The basic idea for Within Your Private Sky began with a chain of coincidences. I was teaching my freshman theory class about the circle of fifths – that wonderful ancient representation of all the musical keys, scales, and much more, in an arrangement that looks like a clock face. The students and I were drawing lines back and forth across the circle connecting the pitches in various kinds of chords, scales, etc. Each musical pattern creates a distinctive visual pattern.
As usually happens, I was drawn into thinking about the relationships between the sound of these musical patterns and the kinds of designs they yield. The first coincidence is that, at just that time, I stumbled across Your Private Sky, a collection of the writings of Buckminster Fuller, whom I hadn't read in many years. Fuller's amazing sense of rigorous adventure-whimsy drew me in as it always had, and the book also reprinteded many of his amazing freehand 2 dimensional drawings of 3 dimensional concepts (even more remarkable now in the age of digital graphics). I noticed that, like the circle of fifths, many of his drawings also involved bisections of a circle or sphere and that, to me at least, they sometimes bore a resemblance to our classroom drawings of musical patterns within that ancient circle.
I wondered what sorts of musical elements Fuller's drawings could have served to express, and what those elements might sound like, which reminded me of all the ways in which composers try to represent three-dimensional musical space in notation, and also of the frustration I've felt when trying to sketch some paper and pencil version of the three-dimensional intersections of the hexachords I often use in composing.
All those converging ideas had to lead somewhere, I suppose. But the third element of chance was the request by marimba artist Alex Stopa for a new composition for solo marimba for his upcoming solo CD. Suddenly all those ideas had a place to go – into a composition built on those three-dimensional hexachord intersections, drawing on musical patterns that continuously connect all of the 12 points of the circle of fifths (in a fairly rigorous way, even if more freehand and less digital in approach), and attempting to project a musical narrative within the spirit of thoughtful adventure that Fuller's writings inspire.
-- Paul Seitz
As usually happens, I was drawn into thinking about the relationships between the sound of these musical patterns and the kinds of designs they yield. The first coincidence is that, at just that time, I stumbled across Your Private Sky, a collection of the writings of Buckminster Fuller, whom I hadn't read in many years. Fuller's amazing sense of rigorous adventure-whimsy drew me in as it always had, and the book also reprinteded many of his amazing freehand 2 dimensional drawings of 3 dimensional concepts (even more remarkable now in the age of digital graphics). I noticed that, like the circle of fifths, many of his drawings also involved bisections of a circle or sphere and that, to me at least, they sometimes bore a resemblance to our classroom drawings of musical patterns within that ancient circle.
I wondered what sorts of musical elements Fuller's drawings could have served to express, and what those elements might sound like, which reminded me of all the ways in which composers try to represent three-dimensional musical space in notation, and also of the frustration I've felt when trying to sketch some paper and pencil version of the three-dimensional intersections of the hexachords I often use in composing.
All those converging ideas had to lead somewhere, I suppose. But the third element of chance was the request by marimba artist Alex Stopa for a new composition for solo marimba for his upcoming solo CD. Suddenly all those ideas had a place to go – into a composition built on those three-dimensional hexachord intersections, drawing on musical patterns that continuously connect all of the 12 points of the circle of fifths (in a fairly rigorous way, even if more freehand and less digital in approach), and attempting to project a musical narrative within the spirit of thoughtful adventure that Fuller's writings inspire.
-- Paul Seitz