( for Adah and RubyLou )

Close-up of the Rivergraph Score

Close-up of the Rivergraph Score

Instructions

any number of players with instruments, voices, and sound

The organic line is a path of performance based on a map of Cane Creek as it passes by Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Vertical lines are demarcations of time you agree upon beforehand. They do not need to be equal or precise.

Sources

  1. An instrument that can express any or all of the pitches: E, F, G, A-flat
  2. An object that makes unpitched sounds, like percussion or electronic noises.
  3. Your voice.

Playing the Score

Allow the organic line to guide your performance. Agree together how you want to use it, e.g. : overall dynamics, rate of change, accompanying visuals, dance movements, field recordings of the rivergraph site, etc. Any of the four parts may be used in layers or strung together. The score may be read from any direction. Any single part may be used for solo performance.

Begin at zero (“0”). Breathe deeply. Make sound when you feel comfortable some time before the first Vertical. Listen. Be aware of other sounds while you blend. At each Vertical make a change:

  1. Numbers indicate anything you choose: repeats of notes or rhythms, ranges of technique, singing or reciting, etc.
  2. You can switch Sources or add simultaneous Sources.
  3. Where a circle “O” appears, freely improvise.

End together at zero (“0”).

[ craque - september 27, 2023 ]

Download

Score

There is no PDF version of this yet, but the four parts are available as individual PNGs:

Score Part 1

Part 1

Score Part 2

Part 2

Score Part 3

Part 3

Score Part 4

Part 4

Video

A solo performance of the score, using the path of the river to add visuals to the music.

About

I love the seemingly random ways that bodies of water flow through our lives. Rivers were a solid feature of my childhood, and remain symbols of change and adaptation for me.

Rivergraph is a concept continued from a piece I wrote in the late 1990’s called Riverbroadening. That piece uses the French Broad River as the basis for its meandering line. The instrumentation is relatively limited, scripted to be played by specific players. Its output tends to produce a gathering of unrelated-but-layered noise, taking on a character that is Cage-like and playfully dissonant at all times. Stylistically narrow, minimally abstract, mostly on purpose.

Two decades later I wanted to update the concept, but provide a more flexible score. In one way, it seems more limited because there is a specific set of notes allowed (except those moments that call to freely improvise). But here, the instructions aren’t as prescriptive on how to play.

One to three sources are used. I invite you to play the notes however you want. Any style, any combination, looped and layered if you’d like, or even not played at all. Voices are welcome, in any capacity.

Likewise, the unpitched sounds allow a wide range of possibilities. In the video attached to this page, I have strings of percussive electronic sounds being enabled and disabled at different points in the score. Just as well, these events could last only a few seconds: I play several times on a piece of electro-acoustic gear to achieve noises.

Interpreting the Rivergraph itself is maybe the most challenging part of the score. It isn’t so clear how this shape should be incorporated into your performance. Be curious and explore non-musical ways to bring it out; mix in a field-recording of a river, choreograph dance movements, craft visual accompaniement.

Dedication

I became motivated to write a piece of music for my two neices because of their growing love of music, both learning to play the fiddle. Their mother is a multi-instrumentalist and they have a great violin teacher, so I went with the original orchestration of “up to four” players.

Writing the piece with them in mind helped to guide decisions about what could be done, how things should be played, what the materials can be (like a simple four-note set), and most of all how it could foster discovery through play and improvisation.

Preparation

This is a real tracing of the real section of Cane Creek that flows by the real town of Chapel Hill, NC. I used “perfect solid” dice to arrive at the sequences of numbers used at each vertical, which are equally separated.

When I practiced my own interpretation of the score, I wrote out the time demarcations (i.e. the verticals) as a list, and what action I was supposed to stop or start (or add!) at that ictus. You can see a section of my prepared score on graph paper in the Youtube thumbnail.