peripheries

Source Material:
A Folio of Transcriptions, Arrangements, & Departures

Source Material showcases musicians, musicologists, and music-lovers whose work interprets, responds to, or adapts a chosen source. Peripheries’ initial call for transcriptions and musical arrangements eventually reached across disciplines to include playlists, poetry, and photographs; contributors expanded the purview of the folio to include archivists, directors, curators, and buskers. While some contributors work to preserve material, others seek inspiration for their own original work. Some renovate or modernize an antiquated style; others compose a work to meet the practical demands of their ensemble. Sources range from medieval manuscripts to avant-garde compositional techniques, beloved pieces of traditional music to work that is raw, unfinished, or neglected. 

Source Material grew originally out of my own love for guitar and early music. Bookending the folio are two pieces arranged by my longtime guitar teacher Joseph Ricker, director of the Happy Valley Guitar Orchestra (HVGO) in Western Massachusetts, and one half (alongside Jamie Balmer) of the Orpheus Guitar Duo. Joe’s arrangement of John Cage’s In a Landscape featured here opens one of the duo’s all-electric albums. At the opposite end of the folio (before Rafael Toral) is the fruit of Joe’s labor in HVGO: an arrangement for guitar orchestra of Stereolab’s Rainbo Conversation. 

​

Next we travel to Finland, where the group Quartet Ajaton, featuring vocalist Mia Simanainen, graces us with their new spin on old repertoire. Their 2021 album Early Music in the Latest Way rearranges familiar English Renaissance tunes by Dowland and Purcell for an ensemble with Moog synthesizer and bandoneón (a small accordion typically featured in tango music). We print here a brief word from Mia along with the handwritten arrangement of Dowland’s “Come Again, sweet love” by the group’s Moog player Kari Ikonen. In the digital issue you can hear the album track along with an additional handwritten score of Dowland’s “In darkness let me dwell.”

​

Fr. Innocent Smith, O.P. similarly renovates traditional material with his transcription of the In Medio chant. A musicologist working on the Graduale Novum Ordinis Praedicatorum, which will collect edited versions of 13th-century chant for use in 21st-century liturgies, Fr. Innocent offers us a brief history of Western music notation, a sketch of the ongoing revival of interest in Gregorian chant, and the particular liturgical import of his transcription of the In Medio. You can turn to the digital issue to hear modern-day Dominicans of the Eastern Province of St. Joseph chanting Fr. Innocent’s version.

​

Changing gears, I am happy to include this folio’s most unusual entry: a creative “manifesto” by the team behind ULYSSA, a small label run by John Williamson and Eric Deines. John and Eric plunder the dark corners of streaming services to rediscover the unsung heroes of our digital age. It’s a new kind of digital crate digging. They specialize in music with <1,000 streams on Spotify, and they have found things you wouldn’t believe. One highlight of their efforts is the work of David Michael Moore, a 74-year-old artist and woodworker in Mississippi who also designs his own instruments: zithers, harps, wooden drums, buzz boxes and dog bone xylophones. If the ULYSSA manifesto isn’t enough to pique your curiosity, we also include photographs of some of Moore’s instruments. The digital issue features a playlist compiling tracks from ULYSSA’s reissues of Moore’s music.

​

After Rainbo Conversation, the folio culminates with a contribution from Portuguese guitarist Rafael Toral, whose recent revelatory album Spectral Evolution, released on Jim O’Rourke’s Moikoi label, is partly based on chord changes from classic jazz songbook repertoire. Toral slows Gershwin’s rhythm changes from “I Got Rhythm” and Ellington-Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” down to near-stasis, atop which whirr birdlike electronics played on instruments of Rafael’s own creation, a free-jazz style honed largely through his “Space Program” releases. But Toral’s shift back to guitar also motivated the dusting-off of an old work he wrote in honor of John Cage. Here, Toral illumines the inspiration behind the new piece and his relationship to experimentation in a brief Q&A that also serves to introduce “Score for Two Points in Space”—a recording of which you can find, naturally, in the digital issue.

​

I am very grateful to all the contributors who graciously entrusted me with their work. Thank you for offering readers of Peripheries a collection spanning centuries and styles, and bearing witness to the potential creative dialogue between the old and the new. I hope that this folio will inspire other artists to re-encounter their own source material with fresh ears.

​

​