Stream_l__i___n____e_____s (after Robert Lawrence, Jr.)

for clarinet and electronics

Performance by Rane Moore, clarinet @ Virtual SICPP 2020

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In 1967, Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. was the first African-American selected for a space program, the Air Force’s Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL). He had flown thousands of hours in jets like the Lockheed F104 Starfighter, and studied a difficult steep-descent gliding technique called the flare maneuver, work that contributed significantly to the development of the Space Shuttle. But tragically, just months after he was assigned to the MOL program, Lawrence died in a training accident. His role in the space program was largely forgotten until the 1990s, when his widow and his colleagues successfully petitioned NASA to acknowledge Lawrence as an astronaut and to inscribe his name on the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Center in Florida.

This music envisions Lawrence flying in the sky, conducting research on the flare maneuver. I conceived of four different views of the aircraft, each paired with its own musical material. One view, from the tarmac, gives a sense of the sound of these massive jets nearby; another view is of contrails, the white streaks in the sky coming from an aircraft at high altitude; a third view conveys a sense of turbulence; the final view depicts the balletic maneuvers of the plane flying overhead at a distance. These musical views recur and are juxtaposed with one another in varying ways throughout.

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The jet metaphor also carries over into the work’s musical material. By way of partial-tracking analysis, I drew my harmony directly from audio recordings of the F104 Starfighter plane itself. I also derived musical lines in the clarinet part from the contours of curved aerodynamic streamlines flowing off a plane’s wing. I developed this last technique following an introduction into streamlines that I received from Professor Wesley L. Harris of MIT’s AeroAstro Department. The electronic accompaniment in this piece seeks to reinforce all of these views, projecting a sense of proximity or distance and transforming the agile clarinet line into something larger, more metallic, and formidable.

Commissioned by Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble. Premiere performance by Diane Heffner, clarinet, on April 14, 2019.

Listen to sample sonifications of streamlines below. These sonifications were generated from photographed streamlines using custom programs developed by the composer. The programs trace and sample streamline curves, interpolate between them, and produce a notated musical representation.

Image from related computer-assisted composition program:

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