Learn about Woven Music and the 'binary code' patterns within it, here: https://ravelledmusic.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/woven-music/

Woven Music

Music that slows down time, leaves room to let you think your own thoughts.

Music for Meditation

These are large-scale pieces of music that ask for commitment and focus from the listener. The music takes on serious topics and needs a longer period of concentration. The effect of the music is cumulative, and rewards of the effort you put in can be big!

Big Music

This is music for people, for relationships.

Music for Community

This is music "just" for listening: unlike some of the other playlists here, the music itself is the point. It's interesting, fun to hear, thought-provoking, intellectually inviting, whatever you want to call it.

Music to Enjoy

LYRICS and CHORDS:

Soon, soon will the day be soon
C         C                    F           C
when you’ll be gone from my arms.
F               F                                G           G
Long, long, will the days be long
A         A                    G             G
after you’ve grown up and gone.
F                    F                        G            E

Ah.....
A               A               A           A    
C               C               C           C  :|| 

   Will this love stay strong when you’ve grown
   F             G           E                    F
   up and gone away?
   F            G         E           G
   Will you still remember then this
   F             G         E             F 
   love we had today?
   F              G        E          G


— 
Soon, soon, will you grow so soon, 
C         C                      F             C
Too big to sit on my knee.
F                 F               G                G
Long, long, will your limbs grow long,
A        A                       G                  G
You’ll run ahead, far from me. 
F               F                          G         E


Ah.....
A               A               A           A    
C               C               C           C  :||


   It‘s so strange to be in love and 
   F           G              E       F
   know you’ll break my heart 
   F                    G            E      
   Someday [mi do] just [la] be[re]ing[ti] 
             F                                 G
   who [sol] you [mi] will [up:fa]
   G                             F                        G E


Ah (up:do-la-do, re, ti)
             A x4               E x4     (cont. pattern)
Ah (do, la, fa, up:re, ti)
        A x4                    E x4
Ah doooo, tiiiii, laaaa (fa major chord for ending)
      F          E      A  (orig. pattern)
      A          E      F  (orig. pattern)

to my child turning four

The time of the singing of birds is come, 
and the shadows will flee away.

The tree of the Lord is where 
the birds make their nests.

Jesus wept, 
a time to mourn. 
He did mourn as a dove.

They that walk with the Lord 
shall tremble as a bird,  
and the Lord will place them
in his nesting house.

~ Words by Robin Muir-Miller, adapted from biblical texts

The Time of the Singing of Birds

Prelude

Viol Sample: pg 1 Slow

Mvt3 - Territories

Mvt2 - Territories

Mvt1 - Territories

Lyrics: John Donne, 1613.
Music, vocals, instrumentals, production: Robinson McClellan, 2016.

Excerpt from Donne's poem 'An Epithalamion, or Mariage Song on the Lady Elizabeth, and Count Palatine being married on St. Valentines Day'

—
Here lyes a shee Sunne, and a hee Moone here,
She gives the best light to his Spheare,
Or each is both, and all, and so
They unto one another nothing owe,
And yet they doe, but are
So just and rich in that coyne which they pay,
That neither would, nor needs forbeare nor stay,
Neither desires to be spar'd, nor to spare,
They quickly pay their debt, and then
Take no acquittance, but pay again;
They pay, they give, they lend, and so let fall,
No such occasion to be liberall.
More truth, more courage in these two do shine,
Then all thy turtles have, and sparrows, Valentine.
—
Full poem here:
http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?textsid=33101

Here Lyes a Shee Sunne - Demo

Commissioned by the Hudson Opera House
Premiere August 20, 2010 with Moira Smiley & VOCO
https://moirasmiley.com/store/?page_id=3476

Text: Joan Murray
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/joan-murray

SONG OVERHEARD IN A FIELD

Softly, softly, the long grass sings:
“Someone’s listening to our song–
let them have it tonight as they go off in the fog
to their warm white beds or the cold hard ground.
They will learn to sing our song
as the wheels come ‘round.

“There goes the couple who were married in the morning 
–in the chapel on the hill.
Now she waits in the dark like an untried lock
while he fumbles for the key.
He’ll sing her our song as the tumblers turn.
By morning we’ll count three.

“There goes the farmer to the barn with the lantern
–that lights his breath beneath the beams.
He leans his ear on his panting cow, 
then rolls his weary sleeves. 
He’ll sing her our song as her calf spills down.
Tomorrow he’ll find sleep.

“There goes the mother with her candle to the cradle
–to lift her baby to her breast.
Her rocker sails to summer
where his waves lap the shells on her chest.
She’ll sing him our song as her lullaby.
And soon he’ll be at rest.

“There goes the fiddler to the barn in the moonlight
–to stir the harvest with his strings.
Under the beams where the farmer’s gone,
the dancers whirl like leaves.
They’ll sing our song till the jigs are done.
Tomorrow they’ll be sheaves.

“There goes the widow to her practice for the service
–in the chapel on the hill.
Her steps are slowed by the midnight frost
that slicks the mossy stones.
She’ll sing our song as she plays her hymns.
By morning she’ll come home.”

Softly, softly, the long grass sings:“The night is almost done.
The wheels bring them ‘round on the old meridians 
to wait for another sun.
But the field keeps singing till the stars go out,
they’ve gone in the grass, and the wind’s found a throat
–and the clouds lie on the ground to listen.”

– Joan Murray
(reproduced here by permission of the poet)

_______________________________________________
This poem was first published in The Southern Review,
and is included in Joan's collection, Dancing on the Edge
(Beacon Press). It occupies its own section as her editor saw
it as different from her other poems: its voice is the earth's.

 

Composer's Program note:

In place of a traditional program note, I decided to offer a sampling of email exchanges, made during the creation of the piece, between the collaborators: poet, composer, and performers. 
As a composer I thrive on collaboration and extra-musical ideas, so as I was beginning to compose I asked Joan Murray for her thoughts on her poem. After I had completed a first draft, I asked Joan and Moira Smiley for their feedback, and then Moira and I made revisions. Later, the other members of Voco made many further crucial suggestions that made the piece what it is. 
In the following email excerpts, you will learn about some of the many currents that wound their way into this piece. I decided to include substantial excerpts rather than brief ones, for two reasons. First, I want to show the extent and depth of the collaborative nature of the project. Second, in this piece more than some, the story it tells is the thing, and it is a story with many layers of meaning and symbol that benefit from being explored at length. For the same reason, I decided that the bulk of the email excerpts should be Joan’s thoughts about her poem, which inspired me immensely and whose many layers made the music what it is.

For the full conversation, see: http://www.robinsonmcclellan.com/music/Title-SongOverheard.htm

Song Overheard: VOCO Premiere

This piece is a message of praise and thanks to the Hudson River. I got my start as a composer at Vassar, within the river's magnetic pull. Later, I continued to write while I lived near the Hudson in upper Manhattan, taking daily walks in Riverside Park. On one of these walks in 2003 I heard a bagpiper playing just a few feet from the water. That moment sparked my interest in pibroch (Gaelic spelling: piobaireachd), a little-known type of early Gaelic bagpipe music. That interest has become a major main strand in my musical life. Pibroch's unique sound has found its way into many of my compositions, and I have written scholary analyses of its unearthly rhythms. By chance — or perhaps not — the Hudson has also witnessed a few other milestones: an Albany Symphony commission, a Yaddo residency, a commission from the Hudson Opera House, and I was married at Riverside Church. 

With all that, I owe the Hudson a big thank you. Writing for Vassar's Mahagonny Ensemble offered the perfect chance to express my thanks and to bring things full circle by linking my Vassar years with pibroch: so this piece became a "pibroch for chamber ensemble."

But what does that mean? One of the things that drew me to pibroch is a certain quality in the sound of the Highland bagpipe: The perfectly matched timbres of the vibrato-less melody pipe and drone pipes create a mesmerizing texture of crisscrossing, dancing overtones high above, shifting as the melody with against its drone moves between consonance and dissonance. 

Another draw was that pibroch melodies, mostly composed in the 16th and 17th centuries, follow intricate patterns of consonance and dissonance against the drone. In medieval harp manuscripts from Wales — a Celtic culture with links to the Gaels of Scotland — such patterns were written in a 'binary code' using "1" (consonant 'home' chord) and "0" (dissonant 'away' chord). What makes these patterns distinctive is their obsession with symmetry and inversion: for example, here is an inverted pattern they used often: 0010, 1101. This piece follows an elaborate pattern, typical of pibroch. Read more about that here: https://ravelledmusic.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/woven-music/

In this piece I tried to capture all that through the clarinet, flute, strings and piano. So: like a conventional pibroch theme, this piece is one long, slow, soaring melody, heard in the strings. The tune is based closely on "Lament for the Viscount of Dundee," a 17th-century tune; all I did was to invert the sonorities, changing each note but only by a step. Meanwhile the flute and clarinet play written-out "overtones" while the piano provides harmony, pulse and momentum. 

A typical pibroch tune — slow and without a perceptible beat — sounds to me like the bow of a boat, cutting through that water of overtones in vast sweeping curves, at unbelievably fast but utterly smooth speed. The piece is five minutes long; imagine the speed it would require to travel the length of the Hudson between NYC and Poughkeepsie in that short span of time, long slow curves experienced from the bow of that supernaturally fast boat, Hudson Running.

Hudson Running

For all of us who make sacrifices.

—
[Mockup recording: instruments are synthesized, all voices sung by R. McClellan]

Music and Text by Robinson McClellan. A new retelling of the biblical story, style inspired by the Schocken Bible version, translated by Everett Fox.

Commissioned and premiered February 2016 by Mahagonny Ensemble, Vassar College. 

SATB Soloists
Chamber Strings
Oboe
Bass Clarinet
Timpani

Abraham and Isaac - Mockup Recording

McClellan - Organ Mass 4: Hosanna

Crucifixions: Penitence Cantata

This short and sweet piece is perfect for concerts on the themes of children, nighttime, dreams, safety. The sacred text, from the Book of Common prayer, is suitable for a wide variety of church settings.

Performance by Kamerkoor QuodLibet.
https://www.kamerkoorquodlibet.nl/

The music is accessible for most choirs.

SATB Choir
Duration 1:45

There are two versions: same music, two texts.

secular version: DREAMING IN DARKNESS (2006)
sacred version: LIGHTEN OUR DARKNESS (2006)

SECULAR TEXT (by the composer)
Dreaming in darkness, we entreat you, O Night! through your long shadows, to defend them from the terrors and visions of their dreams; for the love of their untarnished hopes, protect our children, Night, dreaming in darkness.

SACRED TEXT (Book of Common Prayer)
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord;
and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Dreaming in Darkness

The Macalester Concert Choir and director Mike McGaghie commissioned this piece for premiere in Fall 2013, both at the college and for performance during church services. I hunted for a text that would be interesting and fun for the fantastic singers in the choir (hopefully with interesting and fun music to match), and that could serve in both sacred and secular contexts. I found a great poem in The Chemical Wedding, an alchemical book published anonymously in 1616, and adapted it as the text of this piece.

Invitation to a Marriage

A short piano song for contemplation. Easy but deep. 

Performance by pianist Peiharn Chen.

Rumination Prelude

Written for and premiered by San Francisco Choral Artists
Magen Solomon, Director

About the music:
http://www.sfca.org/robinson-mclellan-interview/

JINGLE! ANGELS! SILENT! MERRY!

Comfort and Joy

Listen for the entire pattern within the first five seconds of music:
1001
2010

Victory Dance For Dread October

ABOUT THE MUSIC

At the Louvre in 2006 I came across a phenomenal 18th century writing desk from the Ottoman Empire, as shown.

Staring at the geometric pattern, I was reminded of the subtle, mind-bending quality of the obscure, late medieval Welsh harp music I had been studying, which is built on intricate, mosaic-like sequences of consonance and dissonance.  I decided to mimic, in sound, the beautiful visual pattern. Reconstructing the pattern with a ruler and pencil, I found an amazing depth of geometric ingenuity and artfulness; for example the whole picture takes shape around the interplay of groupings of fours and fives. The center pentagram is twenty-two 160ths of the whole width, and if you bisect it vertically into two halves of  eleven 160ths each, its center point is exactly 1/160th to the right of the overall center. Like the design, the piece is not-quite-symmetrical, with the music of the first half repeating, in reverse, in the second half. In the peaceful center of the piece, a French horn slowly traces the five diamond-shaped points of the design's center pentagram with five corresponding high E-flats.  These five notes are left in the haunting "flat" tuning naturally produced by brass instruments when they play the 7th partial in their harmonic series (which happens to be near the flat 7th scale degree).  

The piece follows a method that may once have been used throughout the Celtic world. A remnant survives in Robert ap Huw’s 1623 manuscript of Welsh harp music. The manuscript presents a set of compositional formulas, the 24 'mesurs' of cerdd dant. These ‘measures of string music’ are literally written down in binary code: ones stand for cyweirdant, or ‘string of concord,’ and zeroes for tyniad or ‘string of inflection’, so the measures represent patterns of consonance and dissonance. In the harp pieces in the manuscript, a given measure usually serves as a ground bass in the lower part; two chords alternate according to the pattern while the upper part repeats a melody with continuous variation. Thus on the surface, the music in ap Huw’s manuscript resembles the passacaglia and chaconnes later found throughout Europe; what makes these Welsh measures distinctive is the peculiar sense of symmetry and inversion in their patterns: for example in the mesur bryt odidog, the two halves are the inverse of each other: 0010 1101.

I decided to approach the Islamic design by inventing my own measure, i.e. pattern. Like the Ottoman design above, my pattern allows fours and fives to intertwine: 11110111001100010000. It happens sometimes in 4/4 meter as quarter notes: 1111, 0111, 0011, etc., and other times in 5/4 meter, as half notes: 11110, 11100, 11000, etc.). Either way, the zeroes gradually replace the ones in each successive grouping. You'll hear this pattern clearly in the marching quarter-note bass line: movement up and down by a whole step marks the difference between ones and zeroes. Over this foundation, a big strutting melody (also based on the mesur, where each eighth note is one binary digit) alternates with running ostinatos (in rhythmic groupings of seven, eleven, and so on) in a simple verse-refrain format. In the second half of the piece, trumpet and trombone solos add to the building energy.

Website

Beware the Sasannach

This is a shortened arrangement of ‘113th & Columbus’, a wind quintet commissioned by the Orfeo Duo for the Harlem Chamber Players and Rebecca Bone, and premiered in 2011 at what would have been 113th St. and Columbus Ave. in Manhattan. It was written for the 200th anniversary of the first map of Manhattan street grid, made by John Randel in 1811. Including a not entirely jazzy musical tribute to George Gerswhin, who lived nearby.

This piece tells the story of Morningside Park's proud topography. The rhythms are inspired by the street grid John Randel surveyed in 1811, which we still live by. For the grid's 200th anniversary I wanted to celebrate this park’s blend of natural and imposed geometry. Each street becomes a beat as the music retraces the grid from 1st Street northward (sorry, folks: nothing south of Houston St.). The meter is 5/4, one beat per street, two bars for every ten blocks. The piece follows an old Welsh harp ‘binary code’ system in which ones and zeros stand for two contrasting sonorities, laid out in intricate woven patterns. A typical Welsh pattern is 1101, 0010, where the second half inverts the first. In this piece, the inverted pattern, which I hope is clearly audible, is in fives, ten beats/blocks total in the pattern: 11011, 00100. As the piece progresses, a funky 13-beat/block "Morningside Park theme" enters and then gradually expands to tell the story of the park. 

The idea came as I read the history of this park: the only reason it's here at all is that it wasn't feasible to extend the street grid over Morningside's tall cliffs. So in the music, when the grid reaches Morningside Park, the steady pattern of beats (and streets) is interrupted. A struggle ensues between grid and cliffs, between imposed structure and the original proud curves of the island. Gradually these opposing forces accommodate one another, each bending to fit, resulting in today's beautiful park. The piece becomes an allegory for, and a tribute to, struggles—of any kind—that ultimately find peaceful resolution. 

At the end, a joyful coda takes in all of Manhattan north of Houston, blazing past Central and Morningside parks, nodding to St. Nicholas Park (also 13 blocks long), and careening all the way to Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill, where it ends just before running right off the north end of the island. 

John Randel probably never imagined that someone would be dumb enough to try mapping his street grid to music. But I was happy to discover that the grid contains some very peppy, well-proportioned rhythms. Perhaps Randel was a closet composer, and we are living in his great symphony. 

But more than that, this project revealed to me a genuine, felt correlation between space and rhythm: as we travel Manhattan's grid every day, we experience its proportions, its distances, and the time it takes to travel between its intersections. But they go by so slowly that we don't quite experience them as rhythms. Perhaps by translating those proportions to a dramatically sped-up musical timeframe, we are merely re-experiencing something familiar, only now in a more tangible form. I hope that as you sit here today you might imagine the music rushing toward you, over and over again, from all those miles away down by Houston St, a long straight shot until it reaches this spot and must contend with those magnificent cliffs above our heads. 


When planning the piece, I used this interactive map from the New York Times website: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/21/nyregion/map-of-how-manhattan-grid-grew.html 

I also enjoyed the quotations in from this article: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/nyregion/21grid.html?pagewanted=2&sq=map%20grid%201811&st=cse&scp=1

Street/Life

This is a fake Welsh harp tune I made up, to imitate the style of tunes in the Robert ap Huw manuscript, and demonstrate the concepts of woven music and limited pitch material. 

Read all about it: https://ravelledmusic.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/woven-music/

The tune mostly uses only four pitches: D, E, A, B, except that it saves up one more 'special' pitch, the F-sharp, to spice up the music — but only briefly.

The larger 1s and 0s on top show the overall Welsh measure ‘bryt odidog’; the smaller 1s and 0s below show the same pattern within each bar. 

So the same pattern applies at two levels: fractal music!

Fake Welsh Harp Tune - Woven/Fractal Music Demo

Performance by the Chicago Choral Artists, Donald Nally conducting.

This piece is a setting of a passage from the Koran, translated into English.  My understanding is that in Islam, the Koran is considered religiously valid and accurate only in the original Arabic; any translation is strictly an interpretation and can not treated as scripture.  This contrasts with the other monotheistic traditions in which, for the most part, translations into modern languages are treated as perfectly valid and useful in liturgy and scholarship.  

I'm sure that my understanding of the above is incomplete; however, I chose to set a translation of the Koran to music in spite of the limitations in my understanding of Islam; I do not in any way profess to be writing Islamic music or propounding Islamic ideas.  I chose the text because I was moved by it, and I feel that it has universal appeal.  I also wanted to treat this piece as an opportunity to bring out ideas and feelings shared between different religions.  As part of this effort, I inserted a Protestant hymn text and tune, and mingled it with the Koranic text and other musical material.

I have asked many people for advice about the advisability of this project, and have received varied responses, from those urging caution (to avoid offending anyone) to those that feel it's a great idea, and much needed.  I leave you to your own conclusions.

Chicago Choral Artists

Among the Signs

This piece was commissioned by Nektarios Antoniou for his Greek Byzantine chorus, Schola Cantorum for Hellenic Music. It was written during a residency at the MacDowell Colony in December 2009. 

Premiere: Daniel Neer, voice; Hyewon Kim and Ju Hyung Shin, violins; Amina Tébini, viola; Sung Chan Chang, cello

The music borrows harmonic patterning found in Celtic and Greek music. Medieval Welsh harpists used a written ‘binary code’ to record harmonic progressions: A famous manuscript of 1623 lists the 24 patterns harpists were expected to know and be able to improvise on. In the manuscript “1” represents the “home,” consonant chord, while “0” represents the “away,” dissonant one. These served as sets of ‘chord changes’ much like today's jazz charts. Any pattern of two chords could be described with ones and zeroes; the distinctive thing about these Celtic patterns was their preoccupation with symmetry and inversion. Two typical patters are: 1011, 0100 and 110100. 

The pattern I borrowed for this piece repeats audibly throughout, in different guises:
1100, 1011 (sometimes inverted as 0011, 0100). 

When Nektarios asked me to set Yeats’ famous poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ for his Greek Byzantine chorus, I wanted to find a way to link Yeats’ Ireland with Byzantium (now Istanbul), a city that remains a spiritual center of Orthodox Christianity, and which gives its name to the fifteen-hundred-year old music tradition in which the chorus specializes. 

Thus it was an amazing discovery to find that the exact same ‘Celtic’ pattern I had chosen (1100, 1011) also governs a Greek folk song I happened across, musically linking (however tenuously) the two nations between which Yeats’ protagonist figuratively travels in the poem.

Composers are often asked what they are trying to add to a given text in setting it to music. So: what in Yeats’ poem does my musical setting seek to draw out? Interpretations of the poem have varied widely, but to me it involves a subject close to the heart (for better or worse) of many artists: posterity. Let the text speak for itself. 

Gather Me was written during a snowstorm in a cabin in the MacDowell woods in New Hampshire, next to a crackling fire — truly the “artifice of eternity.” The piece is in four movements, one for each stanza. Many images and ideas guided the music, but I'll offer just a few. 

In the first stanza/movement, the poet is overwhelmed and disgusted by the life he sees around him. He hears a quick Irish slip-jig, but it's not pleasant for him — it's too fast, too chaotic, too loud, and it gets all jumbled up with too many layers piling on top of each other (i.e. the "young", the "dying generations"). He resists it, singing more slowly, trying to keep his jangled nerves calm. 

At the opening of the second movement we hear his dragging steps, which then begin to take flight as he hears the distant singing of the sages. 

My image for the third movement is from a picture I saw in National Geographic magazine of Simonopetra monastery, on the Mt. Athos peninsula in Greece (a monastic center of Orthodox Christianity), very high on a cliff. I picture the poem’s protagonist standing hundreds of feet below, on the rocks of the coast, looking up and crying out passionately to the sages to let him come up into eternity. Over and over he bends down and then suddenly stands and throws up his arms, in supplication. 

Finally, after he has been gathered into eternity, the music becomes serene; in the final movement the melody imitates the elaborate Greek Byzantine vocal style in which a moving drone (ison) supports the melody (omitted from this performance) and Byzantine-style vocal ornaments can be added extemporaneously.

Gather Me

Gone Today is a response to several deaths that came close to me in 2005, of many kinds: death in my family, deaths of friends; people very old, very young and in between, in good health and bad; deaths that were long expected and those that came from nowhere. As it is, I spend a lot of my time thinking about death — it serves as a meditation. All of these deaths made it feel even closer. Today, those that died are gone. And today, death is so unthinkably close to you and me that we are also, in a very tangible sense, already gone. 

I had an image in my mind as I wrote the piece: vast beings step through our human-sized world with vast feet. They are not ill-meaning, but the physical scale they inhabit is too large for them to concern themselves with us, or even to notice us. If we do not watch carefully for their movements, we might be crushed. 

This image informs the musical material itself in a general way. Three overlapping sequences, mainly heard in the strings, determine the harmonic structure. Each sequence begins at a different time, on a different pitch, and the notes change at a different rate. When each sequence has arrived back at its starting place, it begins again.

The sequences proceeds according to their own logic, indifferent to any incidental frictions or odd concords in the resulting harmonies between them. Among and around these steadily marching progressions, a delicate piano/harp figure alternates with a free oboe melody of long, soaring notes, aided by the horn, flutes, violins, and finally the trumpets.

The piece begins in the depths, and at the end it rises higher and higher until it disappears–as if the music has simply left the audible range, though it may continue indefinitely beyond our hearing.

Premiere: Yale Philharmonia, Shinik Hahm, director

Also played by:
— Forth Worth Symphony, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, director
— Knox-Galesburg Symphony, Bruce Polay, director

Gone Today

Lyrics, commission and premiere by Daniel Neer, voice, and Alyssa Reit, harp. This performance with harpist Alison Nicholls. 
More info: http://danielneer.com/narkissos/?page_id=83

The Gyre

Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument 2 (improvisation Sep. 4, 2020)

Verse 24

Verses 8 - 9

Verses 1 - 3

Performance by the Toronto Choral Artists. Mark Vuorinen, director. 
Hear and watch the entire piece here, read the libretto and learn about the background, here:
http://robinsonmcclellan.com/ThisRavelledDust.htm

RobinsonMcClellan

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