Fourteen Minutes of Music
The following is an essay on Seán Clancy's work, "Fourteen Minutes of Music on The Subject of Greeting Cards." As with all essays I write about a particular work, I encourage you to listen before reading. In this case, there is written text, as well, drawn from a short film by David Theobald, titled "With Deepest Sympathy."
Here is a link to a video of Clancy's work: Fourteen Minutes
And here is a link to Theobald's film: With Deepest Sympathy
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5.a.
"Brief is man's life and small the nook of the earth on which he lives..." Marcus Aurelius
1.a.
Repetition is a core consideration for the music maker.
What gets repeated?
When is it repeated?
How is it repeated?
Why is it repeated?
What is changed?
1.b.
The ostinato - a musical idea which is repeated over and over again. Often, rhythm is the most pronounced part of an ostinato, but it doesn't have to be. Pitch can be an important part of an ostinato as well (see: the ground bass).
2.a.
do so la mi fa do fa so
do so la mi fa do fa so
do so la mi fa do fa so
do so la mi fa do fa so
...
...
...
3.a.
Fourteen Minutes of Music on the Subject of Greeting Cards repeats most obviously an alternation between two notes: one note repeated, a sharp alternation of a half-step, the new note repeated.
The rhythm is less clearly repeated. The ear senses similarity but the experience is uncertain.
Not quite an ostinato, the opening motive nevertheless has the character of one. Or perhaps it is an ostinato. Had I easy access to a score, I could confirm one way or the other.
I don't. I suspect, for the purposes of the listening experience, it doesn't much matter. Even if I knew it were an actual ostinato, could I hear it as one? How many repetitions would I need to hear before I did? If it isn't an actual ostinato, could I hear the subtle changes made over the course of fourteen minutes? How many repetitions would I need to hear before I could?
Again - would the ability to discern by ear one way or another aid the work's idea? Or is the work more concerned with the inability to perceive the true nature of the perhaps-quasi-ostinato pattern, caught indecisive between two equally plausible answers?
1.c.
The round, or canon (not to be confused with cannon, or Kannon) - a musical form in which multiple voices sing the same melody with staggered entrances (voices singing "in imitation" a theorist might say). Row, Row, Row Your Boat, basically.
Repetition overlapping like waves in a pool, creating difference.
Musical canon might not involve strict repetition. There might be a rule - play the imitation upside down; play the imitation at a higher/lower starting pitch; play the imitation backwards; play the imitation such that the work, like all of life, becomes a crab.
3.b.
Fourteen Minutes does have a melody. It is admittedly difficult to hear as a melody. The flute and violin echo first the piano. Then, always playing long, sustained tones, the two instruments slowly evolve outwards, often imitating each other, first one leading, then the other.
Often, but not always.
The long tones not only make it difficult to perceive the unfolding music as a melody, it makes it doubly difficult to tell if their parts are organized as a canon. Clearly, there is imitation between the two instruments. There is also difference. But is that imitation and difference the result of an underlying canonical logic? It is difficult to tell.
The question becomes more challenging when the piano's other hand enters. Is it playing the same tones as what the violin and flute played at the beginning? Do you remember the beginning well enough to tell?
Or, like 3.a., is the inability to perceive one way or another part of the point?
2.a.
...
...
...
do so la mi fa do fa so
do so la mi fa do fa so
do so la mi fa do fa so
do so la mi fa do fa so
...
...
...
4.a.
So you've decided to write a fifteen hour long opera tetrology. You have a problem - how do you maintain musical and dramatic sense over the course of the ordeal?
In another way - how do you maintain the listener's memory?
Leitmotiv is one answer - a musical idea associated with a character, or perhaps a place, or maybe something more abstract. You see the Rhine? You hear the Rhine. You see Siegfried? You hear Siegfried. You see &c., you &c. &c.
You spend the next twenty-six years of your life writing this opera cycle. It becomes, arguably, the most influential musical work of the next 150 years or so, if for no other reason than showing the powerful potential of leitmotif - especially in films and video games.
4.a.1.
No wrong answer: When you think of Darth Vader, do you think of the Imperial March or his breathing first?
4.b.
Of course, an opera is a drama. Characters undergo change. It makes sense that the music supporting those characters might change as well. A composer might decide to take a leitmotiv or melody or chord progression and make a variation of it somewhere down the line. When well accomplished, the listener has the pleasure both of recognizing something familiar and of hearing something new... at the same time!
Double your pleasure, double your fun!
3.c.
While Fourteen Minutes is not an opera, it does have a text. The music is presented with slides of phrases pulled from David Theobald's short film, "With Deepest Sympathy," in which the camera pans from one greeting card to another, creating from the sequence the narrative of a life running its course from birth to death.
4.c.
Some composers might be so taken by the idea of variation, they make a whole composition that is only a theme followed by a bunch of variations of that theme, a "theme and variations," if you will. "Some composers" might include a few names you might have heard of, like "J.S. Bach," or "Ludwig van Beethoven."
It became something of a way to show off your musical creativity, both compositionally and (since variations were often improvised by the composer as part of performances) instrumentally. And indeed, J.S. Bach's "Goldberg Variations" and L.v. Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations" have more than stood the test of time, they have earned the "towering composition" moniker from many a program note writer. A prestigious award, to be sure.
4.a.2.
In the video game, Chrono Trigger, one of the first tracks the player hears when the narrative proper begins is "Peaceful Days." Skipping ahead a bit, there's some festival shenanigans, a demonstration of a new teleportion invention, and then BAM! You get sent back in time 400 years. As you do.
Anyways. The characters (and the first-time player) doesn't know they've been sent to the same place 400 years prior. But if you listen to the music, you might catch a hint. The music you hear when arrive is "Wind Scene."
Take a listen.
Did you hear it?
2.a.
...
...
...
do so la mi fa do fa so
do so la mi fa do fa so
&c. &c. &c.
&c. &c. &c.
...
...
...
4.d.
Not every composer pursued variation as a sign of aesthetic excellence, but at least one composer prized variation so highly, he made a whole compositional philosophy around it. Enter Arnold Schoenberg.
Growing increasingly discontented with what he felt was clumsy padding in his own compositions, Schoenberg drew upon the compositional techniques of Brahms, Wagner, and Mahler to begin composing works using what he called developing variation. Describing his own music in New Music: My Music, he wrote "variation almost completely takes the place of repetition."
The avoidance of repetition, and the development of compositional techniques to successfully do so, was a preoccupation for such composers as Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage.
If this sounds like difficult listening, Schoenberg would agree. Repetition is an aid to recognition, and, as Schoenberg puts it, "the precondition to memory is recognition."
3.b.1.
Fourteen Minutes has a melody, but not one clearly stated. Certainly not one clearly perceived. New pitches are presented in near isolation from each other. They are distant both in time and register. They do not follow an obvious melodic arc. The old ebbs away as soon as the new flows in.
The moment matters more than the memory.
4.e.
Other composers rebelled, naturally. I am thinking specifically of the minimalist composers, composers whose compositions are, ironically, often quite long. Here is an aesthetic which revels not in variation but repetition.
Although... It's not quite so simple, is it?
Philip Glass is perhaps most obviously "classical" in his presentation of myriad scintillant arpeggios and other musical figurations. Much happens in the moment, but change changes slowly (if at all, say his detractors).
But then there's Terry Riley's In C, for which no two performances will ever be alike except they are all In C.
There's Steve Reich's Come Out and It's Gonna Rain, in which two loops of the same short phrase are played just out of phase so that, slowly, inevitably, the words lose meaning not merely from semantic satiation by from the dissolution of syllabic sense created by constructive and destructive interference.
And speaking of interference. La Monte Young, inspired by the hum of electrical grids he heard as a child, worked specifically with drones to create music from the overlap of similar but not the same waves.
1.c.2
A musical tone is a wave repeating so fast we hear the blur as a single entity.
The sound of an instrumental section playing "in unison" is an imperceptible round.
4.b.1.
"Oh Bwunhiwda, you're so wuvwey."
"Yes, I know, dear. I can't help it."
3.c.1.
David Theobald labels With Deepest Sympathy an "impoverished narrative."
The film is the narrative of a life. Whose life? Could be anybody's (although there's definitely critique to be had regarding the assumption of universal experience, that's an entirely different essay).
The life is twice compressed - life's unique moments compressed into pithy phrases used to label experience as genres; and the industrialized repetition of those phrases rendering them cliche.
4.e.1.
My first listen of Fourteen Minutes brought Brian Eno's Music for Airports to mind. There's a similar vacant feeling in these works, a music detached.
It was a spurious comparison, musically and philosophically. Fourteen Minutes has a poignant sharpness to its dissonance, where Music for Airports is more gentle, more mellow. Eno's album was written as an antidote to anxiety, not by "stripping away all doubt and uncertainty," but by creating calm and "a space to think." Which anxiety was Eno trying to assuage, in particular? Mostly the anxiety of the plane falling out of the sky with him in it. In his words, the music is meant to "Resign you to the possibility of death."
2.a.
...
&c &c &c
&c &c &c
&c &c &c
...
3.a.1.
The ostinato in Fourteen Minutes is a leitmotif - the only consistent throughline in the music for the only consistent throughline in the narrative - the life lived.
5.b.
Two views of ritual.
Ritual as repetition: "The key to forming good habits is to make them part of your rituals." Lewis Howes.
Ritual as change: "Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation." Abraham Verghese.
3.c.2.
An "impoverished narrative," notwithstanding, Sean Clancy underscores the narrative structurally.
From birth to early adulthood: the ostinato accompanied by increasing activity and layers in the melodies. The flute and violin play high in their registers.
Mid-adulthood: in the middle of the narrative, a single word - "sorry." The melody cuts out. A series of troubles is accompanied only by the piano ostinato.
From mid-adulthood to old age: the melody returns with "A New Job." The flute and violin play low in their registers.
From old age to end: "With Sympathy." The ostinato cuts out. The melody continues a while in the violin and flute, again high in their registers. Midway through "With Deepest Sympathy," the flute and violin cut out altogether, leaving just the piano.
5.c.
What is the difference between ritual and tedious repetition?
Belief, I suppose.
2.a.1.
"Do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded..."
"I do."
"And do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded..."
"I do so la mi fa do fa so
do so la mi fa do fa so
...
4.a.2.1.
If you missed the variation in the Chrono Trigger examples earlier, I don't blame you. The "Wind Scene" theme begins with a variation on just a single bar in the middle of "Peaceful Days."
Sneaky, Yasunori Mitsuda. Very sneaky...
3.a.2.
If you watch Theobald's movie after watching Fourteen Minutes like I did, you might be struck by a sudden epiphany, a moment of recognition.
Theobald shot his film at a grocery store of some kind. In the background is the ambient noise of people going about their business, accompanied by the beeping of items being scanned at the cash registers.
That beeping is awfully familiar, is it not?
5.d.
Viktor Frankl, on meaning: "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather recognize that it is he who is asked."
4.e.2.
The sharpness of Clancy's music prevents it from becoming ambient. Fourteen Minutes is insistent, poignant, perhaps a little unpleasant. Compared against Airports almost fatalistic calm, Fourteen Minutes a questioning, challenging the listener to make sense of the sequence the composer deliberately obscures.
Unlike Beethoven, say, Clancy does not demand the listener's attention. Instead, he invokes the insistent question that lurks in many a mind - "Why? What is it all for?" and, perhaps, "Is that all? Everything that happened, everything I did, compressed and flattened into generic events?"
5.e.
"What an odd thing a diary is. The things you omit are more important than those you put in." Simone de Beauvoir.
3.a.3.
Is it too dramatic to say Fourteen Minutes is a statement of rebellion?
Theobald's film is stark, almost nihilistic. A portrait of how lives are squashed and strained into seedless jellies, salted and sweetened, all bitterness eradicated, transformed into commodoties to be bought and sold. This card rack is an altar, Theobald seems to say, and the ritual is commerce.
And then...
Clancy turns the impersonal beeps of the store registers into music, underscores the hollow words with the meaning they had lost. It is stretched thin, almost too diffuse to be perceptible, but it is there, insistent.
Listen:
3.c.3.
I left one bit out of the structual analysis. "Happy Birthday, Grandad" is underscored by a strong, dramatic moment that cuts out suddenly at "On the Loss of Your Wife." The moment is a last moment of happiness before the final, slow dwindling.
A strange thing happens, though, in this final stage of the work. Stealthily, a melody begins to sync up with the ostinato. During "With Deepest Sympathy," the last moments of the life, the alternating ostinato and flute and violin drop out. We are left with a melody in the piano, the ostinato rhythm given new shape as it playfully skips around a larger constellation of pitches.
Do you recognize them? Are they the same pitches as established at the beginning of the work?
Could you, at the end of everything, be able to look back at the beginning and recognize yourself in what you became?
3.a.4.
There is a person in there. In spite of all this, the symbols yet signify.
2.a.
...
do
.
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I hope you found this essay enjoyable. At the very least, if you made it this far, it might have made you think a bit. If you'd like to support future blogs, as well as my own composing, consider becoming a Patron at my Patreon.
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