Exploring "Pulse Magnet": Part 1
When I first listened to the opening moments of the third movement of "Pulse Magnet" (on the video above it's at 10:34), I was struck immediately by the lack of clarity of the underlying pulse. A quick glance at the score will tell you that the opening section repeats a three bar cycle: two bars of 6/4 followed by a bar of 4/4. In some ways it's a neat trick that is deceptively simple, but I was more interested in the fact that it sounded like the opening was in 6/8, but then just fell over in the middle. That was where the interest lay for me.
So I've been trying to craft some sort of composition, arrangement or exercise that would fully flesh out the sense of dislocation that I felt when I first listened to the work. In a way, I think that over-reliance on the score undermines the beauty of rhythmic ambiguity, and I want to restore some of that ambiguity.
Part of my dilemma is that I'm thinking of calling this a "mixed bag arrangement" in that I want to arrange something for the whole class, but it won't strictly be an arrangement per se. My basic concept is this: why not take the 6/4 motif and actually put it in 6/8 and see what happens?
Fleshing It Out
Okay so here is the original motif:
You can see that the groupings of crotchets and quavers lend themselves to being divided in dotted crotchets, or compound time. The only thing that messes that up is the 4/4 bar that causes a rupture in the flow.
So what if this pattern was written out in 6/8 instead?
You can see that I've added some notes to the end of the phrase in order to fill out the final bar. This is going to be the fundamental motif that I build my first "mixed bag arrangement" from. I think with my class I'll get them to perform this first, and then I'll arrange something else that is closer to Hindson's work, so that the disjuncture between the "feel" and the time signature is brought out more clearly.