familiarity Schisms

Ensemble: Eastman School Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Maurice Cohn
Date of Performance: Oct 21, 2019 

Composer's Notes: A ‘raga’ is a concept in Indian classical music that encompasses the scale patterns, necessary pitch inflections, and key musical phrases assigned to a defined set of pitches. There are several hundred individual ragas in use in the practice of Karnatak (South Indian classical) music. The piece Three Streams utilizes one specific raga – ramapriya – as its primary pitch material. The title refers to three musical progressions that occur throughout the piece: (1) a series of cascades in the strings used as a bed of sound on top of which (2) various solos throughout the ensemble sing out the raga intermittently (particularly the cello), which are (3) orchestrated by a series of chord progressions composed of the pitch set associated with the raga ramapriya. While the chord progressions and cascades in the strings deploy only cursory soundings of the raga, the solos that emerge from the texture of the piece allow ramapriya to vibrate in its full richness.

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Three Streams for Orchestra

The title of this work, The Stone Cries When I Sing, is a reference to a story in which Baiju Bawra, a character of Indian legend, sings in despair to a stone statue of the god Shiva, and the stone begins to cry in response. The cello part in this piece is the first 30 seconds of the song Baiju sings to the Shiva statue stretched over the course of 12-15 minutes. Because the excerpt is stretched to over twenty-five times its original length, each slide, inflection, and nuance in the original song is carefully ornamented, modified, and eventually distorted to produce a unique transformation. While contemplating how the three brass instruments should interact with the cello, I came upon a different combination of stone and water myself, this time a statue of a Sitting Buddha. A fountain, this Buddha statue produced three courses of water, two from a pot in his lap and one from his head. The Buddha statue serves as the framework for the interactions between the four instruments. The cello remains steadfast and constant, like a stone, while the three brass instruments react like streams of water emanating from it. 

The notation of this work is mostly prescriptive as opposed to descriptive. In other words, the notation represents physical actions that the performers must undertake rather than the resulting sounds of their actions. This basis for producing sound results in an indeterminate compositional setting, particularly in the brass part; multiple iterations of the same notation could possibly produce distinctive aural results, an appropriate framework for representing the constantly changing formations of flowing water. The cello part, on the other hand, while also containing prescriptive notation, is less indeterminate than the brass parts. While a stone statue may slowly erode with time or transform physically because a changing environment, it remains more steadfast and constant than flowing water. Accordingly, the cello sound is more constant and present throughout the work.

The Stone Cries When I Sing

Varun R. Composer

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