Patagón

Pianos (2013), concerto for piano/keyboard sampler with flute (bass flute, piccolo), oboe (English horn), clarinet (Bass clarinet), horn, harp, percussion, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, 19’
for Gloria Cheng and the Eco Ensemble, with support from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and presented by Cal Performances
premiered in Hertz Hall, Berkeley, February 2013

Cox Pianos3 - 4-5

Cox Pianos1 - 2

Transfigurations of Grief (2011), for flute (alto flute, piccolo), oboe, clarinet (bass clarinet), percussion, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, 19’
commissioned by the Eco Ensemble
premiered in Hertz Hall, Berkeley, April 2011

Transfigurations, movement 4

Tranfigurations, movements 1 - 3

Part 1: I. Resonant and fragile; II. Swaying, swirling--Dark, brooding
Part 2: III. Silvery and lilting; IV. Forceful
Part 3: V. Resonant and fragile

The entwined and enwoven puzzle pieces of my Hishuk ish ts’awalk were inspired by a visit to the wild temperate rainforest in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve of Canada a couple of summers ago.  To the First Nations people of the Nuu-chah-nulth, the title means “all things are one”, and the music evokes a resonant, forceful, yet fragile musical ecosystem.  My idea was to create a musical space full of echoes, noise, and silence.

The large-scale form is in three parts, separated by pauses.  There are two movements in part one, two movements in part two, and one movement to finish, making a total of five movements in the piece.  Spatial relationships predominate; you will hear the same music reappear in a different register and moving in a different direction, turned upside down and varying in character and speed.  

The resonance of the piano’s sostenuto pedal is employed throughout Part one and Part three, against clarinet subtones, and special bowings, harmonics, and swaying double stops in the strings.  The clarinet solo at the end of part one, with its interposed noisy multiphonics, falls to complete movement two, and is complemented by the rising cello solo at the beginning of Part three. The center of the piece, Part two, features a silvery and lilting unison line that loops around on itself in movement three. A contrasting and complementing palindrome, movement four rises with forceful, loud snaps in the strings, slaps in the bass clarinet, and a huge culmination and climax of everyone to the top. In Part three, the opening music returns, with piano resonance, trembling strings, and the disembodied clarinet sounds.

Hishuk Part3

Hishuk Part1

My work for bass clarinet, cello, percussion, and piano, Lift-up-over sounding, is based on two lines from a poem by John Campion:  “World a tuning fork/ lift-up-over sounding.” The lines in his poem are a literal translation of the words dulugu ganalan in the Bosavi language of Papua New Guinea. Their term refers to both the sound world of the Bosavi rainforest and the musical forms created by its inhabitants.  In the poem, Campion describes a living, canopied sound world in the Papua New Guinea rain forest and its resonant space.  The piece is a reworking and recasting of a composition from 2001 called World A Tuning Fork, which was originally for amplified soprano sax, double bass, percussion, piano, and fixed media. I chose sonorities loosely based on the overtone series of the double bass’ open strings (E, A, D, and G), and used the piano’s sostenuto pedal (the middle pedal) to capture the lowest octave ringing throughout. The musical material alternates between large expressive soliloquies played by the bass clarinet, and a cyclical set of repetitions played by the entire quartet. The piece is dedicated to John Campion, and premiered by Earplay in 2017.

Water

Lift-up-over-sounding

This piece began as a set of piano improvisations called Sylvan Pieces-- for me, the piano is my musical “home”, and I use it as a kind of personal laboratory to work out my compositional ideas.  All of the movements in Wave take the shape of an ever- increasing, oceanic-like wave form.

Wave 3

Wave 2

Wave 1

text by John Campion
bass clarinet/voice by Laura Carmichael

My daughter brought a shell and bade me put my ear to it: 
—That’s the sound of the ocean, I said.
—Is the ocean inside of it, she asked?
—The shape of the shell causes the sound, I said.
—Then the ocean is the shaper of things, said Sophia. You throw a stick out into the water and it comes back looking like a fish.

The shape of the shell

In her transcendent set of etudes Hierosgamos: Studies in Harmony and Resonance (2003), Cindy Cox uses the “hieros gamos” to unify two characteristics of the piano that on first glance seem very different: its tremendous capacity for resonance and a percussive, primarily motoric texture in this large scale set of seven etudes.  Performed here by Boston based pianist Oni Buchanan.

6 Hierosgamos 6

5 Hierosgamos 5

4 Hierosgamos 4

3 Hierosgamos 3

2 Hierosgamos 2

1 Hierosgamos 1

Singing the lines (2008) for soprano, flute/piccolo, B-flat clarinet, double bass, percussion, and piano
music by Cindy Cox
text by John Campion
I. “Light changes”
II. “Walking, Naming It”

performed by Lucy Shelton, soprano
Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players
David Milnes, conducting

Cox, Singing the lines_II_mp3

Cox, Singing the lines_I_mp3

The Blackbird whistling/Or just after

La Ciguena, for piano and sampler keyboard

Mallets, for sampler keyboard

“Naseon” is Korean for spiral.  You will hear the instruments revolving around a central pitch, becoming increasingly embellished as the piece progresses.  Naseon II is the second part of a larger work; the first part features an extended solo for the haegeum.

I visited Seoul in the summer of 2015 as a Fellow at the National Gugak Center.  They gave a wonderful two-week workshop on traditional Korean music, and workshops have continued over the last year at UC Santa Cruz.  From them I learned first hand about the gayageum, geomungo, and ajaeng, all zithers, but played in completely different ways.  Here the ajaeng plays variations of a Korean sanjo melody, which appears twice, surrounded by the ritualistic and rhythmic playing of the gayageum and the geomungo.

Naseon II

Hierosgamos IV

for piano trio

You may recognize the wonderful opening of Frederico García Lorca’s famous Romance sonámbulo,  “Verde que te quiero verde” (“Green I love you green”). The title of my new work for piano trio, “la mar amarga” (the bitter sea) comes from a later section of this poem; I loved the sound of the elided repetition of “(l)a mar” and found in it a strong relationship to the kind of covered repetitions in my own piece.

But you probably don’t know of an oddball work called Sensitive Chaos (published by the Rudolf Steiner Press) by Theodor Schwenk.  He wrote this study in the 1960s and subtitled it “The creation of flowing forms in water and air”.  His mix of the poetic and the scientific, with chapter headings such as “Archetypal movements of water” and “The formation of vortices” was particularly inspiring as metaphors for my approach to musical shape and direction.  Like the gorgeous pictures of water and wind patterns at the end of the book, my music strives to be in a simultaneously fluid yet architecturally static form. 

My composition is in three movements, played without pause.  The first movement is marked “supple, mysterious, and very fast” and is dominated by the piano. The rhythm is continuous and motoric, almost minimalist in nature, with tiny elongations and diminutions that vary and disrupt the internal repetitions.  The second movement features solos by first the violin, and then the cello, and is based on different modes of playing their open strings.  The last movement is marked “fierce, wild, but strictly in tempo” and features rhythmic play on a dissonant scale in conjunction with the open strings of the violin and cello. 

The piano acts throughout as a kind of giant resonator, with the Sostenuto pedal (the middle pedal on the piano) holding down the bottom octave and allowing those strings to ring freely. My harmony is derived from the physical properties of the overtone series and the construction of each the instruments: the open strings of the violin and cello, and the symmetrical division of the piano into its highest, lowest, and middle registers. La mar amarga was commissioned by Noe Valley Chamber Music with funding from the Carol Franc Buck foundation for Graeme Jennings, Leighton Fong, and Christopher Jones, and is gratefully dedicated to them.


la mar amarga, movement 1

la mar amarga, movements 2-3

Etudes for solo piano

The hierosgamos is an ancient principle which reveals the ultimate wholeness concealed among pairs of apparent opposites.  Literally “sacred marriage”, this mysterious union involves a simultaneous moment of creation and dissolution between the self and the other, a co-terminus spiritualization of matter and a materialization of spirit.  In the language of alchemy, Carl Jung spoke of a “chemical wedding”, where the “yang and yin” of things is purified back into an original unity.  

In this large work for piano, I attempt to show how opposing characteristics and materials ultimately derive from a single source. Two seemingly contradictory properties of the piano are very important to me: first, the piano is a huge (horizontal) harp, with its strings under many tons of pressure and capable of incredibly powerful resonance.  Second, the piano is essentially a percussion instrument, and not a sustaining instrument, as many eighteenth and nineteenth century composers tried to make it.  Reconciling these two aspects led me to use the harmonic series and a predominately motoric and continuous percussive texture.

The seven etudes principally address the study of harmony and harmonic resonance.  The overtone series (up to the sixteenth partial) and its inverse provide the pitch material, while I use the piano itself as the basis for the choice of fundamentals: the lowest note, A0, the highest note, C8, and the exact middle, E4. The architecture of the piece is derived from this construction, with the first and last movements based upon the lowest and highest pitches respectively, and the middle fourth movement on the middle E4. I further divide the piano’s eighty-eight keys into zones of eleven half-steps, and use these areas as secondary relationships throughout the work.  Movements two, three, five, and six form sharp apparent contrasts with the beginning, end and middle, even though, as with the hierosgamos, they are all created from the same originating material.


Hierosgamos I

Hierosgamos II

Etudes for solo piano

movement three



Hierosgamos III

Patagón (2012) for string quartet
I. Las aguas del sur (The southern sea)
II. La tierra caliente que duerme ("The sleeping warm earth")

Patagón is the ancient, archaic name for the land of Patagonia. My newer compositions increasingly link to nature and landscape, and this latest string quartet evokes the idea of the far away, the other-worldly, and the remote.  Last year I spent a sabbatical leave in travels to South America, and I was particularly inspired by a trip to the Valdes peninsula, a large nature preserve in the southern region of Argentina. 

In this string quartet I try to elicit as many colors as possible, by using many different playing techniques—especially techniques involving bowing and harmonics.  In the beginning you will hear an odd effect that string players call the “seagull”; it involves playing an artificially produced harmonic (by touching the string above a fingered note) while simultaneously gliding down the string—a very beautiful and eerie sound that does indeed evoke seagulls.  Also in the opening is a gesture played with the wood of the bow (called “col legno”); it is a kind of “heartbeat” idea that is featured throughout all the movements. 

Very prominent in the piece are the use of harmonics, where the player touches the string at a node that produces pitches that follow the overtone series.  Other special techniques include playing near the bridge of the instrument, for a very glassy sound (“sul ponticello”), playing on the fingerboard for a very white, subdued quality (“sul tasto”), and pressing the bow very hard against the strings while bowing slowly (“overbowing”) —this last effect produces a harsh, crunchy sound that is sometimes difficult for the player to control. .  The third movement in particular was inspired by a couple of special days I spent with my family seeing the southern right whales (huge creatures that came right up next to our boat!) and visiting an enormous penguin colony—over half a million—at Punta Tombo, which my eleven year old daughter particularly enjoyed.
 
The titles of the movements pretty much explain themselves, but the last bears some note: the “southern cross” is the southern hemisphere’s equivalent of our northern star.  Like the northern star, people use the southern cross set of stars as a fixed guidepost in the night sky, and other constellations are seen as revolving around it. 

This piece was commissioned by the Alexander String Quartet for the occasion of their thirtieth anniversary season, and is gratefully dedicated to them.



Patagón, movements 1-2

Patagón (2012) for string quartet 
III. Ballenas australes y pingüinos de Magallanes ("Southern right whales and Magellanic penguins")

performed by the Alexander String Quartet

Patagón, movement 3

Patagón (2012) for string quartet
IV. La tierra fría que duerme ("The sleeping cold earth")
V. La cruz del sur y el cielo que gira ("The southern cross and the revolving sky")

performed by the Alexander String Quartet



Patagón, movements 4-5

Radically transparent, Cindy Cox’s music synthesizes old and new musical designs through linked strands of association, timbral fluctuation, and cyclic temporal processes.

Cindy Cox

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks