Homage to the Triad – 2018

In 2016, I had the great pleasure to work with Susan Marshall and Suzanne Bocanegra on a collaboratively created work called Chromatic, based loosely on Josef Albers book Interaction of Color. In the process, I loved diving deeply into Albers’ series of paintings Homage to the Square in which he paints three or four squares of different colors nested inside each other and, in repeating the pattern over years, it becomes a meditation on color. I was intrigued by his process and commitment and I wanted to find a way to react in musical terms.

Having never really having a strong relationship with triads or comfort in moving them around on the page, I decided to use it as a chance to dive deeply into the subject. I divided the octave into three parts and made a catalog of every way to put a triad together with one note from each part. It is a long catalog of chords that I use as the basis for this piece.

Homage to the Triad is constructed in three parts with a short coda or epilogue. In the first part, every triad is laid out as I catalogued it, with a seeming logic getting us from one triad when possible and intuition taking over when logic runs out. Each successive part chooses a smaller group of triads that are more interesting to me intuitively and leaving behind the ones that feel less a part of my language.

For this performance, I am accompanying the performance with some live collage art that is a loose homage to Josef Albers’ squares series.

-Jason Treuting 2018

This pdf download includes access to both full score and part for Homage to the Triad.