WINGATE: SYMPHONY NO. 1
“Mythopoesis”
for 13, 26, or 39 Violoncelli

Movements:
I. Canone cosmogonico (Cosmogonic Canon)
II. Fuge der Dämonen (Fugue of the Daemons)
III. Chorale Pythagorée (Pythagorean Chorale)

Date:
2007

Instrumentation:
13 Violoncello parts which may be doubled or tripled.

Duration:
27'

Notes:
Wingate’s First Symphony, titled ‘Mythopoesis’, is an epic celebration of the cello and its transcendent sonic and emotive powers. The title refers to the act of myth creation, as this composition employs the virtuosity and six-octave range of a large cello ensemble in an attempt to evoke no less than the origin of the universe, as well as the subsequent emergence of human consciousness and abstract understanding—or that curious state of affairs in which a kósmos begins to look back at itself. The Mythopoesis Symphony may be performed with an ensemble of thirteen cellos, but, if desired, this already-substantial cello choir may be doubled or tripled to stage-burdening proportions. As a nod to sacred geometry, these thirteen cello parts may be seen as a musical embodiment of the thirteen circles contained in the ancient mystical diagrammatic figure known as Metatron’s cube—a symbol of the building blocks of creation. But this mythological baker’s dozen of cello lines additionally serves as a serialist composer’s toolkit which can simultaneously express all twelve possible pitch classes, plus one—this thirteenth being a kind of dodecaphonic wild card, perhaps adding a layer of complexity not unlike the famous thirteenth trump card of the tarot (Death XIII), with its transformative implications. Nevertheless, the music emerging from this cello orchestra surreptitiously follows a rigorously twelve-tone structure, and this alchemical pitch serialism generates the work’s three contrasting movements, named from languages representing the cosmopolitan musical forms that they engage—the Italian canon, the German fugue, and the French chorale. Together, the densely interconnected cello lines collectively weave a new symphonic mythos into existence under the auspices of this infrequently-heard instrumental configuration and Wingate’s unique dodecaphony. The Mythopoesis Symphony was composed over a period of seven weeks in Hamilton Heights, New York City, and completed in September, 2007.

I. CANONE COSMOGONICO
The symphony’s first movement takes the listener on an intense and monumental journey through the heated soundscape of a newborn cosmos. Technically, this movement is a gargantuan thirteen-voice cannon consisting of 576 ‘pitch events’ spread over fifteen minutes and representing all 48 possible permutations of a single twelve-tone row.* As each cello voice enters this relentlessly imposing music, the responsibility of playing the next tone in the metaseries is shared asymmetrically amongst the ensemble, sometimes producing melodic lines or motifs, sometimes subtly transforming the entire structure, but always moving only one voice at a time through the textural throng.† This movement is an enormous musical wave, beginning and ending with small, quiet troughs of single cello lines, but swelling via assemblage into an impenetrable wall of cello sound at the crest. By the time the thirteenth cello line enters, the piece’s contrapuntal texture has become bloated to cosmogonic proportions, blurring in and out of tonal referentiality. Yet as this stately primeval uproar proceeds, there appear here and there a few furtive melodic branches, seemingly grasping towards possible tonal climaxes, but quickly being reabsorbed into the movement’s dense atonal macrocosm. The complex sonic simultaneities are both enhanced and obscured by the ravishing timbres unique to a large cello ensemble, somehow numinously bright and tenebrous at once. After much canonic struggle, the counterpoint at last produces a climax of sorts at bar 191, but this feels more like a late-stage coalescing of already-spent energies, as by this time, the flexuous meanderings of the cello lines have begun to die off one by one. As the canon solemnly and splendiferously disassembles itself, all that ultimately remains is the 576th note, tenuously preserved by the thirteenth cello in the movement’s dying moments.

II. FUGE DER DÄMONEN
With the cosmos now having been sorted out, the Mythopoesis Symphony’s central second movement takes the form of a relentless thirteen-voice fugue forged from daemonic, percussion-like melodies plucked out on the cellos, their bows cast aside. This fugue concerns itself with the emergence of the distinctly human psychological categories of good and evil, musically personified by those mysterious, quasi-divine beings from Greek antiquity—the Daimonia—acting as intermediary guiding spirits or personifications of abstract concepts, yet curiously abiding ‘beyond good and evil’ as Nietzsche might have put it. These entities pluck their way through the metaphysical delusions of false dichotomies in an all-pizzicato scherzo movement—a peculiar soundscape which may draw comparisons to the famous plucked third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony from 1878.‡ Here, Wingate’s twelve-note melody heard in the opening bars of the symphony’s first movement is now rhythmically recast as a plucked fugue motive for the second. The thirteen successive fugal entrances are arranged according to each statement’s hierarchy in the prime tone row order, while accompanying figures unyieldingly follow their own rows, although sometimes finding themselves doubling a surrounding daemon or two as if by chance. Later episodes include badly behaved Baroque fugue statement transformations in retrograde, inverse, and retrograde-inverse forms, including absurd and uproarious clusters of all twelve tone rows at once. All the daemonesque string plucking finally concludes as this danza fugato of lesser deities abruptly refuses to cooperate with our preconceived musical and categorical notions any longer. 

III. CHORALE PYTHAGORÉE
The symphony’s third and final movement takes the form of a quietly intense chorale, bringing forth a disturbing musica universalis constructed from the cello choir’s so-called ‘natural’ harmonics—those ethereal high notes sent forth like sonic beams from the cello’s overtone corona.§ This musical armillary sphere is meant to invoke the emergence of human geometrical understanding of the universe and its abiding mysteries. It is said that Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 - 495 B.C.) was the first of the ancients to describe the nature of the harmonic series in music, thus the title of this fully harmonics-based musical emanation uses his eponym, as these ostensibly bass-ranged instruments soar uncharacteristically amongst Pythagorean spheres using this demanding ‘extended’ technique. The cello possesses 29 available natural harmonic tones spread over 72 possible nodes on its four strings, and all of these are made use of in due course by movement’s end. But there are no naturally-occurring D-sharps or G-sharps, so the symphony’s twelve-tone row is here reduced to a ten-note, cello-specific subset. Some of these harmonics (especially the seventh partial) are notoriously out-of-tune-sounding to the ‘well-tempered’ modern ear, further enhancing the otherworldly strangeness of this diaphanous soundscape. The movement’s formal scheme begins with a three-voice chorale, followed by four voices, then five, and so on until the full chorale of the ten subset voices is finally heard after much interruption near the end. Certain attendant tones hang on in lonely isolation between chorale episodes, connecting them to other musical nebulae further on, while shimmering tremolo constellations periodically provide a coruscating backdrop for meandering, chorale-esque interludes played by the voices otherwise left out of the celestial decachord. At the movement’s coda, there is unleashed a breathless fragmentation of the ensemble into sub-chorales, all competing for momentary triadic tonal referentiality. But this soon disintegrates into a grand chordal statement by the now-unified thirteen, and the symphony brings itself to a quietly spectacular close as this cluster evaporates, revealing one of the highest notes possible on the cello—an A7, concluding the symphony at its sonic apogee. Yet this lonely last note seems strangely familiar, as if it had been hiding there all along in the overtone shadows of the cello choir’s collective A-string—now facing an inevitable solitude at the end of its symphonic cosmos. Perhaps it leads the way to a phantom fourth movement lurking in the rarefied æther at the symphony’s end—following Kepler’s conjecture that the harmony of the spheres could only be ‘heard’ by the soul, and not by the ear.


* The Mythopoesis Symphony is entirely built from the tone row: [0, 1, 6, 7, 3, e, t, 9, 4, 2, 8, 5], first heard in its P1 form at the opening seven bars of the work. 

† The order of the appearance of tones in the first movement comes from a prearrangement of the tone rows in twelve groups of four rows each, in which the second through fourth of these rows begin on the same pitch on which its respective predecessor ends, and with the sub groups arranged according to prime row order.

‡ See also the ‘Playful Pizzicato’ movement from Britten’s 1934 work Simple Symphony, as well as the all-pizzicato ‘Animal Spirits’ movement from Wingate’s Thirteen Cartesian Dualisms for two violas, from 2011.

§ There are admittedly two ‘unnatural’ (i.e. artificial) harmonics briefly used in the third movement as well—both ghostly F4s, serving as pedal appoggiature near the movement’s end, in bars 121-124.