The flip side of the pun was suggested by my own childhood memories of growing up not far from a defunct Shaker colony near Canterbury, New Hampshire. (Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain is the paradigm of this technique.) The Shakers got into the act partly as a pun on the musical term "to shake", meaning either to make a tremolo with the bow across the string or else to trill rapidly from one note to another. The "loops" idea was a technique from the era of tape music where small lengths of prerecorded tape attached end to end could repeat melodic or rhythmic figures ad infinitum. Most importantly the quartet became a septet, thereby adding a sonic mass and the potential for more acoustical power. I held on to the idea of the oscillating patterns and made an overall structure that could embrace much more variety and emotional range.
The need for a larger, thicker ensemble and for a more flexible, less theory-bound means of composing became very apparent.įortunately I had in my students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music an ensemble willing to tryout new ideas, and with the original Wavemaker scrapped I worked over the next four months to pick up the pieces and start over. Wavemaker crashed and burned at its first performance. But my technique lagged behind my inspiration, and this rippling pond very quickly went dry. The "waves" of Wavemaker were to be long sequences of oscillating melodic cells that created a rippling, shimmering complex of patterns like the surface of a slightly agitated pond or lake. I gradually developed a scheme for composing that was partly indebted to the repetitive procedures of Minimalism and partly an outgrowth of my interest in waveforms. Having experienced a few of the seminal pieces of American Minimalism during the early 1970's, I thought their combination of stripped-down harmonic and rhythmic discourse might be just the ticket for my own unformed yearnings. At the time, like many a young composer, I was essentially unaware of the nature of those musical materials I had chosen for my tools. Shaker Loops began as a string quartet with the title Wavemaker.
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