Score (pdf) 179 KB

Audio (m4a) 5.17 MB

 

Program Notes

Written as a companion work to Singularity, Second Sight explores the various resolutions of its central dissonance, which contains the intervals of a major second and a minor second. Its discovery led to the piece’s creation, and its development led to the piece’s lengthening beyond what I had initially conceived. Second Sight began as a short piece, of about three minutes; but the longer I worked, the more interesting and complex its journey became.
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I was immediately fascinated by the number of tonalities to which its central dissonance could resolve. Each resolution was a route to be travelled. The piece takes only three of these routes, and returns to its home dissonance before each new episode. As Second Sight unfolds, this central dissonance becomes a point of departure, or lens, through which the music continually passes. This gives the piece unity and variety from exactly the same source – one of conflict.
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The climactic phrase, near the end, is built upon a sonority which contains all seven notes of the Bb major scale, and has the widest range of any single vertical sound in the piece. The sonority is attacked four times in different orchestrations. Each time, the tonalities visited prior to this phrase “peel away” from the large sound, revealing themselves like memories. A calm section at the end, finished by the marimba, brings repose.