Peter Batchelor's Valley Flow Analysis

The analysis concentrates principally on pitch relationships in the piece (coverage of the sound materials themselves and their relationships is rather bitty and might usefully be the subject of a complementary analysis). It borrows substantially from Schenkerian analytical practice – a highly reductive approach which proposes that successful tonal works should be reduce-able ultimately to a I-V-I Fundamental (harmonic) Structure. Trying to shoe-horn acousmatic music into such a structure is of course problematic, though I seem to have tried to here; certainly the analysis assumes that the piece conforms to some sort of diatonic pitch structure (though this is certainly not a claim made only by me about Smalley’s works (Rudi, 2003)). In any event, many of the principles of reduction in such an approach are sound—e.g. prolongation (demonstrating ‘how a background structure may be expanded step-by-step until it results in the succession of musical events on the surface of the composition itself’ (‘Schenkerian Analysis’, 2011), neighbour notes (methods of prolonging structure by inserting adjacent notes as ‘temporary embellishment’) etc—and certainly encouraged a deeper understanding of the piece.

Sound Materials

Programmaticism and imagery

The title evokes a vague image which is enhanced by the programme note. But even upon hearing the work without such ‘guidance’ as to the inspiration behind it, the listener’s thoughts may yet be drawn to visions of the appropriate environment. This is achieved by the following means.

1. Evocation of natural sounds to induce concrete image of an object and manner of its behaviour (e.g. wind blowing, pebbles bounding or grating against each other);
2. Less explicit, perhaps subconscious association of the behaviour of a sound with that of a natural source (even if it doesn’t sound directly like the object normally associated with such behaviour)—e.g. adjacent sounds ‘flowing’ into each other
3. Drawing upon the psychological associations of ‘up’ and ‘down’ in the implication of physical contour—cinematic? Furthermore, falling events far outweigh rising. Notably, both ‘Valley’ and ‘Flow’ suggest downward motion. Where rising glissandi are employed, they chiefly evoke anticipation; downward gestures, by contrast, are more decisive.
4. Inducing a sense of awe in the broadness of gesture, including the gradual changes in amplitude of an intense sound or series of sounds (e.g. the construction of layers of pitched material later on is often quite breath-taking)

Such sweeping sounds are clearly things that have become accepted within the electroacoustic world in their capacity to induce images of expansive vistas. Analogous instances are to be found in Andrew Lewis’s Ascent (1992) and Smalley’s own later work Névé (1993). Thus although this piece is clearly of quite a different style to that of Vortex (1982) which also involve fluid motion (Lewis 1987), there are still a number of similarities. Both embody the concept of up-down to a large degree. Fluidity (in the sense of ‘Flow’) is also evident in the manner in which some of the supposedly more ‘solid’ sounds (e.g. stony textures) flow into other sounds.

Categorisation of sound-types

Pitched material:

• Sustained and clearly-pitched material, frequently pseudo-brassaged—evocative of mountainous contours or of liquid ‘flow’, given the gradual, sweeping evolution of such material (either by moving pitches (i.e. glissandi) or by changing amplitude on one pitch).
• Collection of short, clearly-pitched events (static or glissandoing), oftend configured in apparently descending patterns.

Cacophonous textures:

• These are all somehow evocative of elemental materials (wood, water, stone) or states/behaviours (fire crackling, wind blowing, thunder rumbling). These often evolve (‘flow’?) out of each other (N.B. grainy textures may be, by means of filtering, made wind-like.

Articulative gestures:

1. Dry, wooden-sounding knocks, predominantly low-frequency
2. Pulsations—WOWOWO-sounding—both pitched and non-pitched but generally low-frequency
3. Rapidly rising or falling noise-like gesture (occasionally pitched, as at 11’46), predominantly low-frequency
4. Abrupt, brief manifestations of the cacophonous textures (or their components—e.g. sharp crack from fire-like sounds, 13’36) described above.
5. Rattle
6. Sharp-toned falling brassage from notes c’’ and g♯’
7. Low-frequency triton fall (articulative, but to what purpose?)
8. High-frequency twinkling effects

Pitch Analysis

Importance of where short glisses are glissing to and from

There are recognisable pitches at the ends of each short glissando, but the end that seems important is the one at which the main pitches are heard. The main example is the recurring ‘falling brassage’ which involves a gliss of c.1 semitone from c’’ and gG’. In its first instance, at 1’33 the gG appears to fall onto the main pitch of the section (i.e. g’) even though the latter is not directly heard—the ear’s expectation makes its own allusion to that effect. Similarly, at 6’17, the c might be seen to be falling onto the a’. When the same figure is heard later on, however, it holds different significance: the c’’ and gG pitches preside at this point therefore the glissando appears to be falling away from the Principal notes of the section.

The gG’/c’’ falling brassage that appears sporadically throughout the first eight minutes gradually assumes significance from 8’18 onwards—tentatively at first, then more convincingly, until the same event occurring at 10’41 is supported by a steady gG’/c’’ drone.

Structure

Structure of the various sound-types has not been addressed for the purposes of this analysis. With regard to pitch, however, there is a very clear structure:

From this we can identify

• a pseudo-arch structure
• a homogenous set of pitches
• a decreasing intervals between Principal constituents (returning to 5th interval at end):

• intervallic relationships: frequent use of perfect intervals and tritones within pitch agglomerations. Even the final ‘chord’ comprises perfect and tritone intervals.
• Reference is frequently made to D throughout the piece. Its universal presence lends a sense of continuity, not only facilitating the transitions between the potentially incompatible Principals, but also preventing the music from moving very far away from the G Principality with which the piece began.

(thus, in effect, the piece goes I-V-I; Schenker would have been delighted!)