Joel Suben Where All the Waters Meet

Suben Memorial
Scorca Hall starting at 11 AM on May 4
330 7th Ave
7th Floor
New York, NY 10001

When I was studying composition with Joel Suben, he avowed a deep love of Carter. And he expressed a reservation.

Sometimes Carter “hangs his pitches out” as on a catenaire. (Pitches fixed in a register persist for a phrase.) That organizes pitches nicely locally, but it doesn’t necessarily have much range. Similar problems sometimes with Wuorinen.

Similar problem when Chinary Ung does it in his Spiral series.

The problem there is that his harmonies are modal and so one landing point is not really more foregrounded than another. Diatonic harmonies do have different weights – with or without tritones; with or without minor seconds. See Oya tu Merced y Creo, where in a dim triad (after first falling gesture, with B in soprano) foreshadows a Lydian cadence. Both tritones pop to the surface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=606oy98pt2s

(The way I play this could be the canionero editor’s interpretation of the ficta.)

And I made this “empty nesting” error for years while I was experimenting with Wuorinen-inspired nesting. When focal pitches work in counterpoint with focal harmonies, a greater depth and range is possible because the focal harmony’s teeth can get into you. (The teetch schtick is credited to Frank Brickle.)

*When focal pitches work in counterpoint with focal harmonies, a greater depth and range is palpable.*

In “Where All the Waters Meet”, Suben gets it all. I’m very impressed after 35 years. The piece is 35 years old. It aged well.

So we care about those Es circled in red in measures 8, 9, 10, because they awaken a memory of the opening E. This is a half cadence, and it takes place in the right bar, bar 8, and it is given apposite weight by a slow harmonic rhythm extending through bar 9 into bar 10. And that all keeps E in that register alive until bar 16 when it returns in that fleshy diatonic harmony of the opening.

The focal harmony is one that can will get its teeth into you. It’s a familiar diatonic harmony. It’s in us. That the mid-phrase departs into non-diatonic harmonies is a simple cis-trans binary. It’s very palpable and very real in our perceptual appratus. We feel diatonic; we feel non-diatonic. That is very Boykan, I’ve learned. Suben studied with Boykan.

See my notes about Boykan’s brilliant “Diptych”. Babbitt had nothing on Boykan. Moreover, Babbitt, unlike Boykan, was often too ambitious.

I gradually absorbed this through conversations with Brickle and Boykan. Much to learn about such proceedings by studying Babbitt Swan Song, by playing music by Robert Pollock.

Gurgling: I do respect the old whine, “there’s no melody…”

Joel’s “Where All the….” is not merely slurping, gurgling and splashing. The waters run deep. The hydrodynamics of this work are wonderfully rich – eddies and those still places in between the eddies or in the middle of a whirlpool.

The metric modulations are, in the first 16 bars, of phrase proportions, working in counterpoint with the focal harmony. The tempo moves away from the focal harmony in coordination with the pitches moving away into the mid-phrase.

Now – noise and microtones do not dismiss one from grappling with these questions, and introducing those into our counterpoint does not have to obscure or moot these issues either.

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