White Stone (after Agnes Martin) for violin and electronics
James Budinich
for Kate Dreyfuss
White Stone (after Agnes Martin) for violin and electronics
Program Note White Stone (after Agnes Martin) borrows its title from Martin’s painting of the same name. Martin’s work builds intense emotion from its structure, often based on grids and geometric patterns. Taking on this idea, the violin in my White Stone plays with limited pitches and rhythms; through these restraints I build my own simple structure paralleling Martin’s grids. The electronics act as a wash of color surrounding the violin’s continual motion, providing a soft undercurrent to the texture. Stemming from my study of Medieval music, I processed an audio sample from Heinrich Isaac’s Missa Paschale through Ableton Live’s audio to midi converter. After cleaning up the resulting excess of midi notes, I retuned the chords to align with the violin’s use of the F overtone series, limiting the electronics to pitches from that series. The resulting chords are far removed from Isaac’s original material, Isaac here serves as a hidden starting point. Reusing material in a way that obscures the source has become a reoccurring element of my practice. In my evening-length piece Plexus: a work in knots for electronics and dance, with choreography by Gabrielle Lamb, I reduce the opening chords from Beethoven’s “Heiliger Dankgesang” from Op. 132 to punctuating chords for the opening of Act II. In Manual City, my collaboration with the visual artist Mao Wei, I composed short pieces for music box based on children’s songs. The songs are obscured through erasures and overlaps to create a strange and still familiar sound world, what the artist calls a “postmodern amusement park.” White Stone (after Agnes Martin) was written for Kate Dreyfuss, who premiered the work in Nelson Music Room, Duke University in November 2019. -JB
Performance Notes The violin is in scordatura, tuned from low to high as F3 – C4 – A4 (14 c. flat) – and E5: - F should be tuned to 174.6 Hz - C is tuned to the touch 5 natural harmonic on the F string (but an octave lower) - A is tuned to the touch 6 natural harmonic on the F string (but an octave lower) - The E is tuned as normal (and not used at all in the piece) The violin signal is amplified and delayed (contact me for details and instructions) The score uses three staves, the first is the sounding pitches, the second the fingered pitches, shown as if performed in standard tuning, and the third shows the rhythm of the electronic chords The violinist uses a click track (contact me for details and instructions)
Recommended Excerpt: mm. 84-105 (5:54-7:29)
c. 10’
© James Budinich, 2019 james.budinich@gmail.com