composer
WINGATE: TIME SCULPTURES
for Organ
Date:
1981
Notes:
Time Sculptures for organ represents Wingate’s first aspiring foray into dodecaphonic composition. The title* refers to the composer’s precocious childhood musings on the peculiar metaphysical condition of the musical arts, with its existential essence – sound – only existing for the human ear in the context of time, and this thoroughly strange condition always and everywhere taken for granted. This piece therefore quietly proposes a thought experiment in which we may ponder the idea of music being a form of sculpted time, resulting in a sense of musical ‘остранение’ [defamiliarization]. The organ creates its statuesque assemblages of disturbingly static sound by carefully casting the twelve-tone materials in a mold of layered chords, while sustained simultaneities of all twelve tones are available for the first three ‘sculptures’ thanks to the organist’s ten fingers and two pedaling feet.
Additionally, in a naïvely heretical departure from orthodox serialist procedures, the piece’s 144 pitch appearances follow a clockwise spiral around the twelve-tone matrix to its labyrinthine center:
The Time Sculptures matrix, with pathways added.
Hence, the 23 tone conglomeration episodes in the work each represent one of the 23 discrete sides of this square spiral drawn around the matrix, each ending and beginning with the corner note sounding alone, to connectively delineate the space between the ‘sculptures’. The effect is a gradual deconstruction of the tone-row forms, as the aggregates are necessarily cut into ever-smaller fragments along the path, from undecachords, decachords, and nonachords, down to the last two lonely dyads in the spiral’s center, heard at the piece’s close.
To further emphasize the urgency and agency of time in this piece’s formal architecture, the score has been notated in the rarely-used 1/1 time signature, and performed at 60 whole-notes per minute, so that every passing bar represents one second, with the piece lasting 300 seconds (or exactly five minutes) in total. And the way the appearances of the 144 pitches are ‘timed’ in sometimes collapsing arrays of ever-shorter, impatient appearances – others tentative and delayed – tends to erode the listener’s sense of the even flow of the whole-notes caught in the score’s elaborate maze of endless tie-markings.
Never rising above an ostensibly piano dynamic, the work’s many dissonances nevertheless cause a disturbing undulatory effect at times in the organ soundscape, as the tonal interferences between sound waves (a.k.a. ‘beating’) pulsate throughout the instrument’s lower ranks while it struggles to hold the low minor seconds together. Meanwhile, the instrument’s characteristic ‘chiff’ sound as its notes begin to play is here used to create restrained constellations of pitch entrances in pointillistic quietude.
Time Sculptures was the fortuitous result of childhood organ lessons on a magnificent Casavant Frères instrument at a local university. And although a very early work of relatively short duration, the young composer took much trouble over its composition and its many details, inadvertently uncovering many delicate mysteries concerning the perception of time – musical and otherwise – in the process. One day the composed rhythms of a certain passage would appear to him too rushed, then the very same passage at the same tempo the next day seemed perfectly in place, or too slowly paced… possibly analogous to the common experience of time ‘dragging’ during boredom and ‘flying’ during joy. Ultimately another early example of the composer’s penchant for process music (like the Symphony No. 0), Time Sculptures survives as an intriguing dodecaphonic artifact in the juvenilia.