Symphony No. 1 – Finished the interlude, started the 4th movement

I’m worried I have strayed from the tonality of last year’s studies (which is what I’ve wanted to do) but have made it all process and not art (which is what I didn’t). The 2nd movement was very deep into process much like what I’d read of Ferneyhough’s technique in Lemma (or any serialists really) and I’ve continued a bit with that approach with the 4th. Is it too much? I am very happy with the mood so far though.

The two pages of the 4th movement’s sketched score, three weeks in
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Symphony No. 1 – Before everything changes

The 2nd movement (I am now), interlude (“Everything was forever until it was no more”), and 3rd movement (an occupying army) are done.

I have this fear that when everything changes on Tuesday I’ll no longer be able to look at this work, the work that’s left, in the same light. No matter the outcome.

I finished the interlude and it feels very good that there’s a stopping point. I don’t know what our state of mind will be on Wednesday. Being in mid-music would be at the very least fragmenting.

I can’t say that the oncoming anguish helps or hurts or strips any possibility of creative expression because of a fight-or-flight panic.

Musical observations feel less-than-important right now. Here they are from the last few days:

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Symphony No. 1 – Reassessments and confessions

I was cleaning up the 2nd movement and, more and more, it started feeling alien to me. It was another me, another person, that wrote it and I no longer had any ownership or control. With distance you leave the work and become the listener. In some phrases I knew, for example, a trombone would add to the depth or rolled cymbals would provide that “radio static” sound, but I was really only giving editorial notes after-the-fact. Even if it wasn’t perfect or complete, I had to leave it.

Side observation: From the start of these notes I had been afraid that documentation would soil the creative process (the social media affect: you become the performative you instead of the intentional you). So far, I don’t feel that’s the case. The fear of exhibitionism would come from posting each movement as it’s complete but not from documenting the battlefield of creating each.

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Symphony No. 1 – Finishing the 2nd movement, starting the interlude

A few days back, I felt like I was failing with nearly the entirety of the 2nd movement and was ready to scrap, a month-and-a-half in, the entire score. It was at ~13 minutes of music so I hadn’t listened to it in its entirety–just read through and listened to shorter sections as I worked or re-worked–and so it would have been easy for the cohesion to be in my head, not my ear. But after getting to what I planned to be the final two sections, I listened through for the first time and felt vindication and relief. My intent came through. (Although I can read and hear to a decent degree, I marvel at the modernist composers of the mid- and late-20th century who did not have software and who wrote–sometimes creating new notation in the process–some of the defining new orchestral sounds of our lives.)

This weekend I listened to Finnissy’s string quartet Multiple Forms of Constraint, Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 3, and re-listened to Penderecki’s Threnody. While researching I found out or re-found out that Penderecki died this year in March. That feels like living in the era in which Beethoven or the era in which Chopin died. I could have met him.

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