New Album: Of Celestial Medicine
After a wee hitch came up in my life plans earlier this month, I made a resolution to be prolific this autumn/winter and get on with some of the stack of projects I've been saving for later on when the time is right. The time is now!
This is actually a very simple one. I wanted to make an album with strings, specifically the SWAM solo strings; I ended up supplementing them with piano on most tracks (there's a short solo piano track in there too, just to break things up).
The title and track names come from the writings of Paracelsus, the same as my solo piano album The Archidoxes. This is an association I seem to have made in my head between my interests in mid-century modernist classical music and Early Modern alchemists. I do think the modernists and the magicians had something in common: a kind of optimism that technical mastery can lead to human advancement. Nobody believes that any more, it seems, and I miss it even though I don't believe it either. My relationship with modernism is obviously nostalgic, but for a time I never lived in -- I dislike nostalgia so I guess I'm trying to intellectualize it as a distancing device. Anyway, I think Paracelsus is cool in a weird way, and I think Xenakis is cool in a weird way that's kind of similar; that's enough to justify all this for me.
In this one I was sometimes imagining a kind of high academic argument between the alchemists and there's something rhetorical about a lot of the music: it makes rather grand and dramatic gestures but the structure of each piece is quite episodic, or like a rondo that keeps departing from an idea and circling back to it. But a lot of my music is like that, to be fair.
I mixed standard 12EDO freely with some of the tunings described by Paul Erlich in this paper. I don't do much that's entirely in 12EDO these days because my ears just want something else, but there's no high concept here and the tunings are used very freely. These in particular were developed with diatonic music in mind, which is not really what interests me but they would have been of great interest to the proto-scientists of the 17th century so they seemed to fit.
