Valences
Valences, three movements for pipe organ solo, suggest three contrasting musical objects, each with its own musical and emotional dichotomies of their intrinsic positive – attractive, or negative – aversive valence. In other words, these three movements explore various polarities of specific cognitive percepts that are characterized by specific musical structures. For instance, positive valenced states are evoked by relatively consonant harmony and periodic harmony and rhythm, while negative valence can be observed in the same structures that become more inharmonious or convoluted. Very often, process structures are employed in order to generate a form that interpolates between the poles of periodic-aperiodic rhythm, harmonicity-aharmoniciy of harmony, and slow-fast tempi.
The work was completed in the Fall of 2009. Each of the three movements gradually builds up the atmosphere of a musical ritual through the use of both individual and combination stops. The first movement, while scored as a spiral canon, resembles the texture of a Baroque organ trio sonata; the meditative and reflective melodic patterns permeate the second movement; the last division of the work echoes a virtuosic toccata-like writing with recognizable melodic fragments from the first movement played in the pedal part.
In this score, I wanted to capture the flux as well the state of our inner self that is reflected through the polarities of positive and negative emotional valence, in a hope to portray the emotional ramifications embedded in some very familiar musical schema and expectations. I was very interested in the perceptual quality of newly discovered harmonic and rhythmic sonance modes, as well as how selected tones and harmonies relate to each other, especially from the viewpoint of melody, harmony, and rhythm perception. If this new organ work can reveal the excitement and potential of some fundamental perceptual schemas in music composition and performance, I will have more than accomplished my goal.
VALENCES, three movements for organ
1. Slow
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2. Moderate
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3. Fast
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