World Trade Photograph

photograph of the World Trade Center, taken by Alex Swedlow in 1984

WORLD TRADE PHOTOGRAPH is writen for two pianos and a digital collage of spoken text. This piece is an example of my interest in visual sources for musical structure: the score was graphically plotted on a photograph of the World Trade Center taken in the 1980s by my friend Alex Swedlow.

I've always loved this picture becasue it so cleverly documents its own production. Alex stood exactly halfway between the twin towers, and aimed his camera upward. After snapping one shot, he turned 180 degrees and snapped another. The print was then made from the two exposures on the uncut neghative, side by side. The continuous sprocket holes along the edges indicate that brief span of time when the photographer turned himself around one afternoon in New York.

The text collage was inspired by the linguist George Lakoff, with whom I studied at UC Berkeley. His research on metaphor helped me see a paradox in the photo: it depicts the towering heights of financial and political power, while situating the public observer as a lowly outsider. At the same time it also suggests this external, excluded position is more securely "grounded" and "centered."

The music was composed during the spring and summer of 2001. I was beginning to compile the text collage during September of that year. Originally this was to be a series of metaphorical comments which highlight distinctions between up and down, such as "She started at the ground floor and worked her way up, climbing the ladder of success." After September 11, 2001, I collected phrases from news articles and political speeches which referred either literally or figuaratively to the vertical dimension.

ABOUT THE COMPOSITION

To generate the musical score, I plotted a grid over the print. This allowed me to gauge pitch up and down the vertical axis, and rhythmic time from left to right along the horizontal axis. In this simple system, the architecture in the picture indicated each specific note. For example, the X/Y coordinates of a window in one of the buildings would correspond to a certain note on the (vertical) scale, at a specific beat in horizontal time.

The width of each exposure is lined by eight sprocket holes, so there are 16 sprocket holes from left to right across the double-negative print. I therefore composed the music in 16 short sections, one for each sprocket-hole-width.

The wall of one of the buildings reaches up the entire vertical edge of one image. There happen to be 66 columns of windows visible on this wall, conveniently marking even units up the Y axis. So, I scaled the number 66 across the 88 pitches of the piano keyboard, omitting 22 keys spaced evenly from bottom to top. The remaining notes constitute the pitch material for my music.

After mapping points in the gridded photo onto musical staff paper, I played through the notes and listened for the more interesting patterns. I was surprised and intrigued by occasional harmonic resolutions - examples of "grounding" and "centering" in the metaphorical gravity of traditional music theory. The finished piece [link to 30 second MP3 sample here] is a distillation of the melodies, harmony and rhythms that sounded best to me.

Listen to an excerpt...