Velocities for Marimba: A Gateway to Contemporary Classical Music?
Classical music has evolved quite a bit over the past few hundreds of years. From early Gregorian chants to music being performed primarily for churches, nobles, and royalty in 1600–1700, and still to a point where anyone can play around with music and sound on their devices at home, we’ve certainly come a long way. Of course, in playing with sound, some music, especially within the classical realm, may be incredibly different than the Mozart or Haydn music that is talked about in your elementary music class. By this, I mean that there might be some unusual sounds that make you ask, “Is this even music?” With that in mind, I want to look at Velocities as an example. Velocities (1990) is a piece for solo marimba by Joseph Schwantner, in which the performer plays fast passages all over the instrument like a marathon. This piece, with its own unusual tendencies, may prove to be listenable and entertaining for someone who is not familiar with contemporary classical music.
Background
Before I get too deep into this, let me give you some background. I received my undergraduate degree in music education, with a focus in percussion. The school that I went to has a percussion studio that was very focused in what is called “New Music”. New music, in terms of classical music, is music primarily written in the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly works that are more recent (hence ‘new’). But what is New Music, per se? What musical qualities does it have that set it apart from the music of Mozart or Beethoven?
Well, that’s the thing. New Music can have many different qualities and styles. It can use a variety of rhythms and pulses, or no discernible pulse whatsoever. It can use a variety of pitches, clusters of pitches, or just use the same pitches over and over again. What does New Music sound like? To be honest, I have heard different things from different people. I have heard New Music pieces that are very groovy, having unique sounds. I’ve also heard pieces that have nothing for my ear to latch onto. This is fairly common for people who are not familiar with New Music. Some pieces can be very easy for the ear to latch onto, while other pieces may be of an acquired taste.
Music and Affect — Something to Consider
Arnie Cox wrote a great deal on affect in music in his 2016 book Music and Embodied Cognition.¹ In this context, Cox says, affect is anything to do with feelings, emotions, moods, and sensory experience. He offers eight “avenues” of musical affect which include mimetic participation (how the listener mimics the music), anticipation, expression, acoustic impact, implicit and explicit analysis, associations, exploring taboos, and the “invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality of musical sound.” I’ll be talking about some of these aspects, but not all.
What particularly comes to mind when discussing both New Music and these avenues include expression, associations, and taboos. New Music, in general, involves exploring the possibilities of music in many different ways. Some composers explore sounds and emotions while other composers focus narrowly on the sound itself, not worrying about expressing something. Even some extended techniques (which are unconventional ways of playing an instrument) can be considered, as taboo as they are. For example, a brass player might use their voice as they blow through the instrument to change the sound.
Introducing Velocities
The vast majority of solo music for percussion is from the past century. As such, composers have tended to experiment with sounds that can be produced by drums, cymbals, xylophones, and so on. A popular example is creating friction using finger rolls or using a violin bow. All of this considered, I would like to talk about Velocities. As I said at the beginning, I feel that this piece serves as an ample starting point for someone wanting to know more about New Music.
Looking at a marimba and a pair of mallets, it’s probably obvious that the proper, typical sound of a marimba is made by hitting the head of the mallet on the bars (or, individual notes) of the instrument. However, right at the beginning, the player is instructed to play the edges of the bars, getting a very thin, clicky sound. A risk with this is breaking the mallets, so the performer must be careful with this.
What You See is What You Get
One notable factor of playing solo marimba is the fact that the performer may rapidly move around across different parts of the instrument, playing high notes on one side, low notes on the other, and a lot in between. In fact, over the course of the piece, each note of the marimba is hit at least once!²
This goes back to what Cox says about the invisibility of sound. Here, he talks about imagery and how if we the listeners are able to touch something (or imagine being able to touch it), it gives us a sense of realness. Music, however, is not exactly tangible. Unless you’re in an altered state (I won’t judge), we can’t touch sound. Sure, we can feel vibrations being next to a loud speaker with a lot of bass.
Though that’s one way of thinking about it.
What Cox is referring to here more so has to do with the fact that we can’t relate music to things in real life automatically — we have to make this meaning based on our own experience. Whatever sound may remind me of ocean waves will not remind you of ocean waves too. In other words, we often get to know things in life best if they are visible and/or tangible, so a lack of this ability in music leaves a lot of room for interpretation in the listener’s mind.³ Again, we won’t get a blatant description of what the music is trying to express from only watching a musician perform.⁴ The composer would need to provide notes and historical factors about the piece if such a definite meaning were to come through.
Often, though not always, the process of making sound on an instrument requires pressing different small button combinations to change notes, which is not always easy to see from the back of an auditorium. With percussion, and Velocities especially, the music-making is inherently visual. As I mentioned above, the player is moving all around the marimba, hitting different notes — high, low, and everything in between. Additionally, using and controlling the height of the mallet effectively can have an effect on the volume of the note when combined with an appropriate speed (just make sure you’re aware of this before you get tendinitis). This can also contribute to how we might perceive the expression of any piece (in Cox’s perspective, what the music might be telling us). With Velocities, the rapid notes themselves might be perceived as energetic, especially if the listener is listening live or watching a video. Also, the correlation between mallet height and volume can be expressive of different things. The loud hits of the introduction can be perceived as powerful and perhaps aggressive, but softer passages in the piece may be seen as calm.
What About the Music Itself?
So far, I have talked a lot about performance factors of Velocities. After all, a live performance is a give-and-take relationship between the listeners and the performer — what the performer plays impacts the audience, and how the audience responds impacts the performer. But what is it about the music of Velocities that makes it stand out among other New Music pieces?
In considering how music might work, Cox discusses implicit and explicit analysis. Implicit analysis, in simple terms, are questions about a piece of music that we answer ourselves in the moment without realizing it, which can inform how we feel about a piece. When we become aware of what we ask ourselves and try to break down what we hear, that becomes explicit analysis. The argument here seems to be that whenever we listen to music, we are always implicitly asking ourselves what is happening. In the spirit of being totally meta, I am going to explicitly analyze the process of implicit analysis, with Velocities in tow.
In music, the way pitches relate to each other, particularly how high or low two pitches are relative to each other, is called an interval. Consonant intervals are intervals that sound pleasing. Consequently, dissonant intervals that are close to each other are often used to create and resolve tension quickly. Dissonances on their own tend to sound less pleasing. As such, a piece that’s full of dissonances may not have much appeal to the average listener. Additionally, when music sounds like it’s going off key, that can also sacrifice its appeal. A common feature in New Music is to embrace dissonances and music that can sound like random notes, no matter how well the composer planned them out.
I would argue that Schwantner sets the listener up to expect this sort of musical content. Velocities contains a variety of musical figures that are appropriately written into a groove so that the listener is eased into the chaos. Not only that, but most of the piece consists of large fragments which have a central key (seasoned music aficionados may call this tonal), even if it sounds like it moves around a lot. As such, it creates a sound that resembles tonal music, which is a very common feature in popular music as well as classical music before 1900. The use of tonal and atonal qualities in Velocities can give the listener something to latch on and prime them for music that is sounds more chaotic and breaks conventions of familiar music.
The opening section of Velocities contains clashing intervals that sound random in nature, interweaving with what sounds like a melodic line. This section is written like this until a few pages in. At that point, the melodic lines resemble scales, moving up and down without big leaps. From that point forward, the piece tends to favor consonant intervals that imply a tonal (and theoretically pleasing) center, spacing notable key changes apart enough that they are not jarring to the ear. This sort of interplay culminates in the very end of the piece when the music becomes chaotic in nature, much like the beginning.
Closing
So, New Music can be weird to the average listener. The 20th century marked a point where composers grew more experimental in how they wrote their music, which sounded different from music before it. Velocities might be a good first piece for someone not familiar with New Music, as it uses variety in volume and pitches while doing so in tonal passages. As such, the sound of the piece is dramatic, if not exciting, and can create a cool visual component. I encourage anyone who wants to listen to New Music to start with Velocities.
[1] Arnie Cox, Music and Embodied Cognition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). All references to Cox in this article are from this book.
[2] This is unless it’s a 5-octave marimba, which has notes below the low E. Marimbas can have different sizes, with 4 (low C), 4.3 (low A), 4.5 (low F), and 5 (even lower C) being the most common. A 4.6 with the additional low E at the bottom accommodates every note in Velocities, but there is room for adjustment if all you have is a 4.5.
[3] Acknowledging the fact that not everyone is equally able to see or visualize.
[4] The obvious exception here is most (not all) music with singers, which can tell a story that gives the listener more context for the music as a whole.
