Allow me to offer a first listen to my long-delayed canon based on Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, best known for its appearance in Through The Looking Glass.
I completed the piece in late-2019, and would have premiered it with the Rockford Aces at the 2020 World Choir Games. We all know how that went.
I’m working on it for a premiere later this year with the Aces, but in the meantime, I took advantage of my home studio to make a recording and a video score.
My motivation in writing the piece came from my longstanding feeling that the settings of Jabberwocky I’ve heard in the past focus on the silly made-up words and the adventure-story plot of the poem, but too little focus on the clever wordplay of Carroll in general, and especially his interest in puzzles of all types, which he worked cleverly into much of his fiction and non-fiction writing.
For my setting, I settled on a double mirror canon (looking glass…mirror…get it?) Learning to write an effective mirror canon was a big challenge, and solving it was a puzzle of its own. Four voices deliver the text of the opening/closing stanza, with the first and third being identical, and the other two being intervallic inversions of the first two; all offset by two bars.
Two more little moments in the piece: first, I delivered the other five stanzas in the form of oration, under which I’ve scored the singers creating a Shepard Tone, an auditory illusion that gives a sense of constantly rising pitch – it’s the aural equivalent of a barber’s pole. It’s taken a lot of experimentation to settle on a methodology for doing that a cappella but I’m pleased with the results. I’m even more pleased to invite my dad, who was the inspiration for my discover and love of Lewis Carroll, and who is a master orator, to deliver the narration.
Finally, I’ll call attention to the first three notes: G-E-B. This is a tribute to one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. He links these three fascinating subjects using his own nods to Lewis Carroll, so it felt fitting that I echo his title with my own first melodic motive. The Shepard Tone certainly calls to mind M.C. Escher, and a mirror canon is certainly a Bach move; I can’t see how you could relate any of the piece to Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, though….
Enjoy this silly, fun bit of nonsense. It feels fitting for Halloween!