Eric Shanfield, composer

I have long meant to compose an Arctic Symphony to add to my collection of “pocket symphonies”. Actually, I’ve long meant to compose an Antarctic Symphony, but for some reason I was reading a bunch of books about the Arctic all of a sudden – Dan Simmons’s The Terror, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, etc. – and I realized I was more interested in the frozen north with its crazy tundra and weird wildlife than the southern wastes, beautiful and barren as they may be. At least more interested musically. At the moment.

At any rate, last year I did extensive preliminary work for an Arctic Symphony. There was going to be a large ensemble of flutes and bassoons, percussion, cellos and basses. There was going to be a big coda depicting the Northern Lights. This work led nowhere. Then, a few weeks ago, I ran into the bassoon and bass playing brothers Brad and Doug Balliett (I was just about to type “dynamic duo”; you appreciate my forbearance) who absently remarked they wouldn’t mind getting a piece from me. No doubt they weren’t seriously expecting anything. Except bassoon and bass were the two main instruments featured in the unwritten Arctic opus clattering around my brain. It was the impetus I needed to get my ass to work, finally.

On January 10th I did all the preparatory work. (The music had been percolating for months and awaited only an auspicious occasion to be born into this world.) First I developed an overall form consisting of two movements and a coda comprising every possible permutation of the pentatonic scales I intended to use as my exclusive harmonic material. There are five main pentatonic scales – all inversions of each other, rearranging the same basic intervals – so I made five transpositions and fit them into my structure so that each smaller unit represents a microcosm of the larger whole, all balanced like a Calder mobile.

My basic idea for the piece being that each instrumental group would create a kind of meta-instrument, melodies bouncing from one to another in intricate hockets, I then composed five basic five-pitch motives, each a different length, and divided those among the five instruments in each instrumental group. Each instrument plays only one pitch of each motive, and I composed five versions of each single-note motive. At any time in the piece you will either hear one motive in one group of instruments, two motives simultaneously (one in each group, their different lengths often leading to non-repetitive polyphony), or one motive in both groups. In the latter case, the motive undergoes certain variations and transpositions. Likewise, at various points in the piece the basic motives are also assigned particular species of variations, mostly involving trills, mordents, and double mordents. In fact every structural aspect of the work was fully systematized prior to composition.

Nevertheless the composition proceeded fairly freely. Although I predetermined what motive would occur when, in which group of instruments, whether it would undergo variations and what kind of variations, I actually left myself a large degree of leeway in realizing the piece. Since there were five variations of every single line, the total possible permutations available to was enormous (and by no means exhausted), and I chose among them as I desired to create various musical effects and narratives. I’m also a big fan of dynamics and unusual textures, so I had a lot of fun putting the symphony together out of the pieces I’d composed.

As I worked something interesting become clear: this was not an Arctic Symphony. If anything, the pentatonic scales gave it a downright tropical feel. Accordingly, I decided to change the title, and it was immediately obvious what it should be: Twin Symphony. Many aspects of the work are premised on doubling, and it was written for Doug and Brad, so there you go.

I wrote the first movement on January 11-12, and the second January 13-14. While suffering various intestinal ailments that kept me in the house. Luckily my desk is right next to the bathroom. At least being sick always seems to result in good pieces! Twin Symphony definitely belongs among what I used to call my “opus numbers”, and gets to be blue in my work list. Yay blue music! The page is up: enjoy.

And there will be an Arctic Symphony. I couldn’t sleep last night after working endless hours birthing my twins, and as I lay in bed my insomniac brain feverishly kept coming up with ideas for not one, not two, but three pieces I’ve been struggling to wrap my mind around for lo these many months. Stay tuned for the aforementioned Arctic Symphony (now in one continuous movement!), Les Règles ont déjà pensé à tout (homage to the Quay Brothers), and Kindertotenwald (homage to Schumann). Also, Mystic Chords of Memory looks salvageable. We’ll see. We shall see.

All great masters must get their start someplace. I began composing at the age of eleven, when late in sixth grade I took up the trumpet and, as I learned to read music, simultaneously began attempting to write down the sounds I heard in my head.

In fact that process had begun even earlier; I have recordings made in 1984 when I was four years old of a “ballet” entitled The White Swan – I memorized several phrases I liked playing on the piano and used my old tape player to record them. My favorite part of the recording is my four-year-old self announcing the piece “THE WHITE SWAN!” at the beginning. SUPER CUTE.

Later on I was trying to write books and felt a strong urge to compose as well; I have pages in an old notebook from fourth grade (all my notebooks and works since first grade are dated and carefully organized, of course – aren’t yours?) in which I invented a notation system resembling actual notation, which I didn’t yet know how to read. It had six-line staves filled with weird little squiggles for notes, and was abandoned only because I found myself incredibly frustrated by an inevitable inability to use the system to reproduce the melodies I’d tried to write down.

Throughout seventh and eighth grades I mostly wrote pieces for solo instruments and small ensembles, for though I understood the principles of pitch and rhythm those of harmony remained beyond my reach. We had no music instruction at my public school beyond the concert band, so I learned by studying Dover scores, those invaluable lifelines of the pre-internet dark ages. Unfortunately my study was circumscribed by unsystematic learning, and I took from them only what interested me – though I learned how to make my scores look like The Rite of Spring, they were all basically in C major and though texturally and rhythmically fairly sophisticated, possessed only the most rudimentary harmonic and architectural understanding.

In my freshman year of high school our english teacher was enlightened enough to allow me to complete two projects in the form of musical compositions, so long as they were accompanied by written analyses. The second was a collaboration with fellow composer and pianist Ben Sagan entitled Romeo and Juliet, and had its moments. Should I ever get my tape player working again I’ll transfer the recording we did to Mp3. Sadly, I can’t find the score, I think he ended up with it.

The first project, however, became my first major compositional statement. It comprised two suites based on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the first suite being the project itself, the second extra credit (which is why I only completed three of an intended five movements). The instrumentation was developed to take advantage of a group of friends at my school; since we had no orchestra, it was limited to wind instruments. We never played it, however, first of all because it proved too difficult, and secondly because I didn’t yet understand how transposition worked. You can see this especially in the tenor sax and horn parts, where I knew what sound I wanted and that those instruments’ written and sounding octaves were not the same, but didn’t know how to correctly notate it.

Later on in high school when I acquired midi notation software and put this piece in our home computer the rudimentary nature of the program made it impossible to reproduce the score as it was written, so when a few weeks ago I engraved my Great Expectations suites in Sibelius it was really the first time I’d ever really heard them outside my head. Now you too can hear this, the first fertile fruit of my magnificent genius!

As I mentioned, the original score was accompanied by a report discussing in minute detail each movement. The first suite corresponds to action in the first half of Dickens’s novel (Pip and Magwitch, the Gargerys, Miss Havisham and Estella), the second to the second half (Pip in London). The movements are highly programmatic; “Satis House” in particular follows the action virtually note-by-note. Accordingly I will introduce the midi realization of each movement with an excerpt from the relevant original text, written in March 1994, when the work was completed.

Here is a page from the original score (Opus 153! Orchestrations by the composer!):

And here is the complete original score, newly engraved. A few editorial emendations have been made; see the introduction for details:

Great Expectations, Suites I & II (Complete Score)

Great Expectations, Suite No. I

“Great Expectations”, Suite No. 1: Mov. 1 “The Convict Upon the Marshes”

“In it we meet the convict Magwitch, who threatens Pip terribly so that he could get some food and a file to cut away his leg iron. The theme is appropriately slow and in the minor mode, so it is more scary. One can easily see how a young boy like Pip could be so scared of a person. There is a brief altercation between the Convict and Pip (all the talking is done by the Convict and Pip is so scared he can barely say anything, so Pip’s motive is not yet well defined and recognizable as anything but accompaniment. See if you can pick out his theme under the Convict’s). The movement ends with the Convict towering over Pip, who runs home as quickly as possible.”

“Great Expectations”, Suite No. 1: Mov. 2 “Pip at the Gargery’s Home”

“The second movement is the most sprightly of the five parts. In it a great dinner is being prepared, and Pip nearly forgets about the convict, whose theme does not figure here. Pip’s theme is first heard in the clarinets, and the flutes play a slight variant of that theme above the clarinets, representing his adopted family, who are so close to him. Nearly the whole movement is played solely by the woodwinds, with light brass accompaniment, and the music is intended to show his relatively happy family doing their honest, hardworking chores about the house in preparation for dinner. The music is naïve and childish, with little instrumental runs up and down the scale symbolizing the family as they rush from place to place, getting things ready. Except that Pip is still scared of the convict, and some of his apprehension sneaks in once in a while in the form of minor chords sprinkled into a major atmosphere.”

“Great Expectations”, Suite No. 1: Mov. 3 “The Policemen in the Marshes after the Convicts”

“[This movement] is supposed to show the policemen chasing the two bandits through the marshes. The reason it is a set of Latin dances played by a polka band is because it is supposed to show how out of place the bobbies are running through the marshes, which are very different from their normal environment.”

“Great Expectations”, Suite No. 1: Mov. 4 “Satis House; Miss Havisham and Her Daughter”

“This is a very complicated movement because it must show the interactions of three characters plus show the setting, which is so important that it is almost a character all of its own. It represents the chapter in which Pip first encounters the mysterious Miss Havisham and her snotty daughter Estella. It starts in the odd meter of 5/4, and a certain set of moving chords in the brasses, recurrent throughout the movement, represents the gloomy, oppressive Satis House. The second clarinet and the flutes play Pip’s theme dreamily and slowly, as he surveys this new environment. A series of discords introduces his coming into the black, lightless house, and Pip watches bugs scatter about in the trumpets, flutter-tonguing a weird sort of rhythm. Then, he is shown into the main hall. Ahead is the room of Miss Havisham. He peeks in to the sounds of a brass fanfare announcing his arrival. Seeing nothing inside at first, he starts to come inside, the flutes repeating the same fanfare, but softer. Still seeing nothing, he comes all the way into the dark, gloomy room, and the clarinets announce his arrival, but questioningly. He sees Miss Havisham, and a snatch of Pip’s theme is heard in a flute. The trumpets say hello, and he is inside, alone with the enigmatic person of Miss Havisham. There is silence as he observes her visage. Then, in the trumpets, a snatch of the theme belonging to her. More silence. The theme repeats, slightly altered, as Pip examines her faded gowns and dead jewelry. We hear Pip and Miss Havisham’s theme together as they speak to each other. She is very strange, and every so often a bug flits through the night air, with a shot of eighth notes. Then she brings Estella in. A brief introduction, and they begin to play Beggar My Neighbor. Estella’s theme appears as a dance in the flutes, with light trumpet accompaniment. As soon as the game is over Estella leaves, and Pip is once again alone with Miss Havisham. There are some discords in the trumpets, and much silence; Pip does not have a clue what to do. Miss Havisham’s motive again, heard in its entirety for the first and only time. Then the movement ends; Pip leaves without a second glance behind.”

“Great Expectations”, Suite No. 1: Mov. 5 “Apotheosis: Pip Comes Into Money”

“[This movement] show Pip several years later, as he comes into money. It starts off slowly in the flutes and clarinets, and gradually a texture is formed. over this we hear the tenor sax, wailing a minor, slowed down and altered version of Pip’s theme, intended to symbolize both his longing for better things and his longing to stay a simple blacksmith. Then Estella’s dance returns, showing Pip’s passion for her even as he leaves his town, in a broadened, re-orchestrated and shorter version of its former self. The trumpets, muted, lead into a woodwind trill, and then the movement ends in the brass shrieking Pip’s theme to the world as he aspires to bigger, better things.”

Great Expectations, Suite No. II

“Great Expectations”, Suite No. 2: Mov. 1 “Little Britain; Jaggers and Wemmick”

“This, the second suite of the Great Expectations music, is played by the same people as before. It deals with the second stage of Pip’s expectations, just as the first suite dealt with the first stage of his expecations. First we hear Mr. Jaggers’s theme, ponderoso. His theme is representative of his character as Pip first meets him; sullen and uncompromising. Wemmick’s theme, while a little faster and more upbeat, is also slow, because all we see of him at first is his business side. Wemmick’s theme is in a major key, Jaggers’s in a minor. Although it seems that at first both characters deserve a minor theme if I am presenting them as Pip first sees them, Wemmick’s theme is in the major because, as we later find out, he is a much more jovial person than at first thought.”

“Great Expectations”, Suite No. 2: Mov. 2 “Herbert Pocket”

“In [this movement] I attempt to identify each of Herbert’s traits in a musical way. First there is an introduction in two muted trumpets. Herbert’s theme, complete and gay, as Herbert is, plays on in the first flute. As the flute plays on different instruments come in with varying accompaniment; muted horns show his subdued willingness to fight; the first clarinet doing little appogiaturas very high to show how whimsical he can be; the second flute and second clarinet doing tremolos to illustrate that he has a soft side; and the tenor sax interjecting ideas as Herbert does throughout the novel. The second time his theme is stated every motive is in abundance, attempting to portray the fact that as the novel went on all of his traits combined to create a lifelike, real character.”

“Great Expectations”, Suite No. 2: Mov. 3 “The Story of Miss Havisham”

“[This movement] is about the treacherous deeds of Compeyson and Arthur. Compeyson and Arthur are played by the two trumpets, who play variations of the blues scale to show the dirty side of the two seeming “gentlemen”. Miss Havisham’s theme appears, altered, in the tenor sax near the beginning. The movement does not portray exact events, instead it show the whirlwind mess of the bungled affair and when the clock strikes twenty to nine it is over (the clock is portrayed by a trumpet player tapping his mouthpiece against his bell), and a coda recapitulates the two villains’ themes to show that they will reemerge later in the story.”

It was fifty a few days ago. GLOBAL WARMING WHERE ARE YOU.

I’ll get back to posting old weird music soon. In the meantime here’s a long-overdue update to my PICTURES page.

It’s not that I haven’t been taking pictures these last few months – I have, lots of them. It’s just I’m lazy. It takes SO LONG to catalog, organize, upload, and Wordpress-ify them I kept putting it off. Then this morning I was trying to stay awake after a long night without sleep and thought, well, here’s some busy work that will keep my mind occupied.

What I’ve got for you is about three months worth of work. In that time I completed nine series, four major and five minor. Most are in the usual style; Photography No. 23 “Sponsored by the Letter W” is a series of preliminary studies for a large-scale project I am planning entitled “A Picture of Every Page of the (X Month’s) 2011 Edition of W Magazine”. A pretty self-explanatory title, whose conceptual basis – which isn’t actually appropriative, not exactly – will be discussed in depth when the project comes to fruition (if it ever does – it might be a terrible idea, or may simply turn out poorly).

I’m going to stick the entire block in this post (why not?), and the PICTURES section has been updated as well. Enjoy!

Timber!

Sponsored by the Letter W

Millerton – Poughkeepsie

Cloistered

Clustered

Skew

Twenty Twelve

When I applied to the Manhattan School of Music’s undergraduate program in 1998 the audition was in two parts. On the first day you took a test. (I rocked the test. Yay me!) On the second day you faced the composition faculty and discussed slash defended your work. I knew this was how it would work going in. What I did not know was that at the end of the first day’s test they would hand out a prompt with directions to compose a piece overnight to be brought in to the next day’s jury.

The prompt gave you two options. There was a technical option – compose a work using three pitches (they were chromatic, something like C#, D, D#). And then there was a narrative option. This is the one I choose. They suggested you write a piece for the opening of an “international lepidopteral exhibition”; I suspect they were expecting a bunch of butterfly overtures, or pieces that sounded sort of “butterfly-esque”, flighty and fast and light. I know that’s what Ricardo did – his piece, “Blue Morpho”, was about that most beautiful of Brazilian butterflies.

I decided to take a different approach. Really I just wanted to show off, but isn’t that the point of an audition, after all? My idea was to mirror by metaphor the complex lifecycle of a butterfly, its development from egg to pupa to cocoon to chrysalis to butterfly, matching each lepidopteral stage with a stage in the development of Western music. In other words, I would start with a collection of pitches, add rhythm through the use of a talea and color, and thus progress from heterophony through to polyphony.

At that time I was deeply influenced by the work of Harrison Birtwistle, especially his 1984 chamber orchestra masterpiece Secret Theatre, and was struck in particular his use of a “cantus and continuum”. By this method he separated his ensemble into a “cantus” which performed the work’s basic melodic material, and a “continuum” which performed the work’s basic rhythmic material. The cantus stood while the continuum sat; as players changed roles from one group to another they would move about the stage, suggesting the titular “secret theater”. I had used this idea in my big piece at Northwestern a couple of years earlier (Cage III – see this space soon), and decided it would be a good approach this time around as well. But what about the instrumentation?

I have always, always loved the sound of homogenous groups. From Stravinsky to Herrmann to Ustvolskaya to Wolfe, there’s little I love more than a bunch of the same instruments sounding together. Accordingly I assembled an ensemble of twenty-four french horns grouped into four cantus/continuum ensembles spatially arranged on the stage. Why twenty-four french horns? Because twenty-four french horns is AWESOME.

Then, between 9pm on May 26th, 1998 and 3am on May 27th, 1998, I composed, in its entirety, a nine minute piece for twenty-four french horns. I don’t know how I did it. This is what a page from the original score looks like:

Now imagine like thirty more pages just like that. Twenty-four parts filled with notes. No erasures, no revisions. When I got around to engraving it a few days ago I was shocked by how few errors I found, and most of those were accidentals I’d missed. Six hours. WHAT WAS I ON? Coke, actually.

Coca-cola, I mean. CAFFEINE MAKES ERIC HAPPY.

The audition went super well and for once I felt sure I’d succeeded at something. When I was accepted into the program shortly thereafter, I thought it would be good to record the piece. So I went over to Matt’s studio with the intention of overdubbing twenty-four french horns. Unfortunately, as happened every other time I tried to do the same thing, the adult professional I’d asked to participate bailed on me, and I was forced to record it myself. I don’t play horn, so I performed the score on trumpet as if it were written in Bb, not F. As horns have a much lower range than trumpets, the lower parts were played on a euphonium I borrowed from my high school and learned to play a day or two before the session (thus the out-of-tune notes – sorry!). Since the fingerings and everything are the same, it wasn’t a big deal; I wish it had that homogenous tone I originally sought, however. Here is the recording I made in 1998:

Butterfly Stories (1998)

A few days after completing the score I replaced the last page with a new coda representing the now dead butterfly pinned in a case at the exhibition. This was included on the recording. After making the recording I realized I’d miscalculated the durations of the repeated phrases in the central “phasing” section, resulting in too thin a texture, and incorporated those revisions into the score. Here is a midi realization of the final version of the piece I made that summer, with horns this time around:

Butterfly Stories (Midi)

And here is the score as engraved a few days ago, including the contemporary emendations described above. I also wrote out the various repeats, which were confusingly notated in the original:

Butterfly Stores (Score in PDF)

I was an industrious young lad, no? Still one of my best early works. Now, though it remains juvenilia, you can see my various obsessions already beginning to germinate. Emerging like a butterfly from its chrysalis, as it were.

YIKES.

Anyway, further information about the piece can be found in the notes preceding the score, or reproduced on the work page, here.

Wasn’t that exciting? More tomorrow! Yes, there is more. There are lots more pieces. I was a busy guy back in the day.

I warned you I would start posting old pieces in this space. Aren’t you excited? Waiting with bated breath? Or baited breath if you’re a shark? Yes? No? Well, let’s get on with it!

We’ll begin with The Rains That Never Fall, from September 1996. 12:09:53 am on September 2nd, 1996, to be exact. That’s when I finished the manuscript. Apparently this is what I spent my junior year doing instead of, you know, school. Ah, jeunesse!

Basically this is a set of variations on a simple 5/4 motive. Basically. That’s hardly the point, though. What’s more interesting is the setting. All the “instruments” are stuff: a telephone, flowerpots, wood blocks, a chisel, a jug strung with twine. And the centerpiece of the composition is a setting of a poem by Neil Rollinson for rhythmic speech.

I have always been fascinated by the rhythmic aspect of speech, and from early on I was making pitchless polyphonic settings of poetry. Say that five times fast! Maybe I should give it another go now that I sort of know what I’m doing.

Anyway, the piece actually turned out pretty well. I even recorded it with my regular partner in crime, engineer Matt Welch, overdubbing all five parts myself. Without a click track (which was a mistake). Unfortunately the sweet epilogue was added after the recording, so it’s not on there. But you can peruse the score and study its many intricacies at your leisure.

Here is a page from the original manuscript.

Here is the newly engraved score. No editorial changes of any kind have been made.

The Rains That Never Fall: Score

And this is what it sounds like.

The Rains That Never Fall: Recording (1998?)

Tomorrow: What do TWENTY FOUR french horns and SIX HOURS have in common?

Over the years you’ve watched me struggle with the organization of my compositions. “Opuscules”, “work lists”, “star ratings”,  etc. Well, I’ve had enough of all that. Today I went back and arranged MUSIC chronologically according to the “ENS” numbers I’ve been using to classify all my musical and literary efforts for the past decade. Simple. Why wasn’t I doing that before? I have no idea. Anyway, everything is back in a single list again. Well, almost everything, as I’ll mention in a sec.

To differentiate between the major works (“opus” numbers) and everything else, I’ve made the good pieces blue. It’s jarring, I know, to come across color in this gloriously monochromatic space, but seemed the best solution to the problem of highlighting the good stuff without overloading the list with bold titles and indents and all that. So: blue is good. Struck through is bad. Semplice. And that’s that.

Finally, I’ve added an EARLY WORKS section at the bottom. This is mostly for fun. Why listen to good music when you could suffer through my juvenilia? Over the next few days I’ll put up posts discussing individual early pieces. For your listening “pleasure”…

Yesterday, Dec. 14, 2011, was the tenth anniversary of the untimely death of W.G. Sebald, my all-time favorite writer, and a man who was, I think we can all agree, among the greatest writers of his time if not the greatest.

However, there is some small good news to report. Out now in the UK, and forthcoming in the US, is Across the Land and Water, Selected Poems 1964-2001, an overview of various bits of verse written throughout Sebald’s life. And even more excitingly, though it has yet to be officially announced, Amazon.co.uk lists A Place in the Country, a translation of Sebald’s last essay collection Logis in einem Landhaus for release next year. That collection includes two essays already available in english – on Jan Peter Tripp in Unrecounted and on Robert Walser as an introduction to The Tanners – as well as several not yet seen in our language. I could not be more excited! Sebald’s creative career was brutally brief; even so, there is enough to last a lifetime of study, and the prospect of more to come fills me with happiness.

Though his readership is now vast, his influence is harder to quantify, in part because there are few writers who have taken up his highly idiosyncratic style; rather, his mood and obsessions have filtered into a generation of writers. Of recent novels I can think only of Teju Cole’s Open City, which reads almost like a parody of Sebald, and Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite, the latter an homage to Sebald owing nothing stylistically to the master; instead Hunt references objects and stories from The Rings of Saturn, and his novel – which is excellent, and highly recommended by me – is all the better for it.

If you have not yet read Sebald, you are missing out on one of life’s great, if peculiar pleasures. No one I have recommended him to has come away disappointed. Any of his “novels” will do to start, although people seem to find Austerlitz or The Emigrants the easiest way in, while the incomparable glories of The Rings of Saturn await. Why not take this sad anniversary as an opportunity to find your way into one of the great modern literary canons? You will not regret it.