I have not been able to compose for months. Sure, I have lots of ideas, but they never seem to turn into anything, and are in any case mostly just new variations on old themes.
The previous paragraph remains entirely true although I did complete a new work today. I wrote music; I probably shouldn’t say I composed anything, though, as that would too ennoble what I did come up with.
Fuck the Astronautsis a setting of a (wonderfully titled) poem by James Tate I’ve been meaning to interpret for a while. Too bad it got wasted on this. Well, it was fun to work on, even if the result was more an excuse to work than an inspired contribution to the repertoire. But then, which of my works, even the better ones, deserves a place there anyway?
Boy, this post is sounding pretty depressed. It’s late (well, early for me, given my current schedule, as my awry circadian rhythm gradually makes its lowing way around the clock), and it’s raining – that may have something to do with it. Because in fact writing this piece really cheered me up. I always enjoy working, busy or otherwise. It’s satisfying. I’m currently spreadsheeting all my various collections, which is taking forever, and I’m really enjoying that too, repetitive as it may be.
The truth is, I no longer really think of myself as a composer. Or a writer. Certainly not a photographer, though I’ve been spending more creative energy on that than anything lately. Heck, I no longer consider myself any kind of artist at all. I think of myself more as a craftsman. I enjoy making things. I enjoy the process. (It’s no surprise I really enjoy minimalism.) When I’m done I tend to lose interest in whatever I’ve been doing. Heck, sometimes I lose interest halfway through, which used to drive my parents crazy. I’m only interested in something as long as I’m learning from it. Which goes a long way to explaining my lack of success at my chosen profession. Or indeed why I don’t consider it my “profession” at all.
Anyway, Fuck the Astronauts. Could be worse. Could be better. I AM SUCH A GOOD SALESMAN ON MY OWN BEHALF!
Believe it or not, this is my first orchestral work since I was a teenager. So really, my first orchestral work. An arrangement, but you’ve got to start somewhere!
Although I love large ensemble pieces the orchestra doesn’t hold a lot of interest for me as a composer: I prefer smaller, weirder ensembles designed to do a particular thing. Plus of course there aren’t too many opportunities to write for orchestra, and when they do arrive there’s no rehearsal, and good luck getting a recording of the performance! No, the orchestra’s not for me, not usually.
Okay, that’s a lie. Submarine Gardens, a setting of an incredible passage from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz for tenor and orchestra is something I’ve been aching to do. And Tilted Arc, a big blowout for a big orchestra with winds in fours. But those aren’t really worked out so well in my head; there’s only a germ, which might sprout given the right commission (ahem).
There’s also the fact I don’t really know how to write for orchestra. Another lie. Less, though. I mean, I know how to write for orchestra, I’ve just never had an orchestra play anything I’ve written, so while I could do a creditable job with one, missing out on school and opportunities for readings and performances did quash this element of my musical education to an extent: I can’t quite be sure what I’m writing is going to turn out the way I think it will.
Anyway, this particular arrangement came about because I was listening to the fantastic composer and pianist Thomas Larcher’s ECM recording of Schubert’s D.946 Klavierstucke (a personal favorite) and Schoenberg’s opuses 11 and 19. And as I listened to op. 19, the Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, I thought, boy, that might be a fun project, to arrange this short masterpiece for orchestra. So I did. It was pretty fun.
The impulse actually came earlier; another thing I’ve wanted to do for a while is orchestrate the Brahms op. 119 piano pieces as a kind of ancestral companion to the Schoenberg and Webern orchestra pieces. That seemed like a lot of work – the pieces are much longer than these – so I never did. Not yet. One day. In the meantime, I actually did sit down and do the Schoenberg today. All six movements. Luckily, they’re short.
My orchestration is more Webern than Schoenberg, but whatever. I have no idea if it will sound any good. Any composers reading this, take a look and let me know what you think. For the non-composers, unfortunately this is one of those times a midi rendition is really not going to do justice to the score. I send you forthwith, therefore, to the original piano pieces. Check out Larcher’s version. If you don’t like Arnold, you will like Franz!
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:
“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.”
“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.”
“[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.”
“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.”
“[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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“[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.”
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.