Cygnus Ensemble

 
  • Decrease font size
  • Default font size
  • Increase font size
  • default color
  • blue color
  • green color
(Mini-MP3-Player v2.2 (c) Ute Jacobi - unregistered version - Only Free for NonCommercial Website)
The Creation: Audio Tour
Article Index
The Creation: Audio Tour
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 2 of 4

Instead, Brickle uses organizational techniques that he learned from his teacher Milton Babbitt to re-examine or re-contextualize some very familiar, public, collective musical items. Brickle re-forges them.

Here's the opening chord of The Creation:



For people who know music from its first notated examples to the present, this opening harmony has associations. It is 2/3s of a chord. E-B. To be a full fledged triad it needs either a G (to make it an E minor chord) or a G# (to make it an E major chord).

Count up from E, where E is #1, to B. B is the 5th note. E-B is said to be a 5th. The musical interval from E to B is a 5th.

5ths sound like Medieval music. We might think of the great composer from the high Middle Ages names Perotin (or his Latin name Perotinus). The fifth prevailed in the Middle Ages because they hadn't figured out tonal harmony yet. In fact they had not figured out a tuning system in which either the G or the G# would sound ok with the E and the B. The G are the G# are called the third of the chord when the root of the chord is E. G is the minor third, while G# is the major third. E-B with the minor third completes a minor triad; E-B with a major third completes a major triad:

E(1) - F#(2) - G(3) - A(4) - B(5)

Of course, we all agree that the major chord is happy and the minor chord is sad. This is the kind of collective musical habit that drives the radical contextualists nuts. Contextualists prefer to redirect our listening habits by the force of highly particular musical arguments. The Creation depends on some of these old habits and potent atavisms.**

Leaving out the 3rd of the chord is an archaism. E-B sounds like old ancient, archaic music. By contextual standards, Brickle is an infidel for employing this old thing that is so much a part of our collective musical identity. Brickle's a rebel in the contextualist camp. Others might be grateful to have this point of entry. In "Brickle on Brickle" he discusses the danger of employing references to old things--it can come across as sentimental if the setting is not adequately re-forged, recontextualized.

This E-B, and other 5ths (especially C-G and Db-Ab) function as a leitmotif throughout these first 5 days of The Creation.

Here's another instance of the E-B 5ths, at measure 15:
 
< Prev   Next >
[ Back ]