Month: October 2020

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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