Three of Twelve

Between Above and Below is a cycle of twelve pieces. Three of them are finished and their Noteperformer drafts are  posted here. A fourth is close enough that I can hear its ending, which is usually the sign that the rest of it is about to get difficult. I’ve been rendering with various orchestral VSTs in Cubase, mainly BBC Symphony Orchestra and Vasks strings.

The three that exist are Husks, Theodical Lullaby, and Winged Witness. They weren’t written in that order, and they were not written to a plan. Theodical Lullaby is the oldest — harp and quartet, a figure that opens like a lullaby and then gets interrupted by something with a march in it. The harp ostinato is the oldest part of it. It feels like a music box, and it started as noodling on my guitar a few years back.

Husks is a quintet built out of material that keeps breaking and coming back altered, still carrying enough of its old character that you recognize what it used to be. Winged Witness is the largest: single winds, two brass, strings, four and a half minutes of slow motion with a hinge near the three-minute mark where everything drops to near silence and returns in a different key. It's the one I'd send out first, if I were sending anything out.

What turned three separate pieces into the beginning of a cycle was noticing, after the fact, that they were arranged along the same diagram. Twelve positions, two directions of travel. Anyone who has spent time with K/Qabalah will recognize the shape. The sephirotic correspondences on the Tree of Life are a beautiful and complicated thing, and well past the scope of a note like this. The framework did its work in private. The pieces have to stand without it.

There's a risk in a project like this, and it's easier to name now than later: an esoteric framework can be a generative source or an illustrative label, and the difference isn't always visible from inside the writing. There's a related risk of getting credulous about your own work or assuming that because you can name the associations, the thing you made is profound. I've watched that happen on occult message boards for years, and I don't assume I'm immune to it.I don’t want to insult any other occult artist’s work, but I certainly don’t find a piece interesting just because it’s based on esoteric themes. If a piece is only interesting once you know which position it occupies, the piece has failed and the diagram has done the listening for you. So I've tried to keep the structure as pressure rather than program; something the music works against rather than describes.

The piece I'm in now is Visions of Splendor. String quartet, 6/8, about four minutes. It began as a trio. The cello is alone for the first forty seconds, voices enter one at a time, an ostinato takes over, and the piece starts moving from place to place without quite arriving. There's a grand pause halfway through, after which the registral logic inverts. It ends on a major chord and a few bars of notated silence. Some of that came from trying to recapture the feeling of walking the Tiergarten in Berlin — a former noble estate put to pragmatic use after a catastrophe, and then being more or less reconstructed.

The harmonic language there avoids the leading tone almost entirely. Minor dominants throughout, no functional resolution anywhere. That wasn't a rule I set. I noticed it afterward, running an analysis on my own score the way you would on someone else's, and found the piece had been implying an overarching  theological position I hadn't explicitly decided on. Consolation as cessation rather than redemption. Things don't get repaired, though the worst of it eventually ends. That seems to be the signature running under all four, and it's where I part company with the sacred minimalists I learned from, who mostly believed in the repair.

The same analysis turned up a problem I've been slow to fix. The viola spends roughly sixty percent of its aligned onsets doubling the cello at the octave, which means that for long stretches a quartet is functionally a trio wearing a quartet's clothes. I added the viola late and I was protecting the original texture. I was afraid that giving it real independence would either dilute what was already there or overcorrect into busyness. That fear produced a specific, measurable timidity, and the current work is going through it bar by bar and giving that fourth voice something of its own to do. Unglamorous, and most of the job. It has asserted itself in a few places as a minor dissonance, which was surprisingly welcome.

Where it goes from here: eight more pieces, which is an honest amount of work and not something I'm going to pretend will happen quickly. I have a day job that takes my best hours, and the arithmetic of a twelve-piece orchestral cycle written in the margins doesn't survive being looked at straight on. So I've stopped looking at it straight on. One protected block a week, one finished bar at a time. Additionally, the renderings into VST are incredibly laborious. I hate the idea of AI writing music, but I’m only halfway opposed to it rendering the mockups. This is probably because of how fickle working with standard vst instruments is.

The plan for the finished thing is small and physical. Bandcamp first. Possibly a cassette run or vinyl. Being at least heavily spiritually inspired, a tangible object seems important. I’m also considering companion zine, risograph, with prose texts I've been drafting alongside the scores. Those texts keep failing the same way, which is that they explain. The rule I've given myself is that the framework has to dissolve into image or not appear at all, which is the same rule as the music.