The children of fire come looking for fire — Eric Wubbels
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the children of fire come looking for fire – Eric Wubbels
Amazing Moments in Timbre | Timbre and Orchestration Writings
by Henri Colombat
As stated in the album liner notes for Eric Wubbels’s Duos with Piano Book I, “these pieces aim to develop a 21st-century conception of ensemble virtuosity (now a virtuosity of listening, concentration, timbral fusion, and collaborative decision-making as much as of technique) in the microcosm of the duo format.” “the children of fire come looking for fire” (2012), for violin and prepared piano, stays true to Wubbel’s stated aim not only in its inventive combination of similar gestures in differing instruments, but also in its use of these individual instruments to highlight and forefront each other’s particular timbral qualities.
Even the work’s opening measures are notable for their timbral inventiveness: four quick percussive attacks are played by the prepared piano, the first of which is doubled by a pizzicato in the extremely high register of the violin, leading to an eighty-second-long “scratch-tone” played by the violin. This scratch tone is executed by playing with extreme bow pressure, producing a heavily distorted scratch-like sound. The composer describes the desired timbre in the score as “metallic, filtered, complex, E (the fingered pitch) generally not perceptible.” It is worth noting that the pressure of the violin bow on the recording released by the Wet Ink Ensemble is so intense that the most salient pitch produced by the open string is in fact raised by a half-step to F. This percussive attack followed by a held tone characterized by timbral roughness will become a key recurring figure as the work unfurls.
In fact, the close of the work’s first part can be characterized as a pitched recapitulation of this same figure. Two slightly different E5s (one natural and the other just slightly flat) are played in the violin and held for an extended period, reminiscent of the work’s initial extended scratch tone. These two slightly different Es produce a beating sound, whose roughness can be understood as a timbral transformation of the noisiness of the work’s opening scratch-tone on the same notated pitch. As noted in the score, the violinist is to control the beating produced by this de-tuned unison so that its resultant beating occurs in sextuplet sixteenth notes. In order to highlight this phenomenon, the piano plays repeated Es in the same octave as the violin, in rhythmic unison with its beating. A couple of measures later, the violinist is instructed to increase the rate of the beating from sextuplet sixteenth notes to thirty-second notes, by slightly decreasing the pitch of the already lowered E. This passage is perhaps the clearest example of one instrument amplifying the timbral qualities of the other. Moreover, it is an interesting case of rhythm - a more traditional musical parameter - converging with timbre. The rhythmic synchronicity of the violin’s beating with the piano, serves to increase its salience and emphasize its eventual acceleration. A spectrogram analysis of this passage from sextuplet sixteenth-note to thirty-second-note beating on E5 is shown below.
“the children of fire come looking for fire” by Eric Wubbels - sprectrogram (end of part 1)
The small rivets in the lowest green line show the beating of the violin tone (notice their eventual increase in frequency around 10:34) while the intermittent repeated peaks (around 10:28 and 10:40) depict the piano’s accentuation of this beating, occurring neatly within the previously discussed rivets. Examples of similar techniques (rhythmized wave beating) are produced by the ring modulator in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mantra, the orchestrated difference tones in Gérard Grisey’s Partiels, and the carefully controlled progressions of beats per second in James Tenney’s BEAST.
Several examples of gestural doubling, another important concept in this piece, can be seen in the following score excerpt from Part II. Wubbels pairs several noisy and even harsh violin sounds to different chords and quick upward runs in the piano. Each gesture played in the last three measures of this system (heard in the example below) run a rich and ambiguous gamut between emergent timbres, in which the instruments’ sounds are fused to form a new sound altogether, and augmented timbres, in which the sound of one instrument is embellished by the other (Sandell, 1995, 212). For example, the inherently discontinuous pitches of the piano scale combined with the highly continuous pitches of the violin glissando in the final measure of this excerpt produce a particularly unique gesture. Here the percussiveness of the piano serves to texture the energetic rise of the violin, while the violin smooths over the discrete intervals of the piano. As neither instrument stands out as being the most perceptually prominent and both contribute a unique quality to the resulting gesture, this is about as close as a piano and violin duo can get to producing an emergent timbre. On the other hand, the falling glissando in the third and fourth measures of this excerpt is punctuated by a low, resonant E-flat1 in the piano at its beginning, and a C-sharp2 and B1 at its close. While the rising glissando in the final bar gives an example of gestural similarity, here the two instruments clearly perform different functions. The piano articulates the beginning of the violin’s fall and accentuates the noisiness of its scratched landing by applying a light pressure to its strings. This technique serves to highlight the piano strings’ upper partials, providing a salient connection to the shaken harmonics of the violin which follow: a highly inventive example of timbral augmentation in the duo format.
“the children of fire come looking for fire” by Eric Wubbels - example 2 (score)
These later gestures serve a similar purpose to the “highlighting” created by the beating in Part I. The density of the piano’s harmonic language augmented the noisiness produced by the violin’s increased bow pressure in these doubled gestures, just as its characteristically articulate attack highlighted the rhythmic quality of the violin’s beating at the close of part I. The accentuation or near-fusion of these timbral phenomena, achieved by combinations of contrasting elements or doublings of similar elements are characteristic of the “ensemble virtuosity” that Wubbels is after. While the piano and violin are rarely fully fused, their gestures are grouped together in the listener’s perception by synchronicity (Gestalt law of proximity) and pitched or timbral imitation (Gestalt law of similarity). As Wubbels manipulates these parameters, the degree of instrumental and timbral cohesion fluctuates and becomes a key element of the music’s discourse.
Bibliography:
Sandell, Gregory J. "Roles for Spectral Centroid and Other Factors in Determining "Blended" Instrument Pairings in Orchestration." Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 2 (1995): 209-46. Accessed February 19, 2020. doi:10.2307/40285694.
Link to album recording: https://ericwubbels.bandcamp.com/album/duos-with-piano
Score excerpts provided with permission from the composer