Sky, Earth and Life is the first musical fragment of the incremental composition The Game of Music. The piece lasts less than two minutes and is built as a small symbolic sequence founded on the opposition and recomposition of three dimensions: sky, earth and life.
The title corresponds to the relationship between two extreme musical poles: the sky, associated with lydian quality, and the earth, associated with locrian quality. Life occupies the intermediate space between these two extremes: not as a static compromise, but as tension, movement and possibility of synthesis.
Basic Structure
The piece originates from a descending series of notes that starts on Ab and arrives at D. These two notes are taken as the symbolic and musical axis of the composition: a sort of north and south of the sound space.
The descent from Ab to D is carried out through a concatenation of sigma chords. Each sigma chord is formed of five notes and is treated as a generative cell, or “musical zygote,” because it contains, in the smallest possible number of notes, almost all the fundamental interval distances.
The only distance absent from the sigma chord is the tritone, which is precisely the distance between D and Ab. This absence becomes the symbolic center of the piece: what is missing from the initial cell is also what allows the composition to develop.
Sigma Chord
The Sigma Chord takes its name from Sigma Orionis, a stellar system in the constellation of Orion formed of five principal stars. In the piece, the sigma chord is not merely harmonic material, but an original musical cell: a small compact system that contains within itself a potential for development.
Sigma chords are concatenated by making the last note of one chord coincide with the first note of the next. In this way a descending cascade is produced from Ab to D.
From a performative point of view, the cascade is recorded on piano in two separate parts, then enriched with twelve-string guitar overdubs and concluded with an ambiguous chord, pervaded by a quality that is at once luminous and dark, major and minor.
Tritone and Recomposition
After the descent of the sigma chords, the piece introduces a series of tritones that rise from D toward Ab. The tritone fills the void left by the sigma chords, which did not contain that central distance.
In the piece, the tritone is not interpreted as diabolus in musica, that is, as an element of division, but as symbolum: that which restores to unity what had been separated. Its function is therefore not destructive, but recompositive.
The tritone thus becomes the musical site of the union of opposites: sky and earth, high and low, fall and ascent, matter and abstraction.
Lydian and Locrian
The dimension of the sky is associated with the lydian scale, while that of the earth is associated with the locrian scale. These two scales are considered mirror extremes: the lydian as maximum luminous openness, the locrian as maximum instability and gravity.
The two scales share precisely the tritone, which becomes the point of contact between the extremes. From this relationship arises the image of the Lydian-Locrian System, a two-armed spiral that graphically represents the tension/complementarity between these two scales and, by metaphorical extension, between sky and earth.
In Sky, Earth and Life, this opposition has no moral value: the sky is not “good” and the earth is not “evil.” They are two dimensions of experience that life passes through and attempts to recompose.
A Fall That Rises
One of the most interesting characteristics of the piece is the contrary motion between the melodic direction and the harmonic one. The notes descend, but the chords evoked by their concatenation seem to rise.
This happens because the sigma chord extends across eleven “steps” within the space of the twelve notes: when concatenated, the movement descends along the spiral scale of pitches, but rises in the circular representation of the twelve notes.
To make this contradiction audible, ascending lines of electric bass, double bass and guitars are recorded, in opposition to the initial descending movement.
The piece thus takes the form of a musical oxymoron: a fall that rises, a sunset that dawns. The symbolic image is that of a meteorite that plummets, carrying with it musical cells capable of generating a new form of sonic life. In the story it corresponds to the meteorite that fell near Kangen.
Electric Guitar
In the following section, above the chord born from the “crash” of the musical meteorite, the electric guitar enters. The chord contains the tritone and some major and minor notes derived from the lydian and locrian areas.
The electric guitar improvisation uses minor notes that rise and major notes that descend. Here too the musical gesture works on the recomposition of opposites: the earth is directed toward the sky and the sky toward the earth.
Sound Materials
The piece combines real instruments, overdubs, and organic or manipulated sound materials:
- piano
- twelve-string guitar
- electric bass
- double bass
- electric guitar
- stone noises
- bark noises
- manipulated digital sounds
The noises of stones and bark serve to roughen the sound and make it more organic, giving body to the locrian dimension of the earth. The manipulated digital sounds instead represent a more abstract and metaphysical dimension, linked to the lydian quality of the sky.
This timbral distinction reinforces the symbolic structure of the piece: the earth is rendered through physical and rough materials, while the sky is evoked through more immaterial and transformed sounds.
Meaning
Sky, Earth and Life is a piece built on the idea of opposition and recomposition. Its symbolic center is the tritone, understood as an interval capable of uniting what appears separated.
The composition relates:
- descent and ascent
- major and minor
- lydian and locrian
- sky and earth
- matter and abstraction
- absence and revelation (of the tritone)
- death and birth
Life, in the title, is not a third element added from outside, but the space in which these polarities meet. It is the intermediate, unstable and mysterious condition, in which opposites can recognize themselves as parts of the same form.