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Study for a Mass (Agnes Martin)

from Three Studies for Future Uncertainties by Nate Wooley

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Study for a Mass is my first attempt at working with just intonation (JI) lattices as a visible framework for building shifting harmonies. I became familiar with the idea of just intonation through listening to, studying, and performing the music of Harry Partch, Chris Brown, James Tenney, and Catherine Lamb. While undertaking my JI primary studies using David B. Doty’s Just Intonation Primer, I came across some of his three-dimensional lattices used to graphically illustrate the connections between the ratios of a certain limit of overtones.

Around the same time I found myself immensely inspired by a creative misunderstanding of Kant’s idea of form and content as well as the grid drawings of Agnes Martin. I simultaneously wanted to exhaust a simple set of content, in the way Martin had attempted to do with her grids and to explore where I could go by setting up broad conceptual architectures that I could house different concrete musical phrases, harmonic or rhythmic ideas, or sound conceptions inside.*

The music for a mass has a certain historical set of parts: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Benedictus, and Agnus Dei, and so it seemed an interesting architecture on which to house these pieces based on my lattice drawings. And, I have a certain personal to Martin’s work, because of, what I perceive to be, its religious quietism and rigor. It just seemed to make sense., and so I set out to compose a full mass service in honor of Martin, using the JI lattices as a smaller generative form for each part of the service.

I decided to limit myself to the use of sine tones to build the entire mass in order to best hear the pure interactions of tones in the Just Intonation system, and because the sine tone, to me, has always had a stoic warmth; a quality I also equate with Martin’s work. I took a pen to a version of Doty’s lattice for each movement. I drew pleasing patterns through the lattice—attempting to exhaust a grid—the connected ratios of which I translated into frequencies to be built and layered one on the other; discovering along the way, which combinations would produce more and less severe combinatory effects. What is presented here is not a movement of the mass, but the first proof of concept for a work in progress.

*All of this sounds very precocious as a mixture, but the inspiration was just the result of a rare amount of available reading time.

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from Three Studies for Future Uncertainties, released May 1, 2020

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Nate Wooley Brooklyn, New York

Nate Wooley grew up in Clatskanie, Oregon. He began his professional music career at age 13 performing in big bands with his father, and studied jazz and classical trumpet at the University of Oregon and University of Denver. He settled in New York in 2001, and maintains an active schedule in jazz and experimental music in the U.S. and abroad. ... more

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