"Sanctuaries" Program Notes

Santuaries – Gary Chang

Illusions
Faith
Forgotten Memories
Elegy for Diana

The idea of this program stems from a experience that I had while visting Sacre Cour in Paris a few years ago. It dawned me that, while many have visited these incredible spaces in the world, few have commented about what they sounded like. Sanctuaries is designed for such an environment of spirituality and meditation.

Much of my fascination with electronic music has been how our mind plays tricks with what we hear – as an autonomic function, we seems to make sense out of chaos. Illusions is a set of portamenti, where within four different voices move from one set tetrachord to another – 9 in all. These harmonic sign posts do set up the piece’s harmonic structure, but the interesting moments occur amidst the textures in between. Although each voice is relatively simple in timbre, many different “illusions” surface – bells, vox humana, orchestral and organ – the musical voice of the church.

Another of my interests in the use of modular analog synthesizers is the imposition of its electrical structure on one’s musical thought, and the discovery of new musical ideas that result from the exercise. Faith is based on twenty-six episodes – each being comprised of a triad which, in the “patch,” is being indeterminately modulated between a quarter note and eight note tremelo. The harmonic content of each triad was constructed from alternating descending intervals of major 3rds and minor 3rds, starting with A flat. (The first triad is an A flat minor, followed by an E major, D flat minor, etc.). Although Faith appears to be a linearly composed piece, it is really the result of how musical randomness can be.

Written in 1978, Forgotten Memories was first performed at The Sixth Annual Electronic Explorations in Los Angeles that early summer. Its performance received my first favorable reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the now defunct Synapse Magazine. This piece was written as something that I could perform live with my Serge Modular Music System, which I had built at Serge Tcherepnin’s Hollywood lab in 1976. A defining piece of an ambient style that would continue for years as backdrops in my film music, I revisited this work in 2006, bringing new incites to it from a view 28 years later. The Wiard Modular Music System is used for this new realization.

Some things are strangely clear. Elegy for Diana is written in memory of Diana Lee Chang, the muse of my life.