TROPE EN TROP
Year of composition: 2018
Instrumentation: flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, piano
Duration: 19’
Commissioned by No Exit New Music Ensemble
Premiere: No Exit New Music Ensemble,
SPACES, Cleveland, OH
October 14, 2018
PROGRAMME NOTE
trope en trop could be considered a culmination point to a compositional technique with which I have experimented over the last several years in a number of recent pieces. This technique involves a particular approach in “re-purposing” the consonant triad, or an attempt to restore the privileged status it occupies in common practice music as both sound object and facilitator of harmonic motion. Stripped here of the gravitational forces of tonality, the work is an exploration of this chord’s special voice leading properties within an open, linear space of pitches-in-register as opposed to a tonal (closed, cyclic) pitch space. trope en trop is cast in two movements, with the second movement prominently featuring auxiliary woodwind instruments. Its title invites different readings of which the most apparent suggests an “excess of tropes”, transposing the literary idea of rhetorical motif into a musical context in which it this concept is embodied by the triad itself. Trope also conveys a turning motion (i.e. “turn of phrase”), which is captured musically in the work’s perpetual rotation by way of a circular harmonic model. Another reading of trope en trop is kinetic: the material follows a steady entropic arc, gradually dispersing the resolute energy of the opening musical idea across various musical parameters (harmonic, polyphonic, instrumental, formal, temporal) over its full 19-minute duration.