Fascinating Rhythms | Cooper Grosscup & José Vargas
- Leah Froyd
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
Hello and welcome to our third installment of posts for our upcoming concert, Fascinating Rhythms premiering September 19th at the Miramar House. There will be 2 additional concerts on September 25th and 26th! Make sure to reserve your spot before they run out :-)
Cooper Grosscup | Bound
Bound came about as an attempt to merge the practice of “historical composition” with more modern technique and language. When composing historically, one tries to employ specific idioms and remain true to the styles and practices of a given era. While one result of this is a pastiche, many composers of today find great inspiration in trying to imagine the results of a style like the Baroque, had it not been interrupted by the emergence of the Gallant.
While music changes and in some way evolves over time, by no means are styles fully realized or fleshed out in the process- like the quote “Art is never finished, only abandoned”, which we typically think of as applying to an individual and their artwork, the same can be said for an entire style. Many loose threads are left hanging as composers seek new sounds both for their own intrinsic as well as extrinsic cultural purposes. Certainly if not for the World Wars artists may have dwelled longer in the age of romanticism before moving on to serialism and the other languages we associate with the post war era, if they were to at all.
Part of what defines contemporary music is the postmodern nature of our influence. We have unfettered access to music from all history, and can study it simultaneously and in depth, while still remaining alienated from the time and place itself. Historical composition is an attempt to counter this hodge-podge nature of modern music by diving deep into the roots and remaining true to a style. If you attended our concert “Building the Trio Sonata” last summer, on the program was my “Homage to Correli”, which was a true study in historical composition in that I did my best to stay within the boundaries of his style, to speak his language with as little of a modern accent as I could.
For Bound, which a year later, I wanted to take some of that baroque language and combine it with some distinctly modern facets. The opening invokes the baroque tradition of the “rule of the octave”, which was a way of training keyboard improvisers to harmonize with the ensemble in a way both beautiful and expected. As the bass ascends the major scale, the upper strings join with something that would be conventional if not for the addition of a few “extra” notes. These extended chords which belong closer to the language of Jazz still follow the counterpoint principles of the rule of the octave, but evoke ethereal and emotionally ambiguous sonorities. The first chord, for example, doesn’t contain a third- spelled C G B D, In its place are both a 7th and a 9th to provide the chord’s color, and while they do resolve “properly” as they would in the time of Bach, over the duration of the piece the ear begins to adjust to them as a consonant chord tones in their own right.
Even before this harmony sounds, the strings announce their arrival with glissandos of varying speeds, creating a “melting” effect as though we are being transported back in time. These glissandos from the transition into the B section, which earned the piece its place on our program "Fascinating rhythm” as well as it’s title. From the slow, chorale-like A section emerges a spritely mixed meter rhythm, groups of 3’s and 2’s adding up to various odd numbers creating a sense of “bounding” forwards, only to be broken up by the strings coming together for a straight 3 beats between each phrase. The challenge of working with mixed meters is to write a melodic line that feels organic and not disjointed or angular, but luckily this melody came about on it’s own without the intent to fit it into some strange count. Transcribing it from my inner ear was somewhat arduous, and I even rolled my eyes that it couldn’t be more simple, but once it leapt from my imagination onto the string of the violin the result run more joyfully than if it had to conform to “common time”.
In this way the piece is neither bound by the constraints of modernity, in which we are constantly pushing to find something completely novel (sometimes to the point of absurdity), nor by trying to conform exactly to the rules and conventions of a style of the past. It exists somewhere in between, in a liminal space only defined by my taste and the unique combination of influences of that time in my life.
It was one of the first pieces where my personal compositional voice and style sprung high off the page and into the air all around me, hence the title: “Bound”.
José Vargas | Angular Momentum
Angular Momentum is a strict model of a very famous piece of classical music. The key it's in, the keys it modulates to, the way the theme jumps across the ensemble, the points where the main theme makes way for a new theme, the points where the texture changes; in all of these structural matters the piece is a 1:1, almost paint-by-numbers copy. Stylistically, on the other hand, it couldn't be more distant.
I tried to capture the poise of the high baroque while using musical materials derived from my other passion: progressive heavy metal! Asymmetrical rhythms, non-functional harmony, and plenty of "shredding" across the whole quartet fit this piece squarely into speed metal territory. Hold onto your hats, and come to the show to find out which piece I used as a model!
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