Bass Cathedral takes its title from an epistolary novel of the same name by Nathaniel Mackey, the fourth installment in his ongoing series From a Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. This open-ended work follows the progress of the protagonist N., a multi-instrumentalist and composer, and his fellow bandmates in the ensemble Molimo m’Atet. Taking the form of letters written from N. to one Angel of Dust, the novel catalogs the band’s experience publishing and touring a new record entitled Orphic Bend. Mackey’s open and fluid prose evokes the creative process inherent in art, music, and literature rather than following a strict narrative. His writing blurs the distinction between music and language, often giving the impression that the sounds of the words themselves betray an inner meaning no less important than their syntax.
Bass Cathedral for Clarinet and Wind Ensemble springs out of one poignant, recurring aspect of the novel: the imagery of balloons. Early on in the story, while listening to a test pressing of their album Orphic Bend, the band remarks that upon the very first note plucked by bass player Aunt Nancy a balloon “emerges from the point where the needle and the vinyl meet.” To the surprise of the band, balloon after balloon containing fragments of text rise from the record. Continuing to appear over the course of the novel at live performances and among listeners to Orphic Bend, these balloons evolve into an anthropomorphic figure named B’Loon. The imagery of rising balloons permeates the music of Bass Cathedral in the form of ascending gestures that recur in various forms throughout the piece. Texts excerpted from inside the novel’s balloons are encoded into musical passages in a variety of ways, dictating phrase lengths, harmonies, and structural proportions. The mere idea of balloons rising from the music takes on significance elsewhere. For example, after the cadenza the ensemble’s different component groups “launch balloons” in the form of constantly ascending lines that build to a cacophonous climax.
The setup of the ensemble in Bass Cathedral is rooted in the make-up of Molimo m’Atet, a band which features well-developed characters that bring their own distinct musical functionality to the group as a whole. Although the characters in the novel are not related to the different musical groupings in one-to-one correspondence, the energy produced by their interactions is rooted in Mackey’s evocative depictions of the band’s live performances. For example, the concertante comprising the solo clarinet, contrabass, piano, and percussion battery often lays the groundwork for a given passage in much the same way that Aunt Nancy’s bass becomes an “antiphonal church” in which the other band members join their unique voices.
Commissioned by the Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s Wind Ensemble, Bass Cathedral is dedicated to clarinetist David Angelo. Bass Cathedral was written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Music in the Graduate School of Duke University.