Nick Politi

AT English
Mr. Mounkhall

In late March of this past year I discovered a poem that spoke to me in a way that Id never
experienced before. The poem was Ezra Pounds, Phanopoeia, a three-part work that concentrated
heavily on vivid imagery and landscapes. Reading the lines over and over, I became entranced; I was part
of a world that had completely engulfed my state of consciousness. As I read Pounds careful words,
musical inspiration immediately struck me in a powerful surge of wild ambition. I could hear a fragile
texture; the fluttering of high voices and the gentle passing of low chordal harmonies. I printed the poem
and pinned it to my corkboard. Time passed and I grew more and more in touch with the poem, to the
point where I was worried that I might become tired of it; I pinned the page backwards so that I would not
see it until I had another chance to compose. That chance would arrive in July as a student at the Boston
University Tanglewood Institute. In planning for the summer, I spent months thinking about how my
composition would work, constantly asking myself, under what conditions will this piece flourish? I
borrowed from one of my greatest musical inspirations, Maurice Ravel, the ensemble that I wanted to use;
two flutes, two clarinets, piano and string quartet. For my own purposes, I changed the ensemble to
include percussion instead of piano. That June, I devised a pitch plan for the work in which I could create
a sense of natural intervallic expansion, allowing for very open and languid textures.
Most important to me was how I would notate the work. Since I had decided to create a freely
flowing, ethereal sound, I needed to incorporate a time system that would allow all instruments to meld
together rhythmically. I ended up writing the entire piece in one meter with the attitude that if I ignored
rhythmic subdivisions altogether, the piece could function continuously as if there were no bar lines at all.
As time progressed I developed the idea of a masked entrance in which the percussionists, bowing a
cymbal and striking a gong, would create a din that covers the entrance of other instruments. Cymbal and
gong both have clear harmonic partials, so perhaps the cello and viola could sustain those partials by
playing close to the bridge. The piece would begin and the beginning would never be lost. I was firmly
invested in this opening the work; it cast the atmosphere of fragility that I intensely craved to hear.
Starting with my masked entrance, I created a narrative through a series of sound objects, events that
take place for the physicality of sound rather than motive or melody. Even though I had clear pitch plan
from which to construct phrases, the work wouldnt be complete without other sounds that could provide
contrast. My piece quickly became about the dichotomy of sound, how non-pitched and pitched sounds
could achieve unity in the same landscape.
There came a point in my process where I had finished around two thirds of the piece but did not
know how to begin the final sequence. I drafted several possible finales for the piece, but ended but
discarding all of them for not being consistent with previous sections. At that time I also had to begin
rehearsals, so I was forced to give my musicians an incomplete version of the work. Sitting in rehearsal,
however, I heard the expressivity and intimacy that I so desperately wanted to convey become a reality.
That night, in a rush of artistic inspiration, I completed the work. I wrote a big ending, which broke away
from the consistently quiet, introspective previous sections. Sitting at my desk, I devised an event full of
loud string harmonics and percussive hits on a bass drum and gong. Having a dramatic finale felt fitting to
me; it brought me closure to five months of my life that were completely consumed with the poem and
the composition. I look back on that experience as my greatest artistic endeavor yet. For the first time in

my compositional career, the main event of my process was not writing the music itself, but the countless
hours of deep thought that enabled me to get there.

the poem:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/phanopoeia/
the piece (use headphones on high volume):
https://soundcloud.com/politimusic/bends-into-the-turn-of-the-wind-2015
score:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d32c0yk9bfpspdw/bends%20into%20the%20turn%20of%20the
%20wind%20%282015%29.pdf?dl=0