Pell-Mell
ensemble flute, bass clarinet, and tape
written summer 2021
duration 6 minutes
Commissioned by the Society of Composers, Inc. for the 2021 National Student Conference
Written for Kamratōn
The first half of 2021 proved to be surprisingly fast-paced - if not in locomotion (most of my time has still been spent locked in my room), then certainly in terms of news cycles and workload. For several months, I found myself fretting about what crazy event would trigger the next wave of headline-addled social media rants - riots, mass shootings, record temperatures, collapsing buildings - all while composing furiously, trying desperately to meet deadline after deadline. As each submission date began to feel less reasonable than the last, some of that frenzied, nervous activity began to creep into the music I was writing. I noticed that many of my pieces were becoming increasingly pulse-driven, filled with wild mixed meters and rapid modulations.
Pell-Mell continues that trend, collapsing so many months of frenetic energy into a five minute mad dash. I wanted to try and compress my usual processes as compactly as possible, building the piece out of two ideas - an oscillating sixteenth note motif, and an off-kilter 4/4+3/4 rhythm. As the flute blazes through double-tongued barrages of notes over vicious bass clarinet multiphonics, the two motifs play against one another through constant stepwise modulations. The piece ultimately captures a mite of my mental state in its large-scale form - a continuous Shepard tone ascending to nowhere, perpetually heightening in tension while never quite breaking.