Listening Response #4: Hailstork

This week I had the pleasure of listening to Arabesques for Flute and Percussion, a five-movement chamber work by Adolphus Hailstork. I find the overall musical language quite comparable to Chin’s Advice from a Caterpillar, especially the manner of notation and the kinds of woodwind extended techniques. Both works, when they present a solo woodwind sans accompaniment, are filled with un-metered flourishes which give the performer great control over the space within each note while still following a general framework given in the score. Although I didn’t think of this last week, I believe this practice harkens back to early chant melodies, which gave a loose outline of each phrase, but left the precise placement of each note in time more up to the performer.

I also noticed Hailstork’s use of the same notation which Chin had used for short notes quickening to a tremolo on page 4 of the score—a notation which apparently isn’t only used by woodwinds, but is also used for tom-toms in the fourth- and third-to-last bars of this movement. I’m curious why I haven’t seen this used for strings in any of the literature I’ve studied thus far. It actually seems that this technique would be rather idiomatic on string instruments, which are famous for the easy of quick tremolo.

When I listened to this piece without the score, it seemed every movement belonged together in the arc of the story which this piece tells, I was surprised to see just how different the notational language appeared in each movement when I saw the score. The first movement, for example has no barlines—another reason I believe a comparison to the early systems of Western chant notation is appropriate. Without barlines, the natural hierarchy players associate with strong and weak beats is dismissed, and the player—and listener—must find fresh ways to navigate each phrase and every musical impulse. At the same time, this movement is clearly not one that could be easily sung, like a chant melody; it is entirely idiosyncratic with the instrument for which it was composed and of which the composer may have had an especially intimate understanding.

By contrast, other movements are neurotically rhythmic. Consider the fourth movement, the rhythmic notation of which is so specific as to request that first note in the first several measures of 4/4 time be placed one sixteenth-note after the downbeat—an effect which displaces the perceived downbeat by the same amount. The fifth movement has a similar rhythmic character with a quite unconventional time signature, 6/8 + 2/4.

Perhaps the largest difference in the language of this piece and that of Advice from a Caterpillar is that this one makes no use of extra-musical cues, like verbal language and stage directions. In fact, the recording I listened to was audio-only, and I therefore didn’t get to see the performers as they interpreted this work. I’m very curious, though, whether the performer would have added similarly theatrical elements to the performance of this piece as well. Such a choice would seem fitting for a story-telling piece like this.