Six Lines for the I Ching is a simple, minimalist homage to John Cage’s Music of Changes. Six yin and six yang lines have been written for celeste, flute, clarinet, piano, tenor saxophone, and cello. This realization is not aleatoric however, and simply progresses through the King Wen Sequence of the I Ching hexagrams. Although Rendina does use chance in some of his pieces, he prefers to do so within a selection of notes or a key, feeling that Cage had been tainted by Schoenberg’s requirement that all twelve notes be used. He has similar sentiments about the inclusion of non-musical sounds that some might consider noise, preferring sounds from nature, leaving birds in the background of his recordings and editing out the rumbling of cars, noting that even Cage’s music is not without preference.
The thematic use of chess in music can perhaps be traced back to a 1968 happening with John Cage and Marcel Duchamp called Reunion, where a chess game triggered electronic sounds to be played. Duchamp played a game at the Pasadena Museum of Art, now the Norton Simon Museum, in 1963. The idea for Music for Chess began in 2004 when Rendina was still a teenager, and sought to create a very musical realization for chess games that would build in intensity as the game went on. After many years of conceptualizing, he wrote themes for each of the chess pieces to be played in repetition and transposed up and down depending on where they moved.
Many different versions of the piece have been considered for realization, including a very simple game for live performance playing motifs for the pieces as they are moved without transpositions, transposing versions that are either chromatic or diatonic and either fixed to the squares on the board or movable, versions with motifs for game events in varying degrees of detail including castling, check, taking pieces, pieces having been taken, considerations of safe moves or pieces that could be taken, and a yet to be realized electronic version with a score or music generated by a computer while the game is played.
This version uses fixed diatonic transpositions towards or away from the opponent only, with the motif for each piece being transposed up an octave at the opposite end of the board. The motifs for game events have been omitted, and would be played by a horn section. As with Six Lines for the I Ching, this version of the game is scored for a double sextet that includes celeste for pawns, harp for rooks, clarinet for knights, flute for bishops, bassoon for queens, and cello for kings. Whether the pieces move by step or leap has also been a consideration in writing the motifs.
Although the piece is algorithmic and instructional in nature, the realization was completed manually, following the moves from a chess game played in 1999 between Garry Kasparov and Veselin Topalov, which is considered to be one of the greatest chess games of all time. The work is unique, having elements that are of a typical call and response nature, as most music familiar to westerners is, cyclical elements similar to Indonesian gamelan and minimalist music, regal contrapuntal melodic elements not unalike baroque music, and chance elements as a conceptual postmodern piece of music by Cage would. This realization focuses on the interplay of the two pieces that most recently moved at a given point in the music, though others may include considerations for more than two pieces and motifs for events.
The music is best listened to with headphones, with Yin and Yang lines being panned opposite and black and white moves being panned opposite.
credits
released October 11, 2023
Marshall Rendina: composer, mellotron and gong on "King Wen Sequence", MIDI orchestration with BBC Symphony sounds on Music for Chess
A collection of tracks from the singer and multi-disciplinary artist's 111 collaboration series, featuring KMRU, Laraaji, and others. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 25, 2024
