An Echo That's Reversing

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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I’m in the middle of working on the 2nd movement, I am now, and am going through the standard concern of whether what I’ve done so far, 3 weeks in, matches my formative thoughts of what I wanted this movement to express. Once you’re “inside” the piece, the phrases can sometimes take you in unexpected places. This is good for creativity, but bad if it sacrifices focus and creates more chaos than cohesion. Improvising can be this way but that’s different than what (certain approaches) to composing is.

Continue reading Symphony No. 1 – Realizing the original intent