(The Fleeting Song of the Infernal Machines)
When I told my former teacher, longtime mentor, and cherished friend Samuel Adler that I was going to undertake a new work for Alarm Will Sound, he said “You know, Baker, you can’t write your usual Postmodernist, quotation-filled stuff for them. It’s Alarm Will Sound: Lots of noise. Lots of notes.” I had already determined that my “usual stuff” would not be appropriate for this unique “new music band,” but I had not yet selected an alternative aesthetic direction. Because of Mr. Adler’s comment about “lots of noise,” however, I decided that I would extensively incorporate in my work multiple types of non-traditional and non-pitched performing techniques for each instrument (although, truth be told, these effects have been in use for so long and are now so ubiquitous that they can hardly be considered “non-traditional”). In preparation, I revisited pieces (some of which I had known for decades) of composers who are associated with using “noise-based” materials – most notably, Helmut Lachenmann and those he directly influenced. Of the latter, I was drawn especially to the music of Gérard Pesson, a brilliant French composer whose deftly crafted works invariably reveal his powerful intellect, his intense musicality, and his engaging sense of playfulness and whimsey. His influence can be seen throughout my score, both sonically and notationally, and the opening seconds of my piece are a respectful nod to the beginning of his 2002 orchestral work Aggrevations et final.
The title of my composition is a riff on both Harrison Birtwistle’s Carmen arcadiae mechanicae perpetuum (The Perpetual Song of Mechanical Arcady) and Christopher Rouse’s The Infernal Machine. For centuries, composers have been fascinated with and have drawn inspiration from the sounds and operations of mechanical devices of various sorts: consider Haydn’s use of the ticking rhythm in the second movement of his “Clock” Symphony, Beethoven’s tribute to Maelzel’s metronome in the 8th Symphony, the Futurists’ attempts in the early 20th century to imitate industrial machinery in their music, etc. During the course of my piece, relatively short, machine-like events (some pitched, some non-pitched) continually start up, sputter, and inevitably stall. Just when it seems as if they are at last humming along, having become increasingly pitch-centric in the process, a spanner is thrown into the works, and everything is brought abruptly to a halt. The machines struggle to restart themselves, but, in the end, their song does indeed prove to be all too fleeting.
— Claude Baker