Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato

Image–pianist Kees Wieringa, Simeon ten Holt’s great champion.

Kees Wieringa’s Simeon ten Holt Playlist

Kees Wierinng, at the YXIE Festival in Villebelevin, 2024, organized a performance a performance of ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato with Kyle Miller on electric guitar, joined by some of the students. They did a fantastic job and I took away something. The piece develops in its repetitive, hypnotic way from one harmonic world to other discrete harmonic worlds. Each transition is a stopper. That’s to say it fulfills the previous music by erasing it or trumping it or supplanting it. The new world then spins forward to another *displacement*.

The Jungians and others say our job is to become our opposites, the musical model suggests that we should not so much become our opposite, but that we can move between modes that are like oil and water to each other.

Elsewhere I mentioned David Lang’s *Little Match Girl* and Harold Meltzer’s Brion. *Little Match Girl* is a series of short movements, each one has its unique soundworld. Canto Ostinato builds transitions from one harmonic world to another. Meltzer’s Brion is a 20 minute work of nested arch forms made of sections that snap from one to the next, often without much of a transition, but each section is like a stone in an archway.

What is a discrete soundworld? – music of diverse viscosities that do not mix. That’s the hydromechanical metaphor. I like the fluid mechanics better than the color metaphor.

David Olan mentioned to his CUNY Grad Center students that music can achieve millions of colors, and he compaired it to what the computer monitors were boasting at the time –

“Millions of colors” in the 90s referred to

24-bit “True Color” (16.7 million colors), a massive upgrade from earlier 8-bit (256 colors) or 16-bit (65,536 colors) displays. This capability allowed CRT monitors to produce smoother gradients, realistic photos, and better 3D graphics by mixing 256 shades each of red, green, and blue.

The Princetonians would talk about interval content and how collections of pitches can link to the various interval cycles. This gets closer to what’s really going on. Schoenberg Op. 9 is one of the landmarks, with a theme for each interval cycle.

Simeon ten Hold manages harmonies very well. One must be committed to a long process with long periods of stasis, but the way the harmonies move is very compelling.

While we are on the subjecyt of slow harmonic movement, people have praised Stockhausen’s *Licht* for exactly that. The point is that there may be music that moves as slow as the earth spins.

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht (Light) is a colossal 29-hour, seven-part opera cycle composed over 26 years (1977–2003) that represents a mystical, cosmic “musical week”.

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

I am now curious to revisit Ann Southam’s *Glass Houses*.