, and to determine how long each section will be. Naturally, I don't expect listeners to say, "Oh, that's the Golden Section," but I hope they will experience a sense of musical timing that feels natural and right.

Finally, I want this piece to be dramatic. To take advantage of the performance space, I place the four trumpets in the balcony, surrounding the audience from all sides. For the first part of the piece they remain silent, until the music starts building, swirling like a rising storm. At the storm's climax, they enter with loud, fast fanfares like bolts of lightning (another kind of unapproachable light), intersecting and ricocheting off the walls, sending shock waves through the on-stage orchestra. The notes for these trumpet lightning bolts all come from the governing pitch series, and the moment when they enter (a little over six minutes after the beginning) is the exact Golden Section of the piece. In this way, I hope that intuition and logic will conspire to make a compelling musical experience--a piece that speaks to the heart, but is fashioned with the help of the mind.

November 1995

Postscript, July 2000: Unapproachable Light was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, Music Director, with the generous support of the Helen F. Whitaker Fund. It was premiered on 19 May 1996 by the American Composers Orchestra, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. Since then it has been performed in the United States and Europe. It has also been recorded by the Moravian Philharmonic, conducted by Toshiyuki Shimada, on Vienna Modern Masters VMM 3048.

CDs may be purchased from Vienna Modern Masters, or you can listen to the piece at www.mp3.com/StephenTaylor.

Readers interested in the Golden Section should check out Debussy in Proportion, an excellent book by Roy Howat (Cambridge University Press, 1986); more information about serialism may be found in Charles Wuorinen's Simple Composition (C.F. Peters, 1994).

(Photo of Stephen Andrew Taylor by Hua Nian)

Stephen Andrew Taylor's new works include Ten Microworlds for flute, guitar, and electronics, to be premiered in Toronto in November 2000, and a quartet for horn, viola, bass and prepared piano to be premiered in May 2001, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony. Taylor teaches music theory and composition at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal.

email: s-taylor@ilstu.edu

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