Lilt: The Music
My new work Lilt is comprised of three primary types of material, each designed to provoke/provide a contrasting music-body relationship for Jennifer’s choreography. A central idea to both Jennifer’s work and mine has been centrifugal motion: the constant drift from a center but with residual pull back towards an initiatory state, forever tethered yet wriggling to break away, stuck in an uneven oscillation between staying and going…
The first primary type of material opens and closes the work: a strict metrical grid of 5-counts (shedding or gaining a beat every now and then) which alternate between short-long (2+3) and long-short (3+2) subdivisions. The difference is subtle yet persistent, creating a kind of alternating limp or lilt by unevenly lingering on the slightly longer vs. shorter beat within a gently tangled polyphonic texture (ex. 1).
Ex. 1: Limp—Lilt
The second type of material concerns a persistent iambic figure (short—long) which alternates between a 2:3 ratio and, again very close but ever so faintly different, 3:5. This variation on slightly off-kilter, uneven lilting relates to the opening, but here moving in chordal blocks, now dense, now widely-spaced (ex. 2).
Ex. 2: Iambic Blocks
The penultimate section of Lilt suddenly plunges into an atemporal world without pulse, without tempo, seemingly without time itself (ex. 3).
Ex. 3: Without Time
Brief echoes of more metrical material resound like aftershocks, quickly absorbed into the slow muck. As a stark contrast to all that came before, this section lies low and slow, only gradually ascending from the abyss towards more earthly territory, all the while rediscovering the tick of time lost. The piece ends as we began: with gentle lilts, though with a newfound sense of all-too-human lingering.
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Many of my initiating musico-choreographic ideas for Lilt stem from an earlier collaborative project with dancer/choreographer Brendan Drake (www.brendandrakechoreography.com) through composer Zosha Di Castri’s 'Composing For Dance' seminar at Columbia University. My work with Jennifer has been independent of this earlier project but the music, and my desire to compose with a kind of bodily immediacy, spans and indelibly links both together. I am grateful to both Jennifer and Brendan for these opportunities to reimagine what kind of new stresses and shapes my music might inhabit and embody.
Written by: Matthew Ricketts