About this work:
Spurl is the first single-line composition I have ever created and it proved to be quite a challenge for me to create something that didn't feel like someone playing a solo that's supposed to go along with a Music Minus One recording without the recording. So, in the spirit of compositions like Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita in A Minor for solo flute, Spurl attempts to convey both a melodic and harmonic progression through a monophonic texture. In order to do that, the music needs to move quite quickly.
I have long wondered about the musical possibilities of an eight-note scale consisting of the 8th through 15th partials of the overtone series, a scale that Baroque valve-less brass players would have ‘corrected’ in order to play a diatonic scale. What happens if this ‘natural scale’ is allowed to have free reign instead? Spurl is the first piece I’ve composed using such a scale. (Since then I have also used this scale in sit and wait as a mountain, also 2009, for six voices, and Maps of New Places, composed in 2010-2011, for brass quintet.) Spurl systemically explores all possible hexachords within this particular octatonic aggregate. The music is a relentless series of ascending sequences in which all pitches are rhythmically equal, but to add a sense of forward momentum those rhythms grow gradually faster through a series of metric modulations. While this compositional conceit is clearly indebted to serial procedures, the result—due to the implicit harmonic relationships between the eight pitches of this scale—is obstinately tonal.
Though originally composed for saxophonist Brian Sacawa to perform at the 20th anniversary celebration concert of the Boston Microtonal Society, Spurl can be effectively performed on any wind instrument capable of producing these eight just intonation pitches. In order to realize versions for instruments other than the alto saxophone, the music can be transposed to any scale degree desired as long as the precise intervallic relationships between the eight pitches used remains the same.
In Roald Dahl’s fascinating 1949 short story, “The Sound Machine,” a man is driven mad by a contraption he builds that enables him to hear sounds that occur in nature which had heretofore been impossible to perceive. While there is no direct programmatic reference in Spurl to Dahl’s “The Sound Machine,” the following passage from the story was on my mind throughout the compositional process:
A flower probably didn't feel pain. It felt something else which we didn't know about—something called toin or spurl or plinuckment, or anything you like.
To obtain either a hard copy or a PDF of the score for Spurl, please visit www.blackteamusic.com.