Exploring "Pulse Magnet": Part 2
If you've read my last post, you'll know that I'm currently trying to explore ways to foreground the disjuncture that happens when your ears divide rhythms one way but the page divides them another. Conventional wisdom would just say you heard it wrong. But what what if "hearing it wrong" was the starting point for rhythmic discovery?
Last time, I talked about how I heard the opening bars of the third movement "Pulse Magnet" as though they were in 6/8, only to find that the time signature was actually 6/4, 6/4, 4/4 (repeated in three bar cycles). How could I have missed that? I decided to write a "mixed bag arrangement" of "Pulse Magnet" in 6/8, to see what that would sound like.
The opening 6 bars start with just the piano, like in the original, so that it's ambiguous as to what the time signature is:
In the second time round, I add a bunch of other instruments (and btw the instrumentation was decided by my students rather than by my aesthetic predilections) playing a dotted quaver pulse to "force" the ear to hear the music as 6/8. The left hand piano, cello, tenor sax and clarinet make up the notes of the piano chord, with the left hand piano helping to ground the harmony in a kind of E minor pedal that is another really interesting feature of this part of the movement:
After that, I decided I'd add a single note melody, a thing almost entirely absent from Hindson's composition. It's a trite little melody but the purpose of it is to continue to emphasise the compound time and really help students "settle" into hearing the music that way, even if they don't realise that's what they are doing. If you can imagine all the parts from bars 1-6 continuing, this is the violin melody that comes in at bar 7, which is doubled by the horn and glockenspiel:
And here is the whole ensemble playing at bar 15, the next phrase:
After that I decided to throw a little spanner into the works by giving the vibraphone a syncopated part that I actually derived from diminution on the vibraphone part in Hindson's actual work. All the other instruments disappear except the original piano ostinato, and then the vibraphone plays this:
It looks a bit messy in 6/8, but it's basically just a quaver followed by a dotted crotchet, or a minim-length pattern. That part will be an interesting test, both for the vibraphone player and pianist as they perform it, and for the rest of the class as they digest the rhythms and try to make sense of them.
So there you have it. You can find the whole score and the parts here.