Reflections on “Dash” by Jennifer Higdon

My students weren’t the biggest fan of this song, but I actually really like it.

I like the chaotic texture because it’s really interesting to listen to all of the different pieces inside of it.

I also appreciate it from the perspective of a composer because I know that creating such a chaotic texture is difficult with only three instruments. It’s still difficult to make something sound truly chaotic with an orchestra, but you have more ways of doing it. With only three instruments it gets tricky.

You can think of it as being the complete opposite of choosing notes to make something sound pretty. Making something sounds truly beautiful is equally as difficult I think. You really need to think about the note choice. In one case the notes sound please, and in the other they don’t, but you need to choose the exact “wrong” notes. It’s surprisingly difficult. You can’t just write a bunch of notes because often they’ll line up and sound pleasant somewhere.

The same thing goes with the rhythm. Making a piece sound chaotic means the rhythms can’t line up much. That means you really need to think about them so that they don’t line up in just the right ways. Because again if you just write a bunch of rhythms, they’ll probably line up unless you specifically write them with that in mind.

This happened quite a bit with the composition students while I was at Berklee College of Music. We’d try to write a similarly chaotic texture, and it’d kind of just be bad. Like it would be in the middle, and just sound like lukewarm chaos. Because we didn’t think about the specific notes and rhythms as much as we needed to.

It’s kind of like trying to get a 0/100 on a multiple choice test. In order to get every single question wrong you can’t just guess. You need to know all of the correct answers to confidently get a 0/100 because that would allow you to choose the incorrect answers.

That’s what making a chaotic texture like this feels like. You really need to think about the notes you’re using and the effect it creates, because you run the risk of it just sounding weird and like a bunch of random notes. But we don’t want random notes, we want chaos.

Another thing I like about this song is that it’s not always pure chaos. It lines up, then doesn’t and oscillates between those two. It creates a rhythmic dissonance and rhythmic tension and then later resolves this tension by lining up again.

It sounds like you’re running a race against a friend as a kid and you’re really putting all your energy into this race, running as fast as possible. And things start getting in your way like rocks and sticks and you need to jump over them. But you keep going because you want to win that race. You’re running so fast you’re almost falling over with each step.

That’s what it reminds me of.

ISJ