PROGRAM LISTING

Grooved Surfaces (1996) Michael Gandolfi (b.1956)

I. Frame Shifting
II. Pitching Rotation
III. Flipside

PROGRAM NOTES

     Grooved Surfaces was commissioned by Richard Pittman and the Boston Musica Viva, and is dedicated to them. At the prompting of Mr. Pittman, I composed a work that derives from world music influence. The title refers to the musical 'grooves' or rhythmical patterns which are omnipresent in the piece.
     The first movement, Frame Shifting, is the result of my study of a particular type of Ghanaian music known as ‘Adowa’. I utilized a typical Adowa drum-ensemble rhythm in which two instruments (here, the pizzicato ’cello and left-hand piano) mimic the role of the shakes (the drum-ensemble instrument that provides a steady rhythmical underpinning). The remaining instruments (in this case, pizzicato violin, vibraphone, and right-hand piano) play syncopated rhythms against this steady groove. Traditionally, these syncopated parts produce a varying rhythmical fabric by altering their starting times with respect to the steady patterns. I chose to repeat each syncopated pattern for several measures before modulating or 'shifting' the frame. (Importantly, the flute and clarinet play soloistic lines that are formed and influenced by the shifting accents and pitch motives heard in the varying rhythmic frames.) Harmonically and melodically, this movement is thoroughly 'western', but rhythmically it is very closely aligned to the Adowa patterns.
     The second movement Pitching Rotation, is based on a pentatonic scale that slowly rotates through all transpositions, several times, until it returns to its original key and voicing. I used the pentatonic scale (a predominant melodic scale heard in the Ghanaian music), as a passacaglia with a continually varying metric scheme that allows the luminous properties of the scale to slowly unfold. At various times within this movement, several rhythmical levels are projected, all grounded by the steady passacaglia figure. This type of rhythmical cycling was a common theme in all of the Ghanaian music that I studied.
     The third movement, Flipside, explores rhythmical patterns that remain absolutely constant but appear to change speeds dramatically owing to purposefully placed, opposing metrical accents. The result is music that appears to flip from one time-world to another, allowing for several listeners to have radically different interpretations of a given passage. This effect is similar to a common optical illusion that occurs in two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional geometric objects that are shaded to appear either concave or convex to illustrate their three-dimensionality. The viewer often experiences the geometric objects as dynamically shifting from one state to the other (i.e., what appears to be concave suddenly turns convex and vice versa). I frequently experienced an aural corollary to this visual phenomenon when listening to Ghanaian drum-ensemble music.

Michael Gandolfi

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