Beckman: Roundabout (2020) [PERUSAL COPY]

for Parker Nelson

Roundabout

a note from the composer:

Ever since I was a child, I've always been fascinated by roundabouts: circular traffic intersections where cars are required to move in one direction, and cars outside the roundabout must yield to those inside. From an urban planning perspective, roundabouts are a significantly more safe and efficient type of intersection when compared to traffic lights or stop signs. But for me, the best feature of roundabouts - much to the annoyance of any passengers or other drivers on the road - is anyone's ability to go around and around and around the roundabout without end. There's a beautiful and haunting feeling of movement but also of stasis as you see car's gasoline meter reads lower and lower and you feel your body perpetually pushed towards one side of the car, even though you're not going anywhere at all.

From a sociopolitical standpoint, anyone would say that 2020 has been an intense year. From the worldwide coronavirus pandemic to a renewed racial awakening in America to ever-stronger natural disasters fueled by the onset of global warming, each day we wake up to another intense news cycle and another tragic story. Yet to paraphrase a sentiment I've heard from so many friends and family members, it feels like we're all trapped in some sort of vicious 'Groundhog Day': time passes, the tide turns, the sun rises and sets: but there is no change, there is no progress, and we are dealing with the same issues of ignorance and partisanship and hatred that we have been for tens, dozens, even hundreds of years. It's like we're all trapped in one giant, endless, manic roundabout: we're stuck in this stasis and we can't go anywhere despite all of the dizzying GForces and our fuel slowly drying up.

When Parker Nelson asked me to write an upbeat and 'pop-y' piece for horn solo and loop pedal, I never thought the work that I'd write would be so charged with meaning. But the whole piece, built off of fragments of material presented by the horn before the loop pedal begins, seems to almost programatically echo the sentiments above. Sure, it's upbeat, and yes, it's 'pop-y', but by the end of the piece it grows into a dark, menacing, manic, and despairing looming mass as the loop pedal's cycle - perhaps symbolizing all of the vicious cycles we are caught in these days - builds and builds until all that is left is one voice crying out. -BSB

FORPERUSALONLY

performance notes :

Performance of this piece requires a loop pedal with the capability to simultaneously record, loop, and overdub on two seperate tracks. The loop pedal should also be able to clear the most recent overdub on each track. The composer's recommendation is the BOSS RC-30 Loop Station.

Sections of the piece are marked with open and close repeat signs. These sections are fragments of material that must be recorded/overdubbed using the loop pedal. As one of these sections begins to play back, a performer may choose to take any reasonable amount of rest immediately after recording, as long as they resume playing at the beginning of a loop cycle. For example, after ms. 4 (which marks the end of a looprecord section), the performer may choose to continue straight into ms. 5 (the beginning of a new loop-record cycle), or, they may choose to rest for a couple of seconds as ms. 2-4 begin to play back, as long as they begin recording ms. 5 when the loop's iteration begins to play back ms. 2.

Finally, a note about time signatures and the construction of the looping rhythm of this piece: musically, the piece is centered around warping a rhythm of 27/16 under a 4/4 grid. The moment this occurs in this piece is at ms. 143. Notice how a metric modulation occurs such that the prior 10/16 bar occupies the space of a 3/4 bar, such that every old sixteenth-note now occupises the space of a 5:6-sixteenth-tuplet in 3/4. However, this method does not evenly map to 4/4: notice how in ms. 145, the rhythm in the loop pedal is notated as a 5:6sixteenth-tuplet followed by two normal sixteenth-notes. In order to properly achieve this rhythmic warping in a loop-pedal context, the performer must, at the outset of the piece, perform and record the final two sixteenths of the 27/16 pattern slightly faster than they should be (as a sixteenth note in 3/4 is slightly faster than a 5:6sixteenth-tuplet). Thus, each and every bar of 7/16 in the piece is not truly a bar of 7/16; rather, they are in reality bars of 5/16+1.7/16, notated for simplicity's sake as 7/16, but where the last two sixteenth notes should be played about 20% faster than they should be.

In measure 1 only, accidentals only apply to the note they precede.

All material written in bass-clef assumes modern bass-clef notation and does not require the performer to transpose down an octave.

Please contact the composer at ben.beckman@yale.edu with any questions.