David Clark’s chamber motet “Looking Back on the End of Time” will be performed by soprano Wanda Yang Temko and Bent Frequency at the Nelson Street Gallery in Atlanta at 8 pm on December 3, 2014.
This piece is the first Esperanto motet based on the work of Scottish Poet and Pulitzer candidate William Auld.
Atlanta’s professional new music ensemble, Bent Frequency and Spectral Quartet from Chicago join to preset an historic and captivating night of avant-garde music in Atlanta. Not to be missed. “This is a great program of music, featuring pieces by Robert Scott Thompson, Carolyn O’Brien and myself alongside the legendary George Crumb.”
“Looking Back on the End of Time” is about the dark side of virtual reality – the feeling that, with out a visceral, emotional connection to Earth, we are lost. The characters in Auld’s poem are on a spaceship traveling through the void to try and find a new planet for their children to live on, a planet they will never see. They are moving fast – nearly light speed, but the feel as if they are motionless because of the vastness of space. This is how we feel today – multitasking, networking, connecting at light speed, but emotionally stunted, knowing more but feeling less.
The story begins with a description of the tralvelers, their craft, the feeling of being pursued while pursuing a home, and the conclusion that time has stopped and died.
Duration 11:30
I. We Pioneers of the Spaceways
II. Within the Ship
III. We Hunt, and are Hunted
IV. When Time Stopped and Died
William Auld (1924 – 2006) was a Scottish poet, author, translator and magazine editor who wrote chiefly in Esperanto. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, 2004, and 2006 making him the first and only person to be nominated for works in Esperanto. His magnum opus, La infana raso (The Infant Race), is a long poem that, in Auld’s words, explores “the role of the human race in time and in the cosmos,” and is based heavily on The Cantos by Ezra Pound.
“Looking Back on the End of Time” uses verses from section 25 of the poem, and captures one of the themes of the work, the purposelessness of the universe and mankind’s search for meaning, for a home. The idea of an abstract, artificial language with no actual cultural genesis seemed appropriate to this poetry and to abstract music. What music do we make in a purposeless universe? Any music that we wish – any logical system of notes and rhythms will do.
Ni, Pioniraj is based on the hexachord B-A-G#-D-Eb-Bb. This six-note set ties together the harmony, melody, rhythm and overall form of the music. The intervals between these notes, in
semitones, are 10, 11, 6, 1, 7, 1 (the last interval being between Bb and the first note, B). This series of values is used to divide the overall time frame of the piece proportionally. The numbers in the set add up to 36. If you divide 10 minutes by 36, you get a base unit of roughly 17 seconds. The first section lasts for 2 minutes 45 seconds, or 10 x 17 seconds, the second section lasts 3:05, which is 11 x 17 seconds, and so on.
Each overall large section has an assigned pitch based on the original hexachord: B natural for the first section, A natural for the second section, etc. Within each subsection, the interval set of 10, 11, 6, 1, 7, 1 is nested and transposed versions of the hexachord used to create additional pitch centers within each subsection.
These points in time with assigned pitch classes are used as focal points. Actual rhythms based on the ratio of 10, 11, 6, 1, 7, 1 and its permutations (inversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion) are attached to these nodes, going both toward and away from the assigned pitch centers. I was inspired to do this by branches that subdivide symmetrically until leaves happen. Since leaves are attached in different directions and come in different sizes, the rhythmic phrases or time point sets have different lengths and sometimes go backward or upside-down. Some of the surface rhythms use a base unit of a sixteenth note:
and others use a different base unit, such as a dotted eighth note:
These rhythms do not represent durations – they are treated as time points, where a pitch related event of some duration of my choosing starts. It can be a short note, a long note, or a chord. Once the surface rhythms were attached to the “ends of the beaches,” I wrote the notes using the row:
B A G# D Eb Bb F C C# G F# E, a symmetrically designed row which is identical to its retrograde inversion, plus the hexachords are I-combinatorial at T5. I was indiscriminate about which row form and transposition to use, but all 24 of them were used in the piece. I allowed repetitions of the same note after the initial attack point created by the assigned rhythmic phrases, which overlap in the instrumental parts constantly, resulting in an abstract contrapuntal texture. For the vocal line, I only used hexachords, to help with singability., and I used regular pulses to allow for the text accents.
Once the notes were all in place, much editing resulted in a piece that has a free sense of time, completely original harmonic gestures, some narrative continuity because of the vocal line, and a space-like vibe reminiscent of the great abstract works of the 1960’s. The row gives the music coherence, and the time-pointed rhythms link the ratios of the tone row to the rhythms and overall form. None of that is immediately apparent to the listener. The effect is truly abstract music that nonetheless has a classical form, a consistent harmonic framework, and uniquely expressive surface features, like a tree with a strong trunk, and branches subdividing to the point of blossoms, which is where all the beauty happens.
I am grateful to Charles Wuorinen, who is celebrating his 75th birthday this year, for his lifetime of important work with abstract musical textures. I was privileged to speak with Mr. Wuorinen on the phone last year and to consult with several of his students, Jake Romig and Anthony Cornicello, in developing an understanding of time points.

