Father McKenzie Music

Musicianship: Composition

I became a musician first through digital composition—in MIDI sequencers, DAWs, notation softwares, and programming languages. I studied computer music, electro-acoustic composition, and algorithmic composition with Paul Nauert, David Evan Jones, Larry Polansky, and David Cope. As a composer, I synthesize common-practice and contemporary art music with popular and world musics, focusing on grooves featuring complex poly-rhythms, poly-tempos, and "tempo spirals."

As a composer, I seek to explore and push the boundaries of some traditional musical stuctures (like meter, or tonality), while keeping other stuctures familiar and traditional. In doing so, I try to ground the novel in the old, allowing us to focus in on the single structure which I am exploring. For example, musicians around the world have thoroughly explored the conflict between triple and duple meter—creating three-against-two cross rhythms or alternating between groups of three at different metric levels. (In Western scores, we often see this sort of interplay notated as the contrast between 3/4, 6/8, and/or 3/16 time signatures.) I enjoy taking these common three-against-two patterns to the next logical level: five (or seven) against two: My most recent piece, Hey Jude Lucas, explores five-against-two patterns in a familiar, folkish guitar arrangement.

Tempo Spirals

The idea of a "tempo spiral" can be attributed to the composer Elliott Carter, though my interest in the idea is more indebted to the Indonesian music theory concept of irama. The basic idea of the tempo spiral is simple: the tempo continuously accelerates but the rhythmic durations gradually shift downward (quarter-notes become half-notes; the drums switch to "half-time"). The result is music that is always speeding up but which maintains the same overall pace. During my Masters work on composition, I became intrigued by writing a tempo spiral which grooved. Thus was born my piece, Shepard—here is an excerpt:

The title of this piece is a play on words with the phenomena of Shepard tones, a pitch phenomenon which is conceptually similar to the tempo spiral.

A second piece from my Masters thesis Temper Temper Time plays with similar techniques. The piece jumps between, and sometimes overlays, three different tempos—80, 100, and 125—, related to one another by (approximately) the ratio of 5/4. Thus, the piece is full of five-against-four polyrhythms and tempo modulations between these three tempos.

Like Shepard, the title is a play on words related to a pitch analogy: The ratio 5/4 corresponds to the pitch interval we call a major third. However, three "pure" major thirds (based on 5/4 ratio) stacked on top of each other do not reach a "pure" octave, but are quite flat. So if we walk through the tempos 80–100–125 then up to 160 (double the 80 where we started), the first two tempo changes are "pure" 5/4, but 125–160 is a little to big ("sharp" in pitch terms). In the pitch world, this type of discrepancy has been "fixed" by making each interval (i.e., 5/4) a little bit sharp (or flat)—this is called "tempering" the interval. (In modern Western music, we tune our instruments to a bunch of "tempered" perfect fifths, which creates what we call equal temperament. In Temper Temper Time, I also temper my tempo relationships so that each five-against-four tempo change is actually a little bit too big: this makes sure that every third tempo is perfectly double time! This pitch analogy is made doubly explicit in Temper Temper Time as each tempo is associated with a different key separated by major thirds (F, A, and C#).

One last experiment I conducted with tempo spirals I conducted during my Masters study was this piece: the Clock is Broken. In this piece, the tempo begins at exactly one beat per second (60 beats per minute)—like a clock—, gradually accelerates through the first half of the piece, then gradually slows back down again in the second half of the piece. However, along the way, the original one-second pulse reasserts itself against the accelerated pulse playing the same synthy arpeggio motive every time, creating a different polyrhythm each time, including 3-against-2, 7-against-8, and 9-against-8. For instance, the piece starts at 60bpm and accelerates until it reaches 90bpm, at which point the original 60bpm clock motive plays again, creating a 3-against-2 polyrhythm between the 60bpm and 90bpm pulses.

Gamelan

Gamelan is the traditional ensemble of the islands of Java and Bali (in Indonesia). At UCSC, I played with the University's west Javanese (Sundanese) Gamelan ensemble for several years—I also got to play guitar with UCSC's Balinese Gamelan ensemble for the premiere of Bill Alves' piece Angin Listrik. This experience inspired me to write my own Gamelan-Rock fusion music. I recorded samples of every note on every instrument in the UCSC Javanese Gamelan, creating my own MIDI-playable "Gamelan-in-a-box" instrument. For my Masters Thesis, I wrote a concerto for fretless electric guitar and the School's Javenese Gamelan, entitled Faux-Java Blues. Here is a recording of our live performance at my Masters recital:

Other pieces

• "Oddly Matched"

  This is an orchestral piece which was performed by the UCSC orchestra in 2011. The concept is that I create consonant counterpoint between two orthogonal pitch-class sets: a pentatonic scale (oboe part at beginning) and its complementary diatonic scale (cello part near the beginning). The complementary pentatonic (5-note) vs diatonic (7-note) idea is then analogized rhythmically in the bridge section, with a 5+7 rhythmic pattern.

• "Liar"

  This is a classical guitar duet I composed and performed (with Carl Atilano) for my senior recital. The piece is predominantly in 5/4, with lots of three-against-ten polyrhythms, especially in the bridge. Pitch-wise, the piece draws almost entirely from a whole-tone scale, with a tiny bit of sweet diatonicism in the major cadences.

• "It Sounds"

  This is a kind of weird, prog-rock, country, rock song which critiques intellectual, "avant-garde" music, while ironically (or hypocritically?) using an intellectual conceit—poly-tonal clashes between G major, A major, and Bb major—to illustrate (or invalidate?) it's point.