Tree Music

Paul Chihara - Tree Music

In addition to writing concert and classical music, Paul Chihara has composed scores for movies (Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, Prince of the City, The Morning After, Crossing Delancy and more) and television shows (the most notable being China Beach and the miniseries Noble House). This article gives a good overview and more details of Chihara's career.

This LP, Tree Music, was created back when Paul Chihara was professor of electronic music at UCLA before he departed UCLA to work on film soundtracks.

From the liner notes:

About the album: "I have a thing about trees," [Chihara] admits, when asked about their relationship to his music. This is translated - where possible - into musical shapes, which often involve free-flowing rhythms in a spacious context - like trees. "My music is not aleatoric," he says, "the extended pauses, for example, are always measured. Chaos is a bad substitute for too much order."

WILLOW WILLOW

Performers: Sheridon Stokes - bass flute; Roger Bobo - tuba; Kenneth Watson, Karen Erin, Paul Chihara - percussion; Kraig Kupka , Robert Ose, Kenny Sawhill - trombones

WILLOW WILLOW is basically a soliloquy for bass flute, with percussion tapestry surrounding it. ...The tuba, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, haunts the music and comments on it (sometimes with music, sometimes with words), but remains detached and aloof throughout.

LOGS

Performer: Bertram Turetzky - string bass

LOGS is a meditation and exercise in nuance, suggested to the composer by the Zen breathing exercises in the Art of Archery. The music is derived from a single phrase (two variants on it) and a group of nine contrasting subphrases. These units are repeated or combined continuously, making larger periods.

BRANCHES

Performers: Arthur Weisberg, Donald MacCourt - bassoons; Kenneth Watson - percussion

In BRANCHES, the principal sound source is a set of chromatically tuned tenor drums that initiates the action and shapes the contour of the piece. The two bassoons, like branches blown by the wind, follow and react to the motion of the drum sound.

DRIFTWOOD

Performers: The Philadelphia Quartet - Veda Reynolds, Irwin Eisenberg, Alan Iglitzin, Charles Brennand

DRIFTWOOD is dominated by the sonority of the two violas, whose rich, middle-range color the composer is especially fond of. Lyric, contrapuntal passages emerge occasionally from quiet textures of trance-like, almost incantatory motion, only to dissolve into them again.

LOGS XVI

Performers: Bertram Turetzky - string bass; Paul Chihara - electronic sounds realized on Moog and Buchla synthesizers at the UCLA Electronic Music Studio

LOGS XVI, so called because it was the sixteenth "take" in the recording studio, appears as an extension to DRIFTWOOD and a sort of coda to the present recording. It uses much of the material from Logs, modulated and transformed electronically, and combined with other musical materials derived from the entire Tree series.

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Willow Willow {10:12}

2. Logs {5:54}

3. Branches {6:23}

Side 2

1. Driftwood {6:55}

2. Logs XVI {8:57}

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