A Slight List
Notes
A Slight List was composed in 1984 for the George W. Welch ensemble.
The piece is inspired by one of the illustrations for Raymond Roussel's massive four canto poem Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique (New Impressions of Africa), which was completed in 1932. Roussel used the good offices of the Goron detective agency to hire a commercial artist, Henri Zo, to provide line drawings to illustrate the poem. Zo, who was never to meet the author, was given a set of instructions, including one which read: “A man laboriously drawing up a list of names (if the names are legible they must be in code).”
In A Slight List, the list is musical rather than literary, comprising all 266 seven-note scale patterns within an octave built on C and containing no interval greater than a minor third. These are mentioned, but not listed, in Ferruccio Busoni's Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music (1907). From this prime material is fashioned a piece in three sections with a coda. All the elements in the piece derive from the small intervallic changes between one scale pattern and the next, which are used to generate non-functional harmony in Section 1, delicate timbres in Section 2, and a strange melody in Section 3.
The sense of a catalogue of possibilities is further emphasized by the use of a collection of enharmonic modulations from Max Reger's On the Theory of Modulation (1904) to punctuate the timbres in Section 2, and an extended version of a perfect cadence from Liszt that is quoted in Alfredo Casella's The Evolution of Music through the History of the Perfect Cadence (1964) for the coda. The whole of A Slight List is therefore an ironic comment on tonal harmony, as if the list-making has removed its sense of purpose.
Performance notes
The acoustic guitar should be re-strung with three low E strings and three top E strings, then placed flat and strummed with a plectrum while pressing a barre chord with a piece of dowel. This part could be realised in another way, perhaps with a monochord or an autoharp, so long as the sound of earnest strumming is retained.
The tam tam should be a small instrument, not an orchestral tam tam. It would be fine to use a different instrument for each of the three sections if desired.