Robert Martin: A Portrait In Sound

1) Chrysolith is a single-movement trio for alto flute (doubling piccolo), viola and harp. It was written for the Chrysolith Trio, who premiered it at Yale University on March 7, 1977. A chrysolith is a glittering, golden, sometimes slightly greenish gem. The term (from Greek) is no longer favored among mineral enthusiasts. All this aside, I simply wanted to write music that was ‘more beautiful than the drift of leaves’—perhaps golden leaves.

2-4) String Trio for violin, viola and cello is in three movements. It was composed in the summer of 1976 in Norfolk, Connecticut, while I attended the Yale Summer Music School on a Stoeckel Fellowship. On August 17, 1978, it was premiered by musicians attending the Summer Music Festival in Aspen, Colorado. The music exploits the many timbric possibilities inherent in the string instruments making use of pizzicato figures, harmonics, glissandi, and double stops. The atmospheric first movement is followed by an agitated, restless second movement. The dramatic third movement culminates in an imposing passage when the three instruments are in rhythmic unison before devolving into a quiet ending reminiscent of the work’s opening.

5-7) Emerson Songs calls for a vocalist accompanied by a mixed ensemble consisting of alto flute, English horn, violin, cello and two acoustic guitars. Based on excerpts from Emerson’s writings, I began working on the song cycle in 2003 and completed it the following year. The work was written to celebrate the 200th birthday of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

For the first song titled "The Flying Perfect", I chose the first two paragraphs from Emerson’s essay titled Circles.

“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms in [sic] the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in [sic] considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once inspirer and condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every department.”

There are 365 measures in The Flying Perfect — the number of days that the earth takes to make a circle, (really, an ellipse), around the sun. Actually, the length of time it takes for the earth to travel around the sun is slightly longer than 365 days by about a quarter of a day. In our calendars, we compensate for this inaccuracy by adding one day (February 29) every four years. I have accounted for this inaccuracy by four fermatas: one at the beginning of the song, one at the end of the song, and two at strategic points in internal sections of the composition.

The second song in the set is titled "Travel" and it can be found in Emerson’s essay titled Self-Reliance as follows:

“Travelling is a fool’s paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

Supporting this song is a musical structure built around a twelve-tone row and its eleven transpositions. The opening of the song introduces the row which is: C D# C# D E F G A F# G# A# B. Interestingly, the last note of the eleventh statement is the first note of what would be the twelfth statement—so just as the sentiment of the song projects, we have traveled quite a distance, but have—in essence—gone nowhere.

The last song is titled "Roses". It also is in Emerson’s essay titled Self-Reliance. Here is the text:

“These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before the leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present; but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present above time.

In this last song, I chose discarded fragments of unused portions of my unfinished pieces. I tore the pages that were left intact, shuffled these scraps, then pieced them together again. In the terminology of painting, I splashed the canvas, watched washes of color descend, and cherished rogue drips. As my painter friends would say, I allowed accidents to happen.

Consider the musical structures moving from song to song. We moved from a grandly worked out musical structure, then traveled through a structure with deliberately missing components, and finally arrived in a musical structure hewn from broken and discarded fragments.

In the text of the first song we sought knowledge of God. We looked outward from ourselves. The musical structure was intricate, with only one element missing representing the unattainable—what man has yet to discover.

In the text of the second song, we sought knowledge of ourselves. The erasure marks in the musical structure represent the flaws in humankind’s character, his defects and imperfections. A perfect human would not be missing any aspects of character, but that’s not us, and it’s not this song. Changing physical or geographic locations does not remove or improve our flaws—we take them wherever we go—we cannot run away from ourselves. Therefore, despite the missing elements, the structure arrives finally at the point where it began. We cannot run away from our faults, and similarly, this musical structure cannot escape its own journey to where it started.

Don’t regret the past; don’t envy or fear the future. The message of the last song is that living in the present is an important part of a spiritual existence. And, after the conclusion of the searches in the first two songs, we were unexpectedly led in the direction of spirituality—perhaps, a footstep we could not have taken on our own—and it happened at the very moment that we were unselfconscious about musical structure. Some questions remain unanswered, but it is time to accept the flow of the music at the moment we hear it and accept the flow of life at the moment we live it.

8-9) Two Ancient Pieces are two short pieces for piano solo. In 1971, I sat in my third-floor dormitory room at the Peabody Conservatory looking down at Center Street, and I thought about music and art. It was now time for me, early in my sophomore year, to demonstrate to my professors that I understood what they meant when they lectured on Expressionism. Not only by learning the historic figures and pathways, but by placing pencil to paper, and composing music that showed my comfort and even mastery in this genre. These Two Ancient Pieces were the result.

10-12) Piano Trio is in three contrasting movements built around the traditional fast-slow-fast design for violin, cello, and piano. Each movement follows the sonata-allegro scheme without resorting to traditional tonality. Instead, melodic gesture and instrumental texture is the constructive concept around which these three sonata forms are shaped. The piece was composed in the early summer of 2008 in Manhattan, New York

13) Affirmation is a brief work for solo viola written while visiting Aspen, CO during the summer of 1978. Very challenging for the performer, the music emerges out of the simple two note motive heard at the outset. Starting in the middle register, the music gradually grows more agitated while expanding to encompass the entire range of the instrument.

14-17) Cello in the Universe is a composition for violoncello solo in four movements written while spending time in Manhattan during the summer of 2001. I conceived of this piece in a curious way—I experienced a dream. It was a dream of solo cello music that was unattached to our comprehension of time and space. In my dream, the music was coming from a cello floating in space. Perhaps at one time it was attached to a satellite, or a space station, but by accident it came unfastened from its lifeline-tether and began to drift forever through the universe. Of course, music cannot be heard in space. There is no air to transmit the vibrations to our eardrums. Nevertheless, I sketched down the idea and worked it out over the course of several months.

18-21) Only When the Clock Stops is a set of four pieces for solo percussion. The title comes from the Quentin chapter of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury—the second section of the novel that focuses on the intrusion of the past into the present. The complete phrase is “only when the clock stops, does time come to life.” I copied the phrase on a scrap of paper during a summer in the mid-nineties while on a cross-country trip when my wife and I were reading a half dozen Faulkner novels—but since then I haven’t tried to find its exact location in the text. The piece was composed in May 2002, in Manhattan, New York,

The percussionist uses the following instruments which are organized in two groups: (group 1) Marimba, Vibraphone, five Timbales, (group 2) Xylophone, Glockenspiel, Chinese gong, four Octobons, one Conga.