Kosmos Kalos
[Performance Music] Senior Project in Composition submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Music from Yale College
Graciously recorded by Naomi-Jeanne Main, Joe Wang, and Thomas Walter.
Composer’s Note:
“Kosmos Kalos owes a great deal to those astrophiles who heard the harmony of the spheres from terra firma before technological advancement allowed it to be remotely transmitted. Its title and transliteration, which roughly translates to “beautiful universe” from the Greek, pays homage to Béla Bartók's Mikrokosmos and George Crumb's Makrokosmos. Its overall structure and orchestration derive from the information relayed by probes sent into the atmospheres of four celestial bodies—the only four to date which have had their atmospheric acoustic data analyzed—as presented by Professors Andi Petculescu and Richard M. Lueptow of the University of Louisiana and Northwestern University, respectively. Even its content, the very space-time of the work, draws inspiration from such diviners as Paul Hindemith (“Musica Mundana” from Symphonie “Die Harmonie der Welt”), Charles Ives (The Unanswered Question), Aaron Jay Kernis (Musica Celestis), György Ligeti (Atmosphères), Missy Mazzoli (Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)), Einojuhani Rautavaara (Adagio celeste), Terry Riley (“Ascending the Heaven Ladder” from Requiem for Adam), Kaija Saariaho (Asteroid 4179 — Toutatis), Eric Whitacre (Deep Field), and of course the eminent Gustav Holst (“Neptune” from The Planets), to name a few.
The work consists of four movements: 1) “Kosmos-Mars”; 2) “Earth”; 3) “Titan”; and 4) “Venus-Kosmos”, all of which guide its listeners from the stillness of the universe through some of the available soundscapes of our solar system, and back to the void. Its inter- and intra-sectional scheme liberally borrows and adapts from Dr. Robert P. Morgan’s conception of circular form, in order to formally represent not only cycles of the galactic or universal scale, but to extract its macro from the micro, from the spheres which it proposes to describe. To address the matter of tradition, I hoped to emulate György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata in its aspiration towards style ex nihilo, such that each movement contains a ‘folk’ tradition derived mostly from its locus’ specific geological, meteorological, and acoustic phenomena. (I suppose that engaging with frequential data ipso facto may place the work under the ‘Spectralist’ umbrella.)
In order to reference these phenomena in the process of composition, I developed a means of visualizing perceived volume as a function of pitch space in the four atmospheres examined—as affected by atmospheric density and pressure, and chemical composition—which I call attenuated pitch spectrography. This mode of approximate visualization reframes Figure 1(a) from Professors Andi Petculescu and Richard M. Lueptow’s paper from pure frequential documentation toward a new purpose in music. A spectrographic chart of this kind precedes each movement.
Using these charts, I attempted to render each miniature with cultural and sonic sensitivity toward their respective theoretical society. “Mars” (“Kosmos-Mars,” m. 41.3), for one example, correlates to an attenuated pitch spectrograph with much the same contour as that of Earth; thus register served only as a minor compositional constraint. Additionally, Mars remains humanity’s most promising hope for habitation, so in its tone I strove for sentimentality, even romanticism. The same applies for such uniquities as Earth’s seasonal progression, Titan’s view of Saturn, Venus’ turbulent weather (the “Fughetta” [“Venus-Kosmos,” m. 1] is written so as to emerge from its winds), and their orchestration, etc. I have also included a (necessarily, as it remains impossible to hear a reading of the piece in this way as of the current year) crude reorchestration of each miniature which counteracts the difference in attenuation for its specific object, for the intention of performance upon it. I call these collected versions extraterrestrial, and the original suite terrestrial, accordingly. I encourage, should the work have such a privileged longevity, the adjustment of the extraterrestrial versions, which have been included more as prototypes than for any other purpose.
The open instrumentation of the work hopes to cater to any instrumental developments in coming times. Perhaps this ‘future-proofing’ of the work stems from the composer’s preoccupation with the unforeseeable offing.”