New Music Aug-92 to Dissonance in Prophetic time

 NEW MUSIC AUG-92 TO DISSONANCE IN PROPHETIC TIME

**Written and composed by Donald Alfred Morin**
**Original composition: August 1992**
**Revisited and presented in 2026**

## ABOUT THE COMPOSITION

*New Music Aug-92 to Dissonance in Prophetic Time* was composed in August 1992 during a period when I was searching for another musical language.

I had already spent years working through guitar, singing, songwriting, folk, blues, rock, theatre, performance, film, video and interdisciplinary art. But I wanted to hear something else. I wanted to move beyond the familiar musical forms I had been using and discover what could happen when sound itself became part of the dramatic, spiritual and psychological argument.

I was also moving toward another intense period of performance work. Around this time I was preparing for work involving contemporary dance and Karen Jamieson, including nouvelle danse work in Montreal, followed by touring with Headlines Theatre.

Artistically, there was tremendous freedom.

Personally and socially, there was also conflict.

Questions surrounding Indigenous people, Canadian identity, colonial history, cultural change and my own place within all of this remained present in my thinking. I did not set out to write a piece of program music that illustrated one particular political event. The composition came instead from the pressure of living within a particular historical moment while searching for a new musical vocabulary.

The result was this strange, restless composition.

More than three decades later, I hear within it an idea I describe as **prophetic time**.

## WHAT DO I MEAN BY PROPHETIC TIME?

Prophetic time is **not 4/4 time**.

Of course, musicians need notation. They need measures, beats, tempo indications and other structures through which a composition can be communicated and performed.

But those markings are not necessarily the deepest time operating inside this work.

Prophetic time is what happens when ordinary chronological time seems to break open.

Past.

Present.

Memory.

Warning.

Possible future.

They begin occupying the same psychological space.

Something from the past returns in the present. Something happening now reminds us of something we thought had already ended. Something approaching from the future seems already to be exerting pressure upon us.

Time becomes cyclical rather than simply linear.

That is the world of this composition.

The music is therefore allowed to repeat, accumulate, interrupt itself, become unstable, retreat and begin again.

A conductor or arranger working with this music in the future should not necessarily feel imprisoned by one mechanical interpretation of tempo. The notation provides the architecture, but the performance should remain alive.

**The day on which the composition is performed becomes part of the composition.**

Every performance occurs in another historical present.

Therefore every performance can be new.

## CRITICAL ANALYSIS

*Dissonance in Prophetic Time* is more restless and continuously driven than its companion work, *Homage to Revelations*.

Where *Homage* develops through larger waves of warning and withdrawal, *Dissonance in Prophetic Time* sustains the sensation that **time itself is under pressure**.

Its dissonance does not arise simply because the music contains harsh sounds.

The dissonance is structural.

Competing lines move simultaneously. Intervals remain unsettled. Patterns recur. Independent musical ideas overlap without comfortably arriving at a common resting place.

The voices seem to inhabit the same world while disagreeing about where that world is going.

That disagreement is one of the central dramatic ideas of the composition.

## A LISTENING JOURNEY

The recording lasts approximately **3 minutes and 35 seconds**, with a brisk underlying pulse of approximately **136 beats per minute**.

### 0:00–0:40 — THE CLOCK BEGINS

The opening establishes disturbance through repeated, almost clock-like movement.

Something is moving.

But movement does not necessarily mean progress.

That distinction matters.

Repetition begins creating the impression that we may be travelling forward while simultaneously returning to something we have already encountered.

The clock measures time, yet the music begins questioning what that measurement actually means.

### 0:40–1:15 — THE FIELD OPENS

The musical spectrum becomes brighter.

Upper instrumental layers become increasingly prominent and the listener's attention is drawn into a wider register.

It feels as though additional voices are entering an argument already underway.

Rather than resolving the opening disturbance, the expanding texture gives that disturbance more dimensions.

### 1:15–2:00 — BUILDING AND RETREATING

The phrases repeatedly build and retreat.

But retreat does not bring peace.

Each apparent reduction in pressure becomes preparation for another movement.

This is fundamental to the composition's structure: **resolution is continually postponed.**

The listener is repeatedly offered the possibility that the music might settle, only to discover another cycle beginning.

### AROUND 2:24 — TEMPORARY REDUCTION

The activity temporarily diminishes.

In conventional dramatic terms this might appear to offer rest.

Instead, it creates anticipation.

Space itself becomes threatening because the preceding musical behaviour has taught us that quiet does not necessarily mean resolution.

### AROUND 2:36 — PRINCIPAL CRISIS

The composition develops toward one of its strongest crests.

Accumulating instrumental activity, harmonic friction and increasingly compressed musical space produce the sensation of arrival at a crisis.

Importantly, this effect is not simply produced by turning up the volume.

The crisis is compositional.

### 2:49–2:58 — FRACTURE

Abrupt harmonic changes destabilize the musical environment once again.

Material begins to fragment.

Whatever possibility of stability existed is disrupted.

### AROUND 3:28 — FINAL RISE

The composition rises once more.

Then its energy rapidly diminishes.

There is no comfortable Hollywood ending.

There is no grand cadence telling us that everything has been resolved.

The warning remains unresolved.

## FOUR KINDS OF DISSONANCE

One useful way of hearing the composition is to recognize that several different forms of dissonance are operating simultaneously.

**Vertical dissonance** occurs between notes sounding at the same moment.

**Linear dissonance** develops between independent melodic paths.

**Rhythmic dissonance** appears through gestures and patterns competing for control of the listener's sense of movement.

And finally there is **structural dissonance**.

For me, this may be the most important.

Structural dissonance occurs because the composition repeatedly postpones resolution.

Every time we appear to approach stability, another cycle begins.

Dissonance therefore isn't an ornament placed on top of the composition.

**Dissonance is the organizing principle.**

In a sense, dissonance is the subject.

## THE CRESCENDO THAT ISN'T SIMPLY LOUDER

There is another interesting contradiction within the recording.

The listener experiences powerful crescendos, yet the measured loudness range of the recording is relatively narrow — approximately **1.3 loudness units**.

So why does the music seem to become larger?

Because musical intensity is not synonymous with volume.

Register rises.

Upper voices become brighter.

Layers accumulate.

Harmonic friction increases.

Intervals remain unresolved.

Musical events occur with less breathing space between them.

The psychological pressure rises even when the recording level itself has not dramatically increased.

This distinction becomes particularly interesting when imagining the work performed by **live musicians**.

A live ensemble could dramatically expand these relationships.

One instrumental voice could emerge from the texture.

Another could resist it.

A third could interrupt.

A phrase could become almost inaudible before returning with greater force.

Silence itself could become part of the dissonance.

Greater dynamic and timbral differentiation could reveal the contrapuntal argument even more clearly. That possibility is specifically identified in the critical analysis accompanying the working score.

That is one reason I am returning to these compositions in 2026.

Ultimately, I want the music prepared for **live musicians**.

## MUSIC, MEMORY AND HISTORY

I want to be careful about the word **prophetic**.

I am not saying that I sat down in August 1992 and predicted a particular event.

That would misunderstand what I mean.

Prophetic time is closer to an experience of historical recognition.

Human beings create histories and then sometimes discover themselves repeating them.

Conflicts thought to be finished return in another form.

Old prejudices acquire new language.

Technologies change while human fears remain.

Memories that seemed distant suddenly become urgently present.

The future arrives carrying pieces of the past.

That sensation — the realization that history may be repeating while we are still caught inside its momentum — is central to the critical interpretation of this composition.

## INDIGENOUS WITHOUT MUSICAL STEREOTYPE

This work does not depend upon conventional signs telling an audience, “This is Indigenous music.”

That is important to me.

The composition was part of my search for **new music**.

Its musical vocabulary can exist within experimental, electronic, chamber, contemporary-classical and interdisciplinary traditions.

But I was still the person composing it.

My Indigenous experience did not disappear simply because I chose not to represent it through an expected musical stereotype.

Identity can exist beneath the surface of artistic form.

It can be present in how an artist experiences history, conflict, spirituality, memory, repetition and time itself.

## FROM 1992 TO 2026

Now another strange thing has happened.

I am listening to this music again in **2026**.

More than three decades have passed.

The technology through which music can be composed, reconstructed, notated, analyzed and shared has changed enormously.

The world surrounding the composition has changed.

And I have changed.

Yet the unresolved musical argument remains.

That interests me enormously.

A composition written in August 1992 enters another historical moment and begins asking different questions.

Perhaps this is another manifestation of prophetic time.

The past has not simply remained behind us.

It has returned as sound.

## FOR FUTURE MUSICIANS

The present score should be understood as a **working score** — a musical document through which the composition can continue developing toward future performance. The score package identifies *Dissonance in Prophetic Time* as a working piano reduction.

I would welcome the day when live string players, an ensemble, arranger or conductor can enter this music.

I would not ask them merely to reproduce a machine.

I would ask them to listen to the argument inside the composition.

Where is time tightening?

Where does one voice resist another?

Where does the music need air?

Where does repetition become warning?

Where should a silence become uncomfortable?

Where does ordinary time stop?

And when the music returns, what has changed?

Those questions are as important to me as simply reproducing notes.

The score gives musicians a map.

The performance must give the map life.

## THE LISTENER

Finally, I do not believe the listener needs to be a musicologist to enter this work.

Listen to what your body tells you.

Notice when you begin expecting something to happen.

Notice when repetition becomes uncomfortable.

Notice when the upper voices make the musical space seem narrower or brighter.

Notice when you think the composition is going to resolve — and what happens when