“Aria Sebaldina” Kaleidoscope, composed by David M Foxe (Pachelbel: Hexachordum Apollinis)

This piece is composed as a dialogue or response to be paired with Pachelbel’s Hexachordum Apolllinis (1699), the apogee of seventeenth century keyboard variation writing. The present composition takes as a point of departure the sixth and final aria and variations in F minor, known as the “Aria Sebaldina,” and expands its binary repeated structure and three-beat meter to accommodate a kaleidoscopic texture of irregular, oscillating details. Starting from the F minor material, the conclusion traces fragments and key regions of all six portions of Pachelbel’s Hexachordum. The composition’s internal pacing is purposefully intended to be governed by the action of the instrument chosen, whether played on a modern or historic keyboard instrument.

Instrument: Unfretted Clavichord, 54 notes, variant of Zuckermann kit c.1975, builder unknown.

Performance recorded 2019.

About this project of Compositional Pairings:

This project consists of new works paired with existing works in the Classical concert-music tradition. Taking as a point of departure some aspects of an existing specific work, including its instrument or instrumentation, enables the new work to stand on its own or to be played adjacent to the existing work if a performer so desires. For this composer, the new works are distinct from transcriptions or arrangements or “covers” of existing works. Instead, this approach is “kaleidoscopic” or analogous to that of a kaleidoscope: each piece focuses on the generative content of musical details, reflects that content through careful structural repetitions and symmetries, and illuminates different qualities of the content through multiple adjacent or overlapping variations. The best analogy for these compositional pairings is that of the Chambourcin red wine developed by midcentury chemist Joannes Sevye: The grapes were bred with a conscious relationship to the properties of dark chocolate. And so while the wine has a perfectly reasonable taste on its own, and so does chocolate to many palates, tasting the wine and chocolate together results in a chemical reaction that is a transformative synthesis amplifying both.

Something similar for the ear and the mind is the aim of this project, albeit likely less tasty.

clavichord,Pachelbel,Composition,Classical,keyboard,new music,early music,