Tag: 12 Orchestral Studies

Orchestral Study #10 (rupture, slowed down and from different angles)

Six months. It feels like a milestone.

I wanted to work through a sonorist piece that emphasized texture over melody. Threnody is the canonical example, but there are many directions you can go by subverting the concept of harmony or rhythm. I couldn’t get close to there and probably never would but the ideal gives you creativity to find your route.

The idea of the opening bright harmonic declaration was there from the start. I don’t think I had an overall structure in mind but rather some germinal ideas, many of which didn’t make it into the final score. Honestly, I’m not sure the final structure holds together because I walked around through so many different themes so inconsistently, but it still feels like a whole. There’s an inconstant consistency.

This is the first time I ran against limitations of the scoring software’s playback not matching the intent of the score. I need to get high quality samples and maybe move on to mixing each part. This is a long way from Study #1.

Much of this grew very naturally and I feel like I could be more expressive in this style. There were several ideas that just-did-not-work, but the immersiveness felt natural. I didn’t go far enough.

The fact that felt more acute this month: with a fixed time frame, it’s difficult to know when you are done, when the piece is done. It makes an artificial constraint on the arc of emotion you’re trying to achieve and may rush any interesting sequences that could be elaborated on. Obvious. But each instance of compromise is different.

Six months?

Next up is uncertain; the other months were not. Previous months I had a task queued up (variations or vivace or lyric) but not now. I’m out of the country for a week, so maybe it’s good to turn off and wait for the next impulse.

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Orchestral Study #5 (variations)

Orchestral Study #10 (rupture, slowed down and from different angles)

I say this every time, but this one felt like a failure early in and, except for the last section, still does. It’s because the muddy harmonies and overfull orchestration that I could never get right. It reminds me of a watercolor when you layer too many colors: a grayish, uncertain mess. This one also took the longest to complete because of my unhappiness throughout. Lesson learned?

The goal was a passacaglia-type work, but I think of it now as four variations without a theme. My intent always drifts as the ideas start to reveal themselves. The first section doesn’t have the clarity to come across as a thematic jumping off point, but it does set the harmonic structure for the three sections that follow. Second section: a chatty variation with runs swapped across the instruments. Third: long held notes in the horns while oboe, bassoon, and violas jump around noisily as background radiation. Fourth: the longest and the one that flowed out very naturally. A brash, more harmonically clear and confident statement split in the middle and the ending with a more uncertain theme using solo violin, viola, and cello.

Next up may be a sonorist piece. I’m using a classical orchestra just for simplicity (it’s enough of an effort to learn with just this limited palette) so I’m not sure how well that style will communicate.

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Orchestral Study #4 (allegro)

Orchestral Study #10 (rupture, slowed down and from different angles)

This was the first one that I felt failure from the start and yet I’m very happy with the outcome. Composing has always been a process starting with impulsive excitement, going to studied focus, then emotional anguish throughout as sections flow or don’t or feel just-not-right, then the polish at then end (the last few day in this instance) and finally almost satisfying achievement. And then–what always happens but has not yet for this piece–a realization that I can never accomplish again what I did then/now. It’s not at all arrogance, just insecurity. Since the rock operas, I had forgotten what a trial these things are. But then I get to the impulse to start again.

Anyway.

I have come up with a few rules: no listening to the previous works and no planning for the next until almost complete. I don’t want to muddy the “whatever” with the impulses of what came before and what will come next. There is a slight overlap though: in the first days of the current I can’t escape the impressions of the last, and at the end of the current I can’t will away the desire for the next. Rules.

I had come into this study wanting to write a rushing vivace. I think I avoided very very fast music for my piano writing because I just could not play that fast, so it was nice to escape the limitations of technical skill. However, there were still mental limitation for this piece based on the rapidity of the ideas that I could hear… if that makes sense? And so for the most part I stuck with a more tonal palette just to sidestep the insecurity around dissonance in compressed time.

The opening melody came out and immediately felt like it needed a canon-like development. I worked from there and I’m not sure how but then decided the piece should be a rondo: A B’ B A B’ C A. The added B’ bridge came just as a halted start of the B theme that I hated to abandon because of the syncopation that ended up getting added, in a way, to the C. That weird and toneless C was intended to be a minimalist perpetuum mobile but that mood/texture started to feel bland as a prelude to the closing A, so I switched gears and went with a mash of syncopated noise.

I was surprise how much music I got out of this. For the first week or so I expected–because fast music equals many notes equals less time–it to be just 2 minutes or so. Right now I feel like this was the most exhausting to compose, but of course that’s until the next one is started.

And so my goals for the next one: a passacaglia, get more comfortable with brass, maybe add sections with the first violin and first cello, and (this is less specific) but have more instrument “swapping.” I heard in Brahms’ 1st how he would throw the melody from one instrument to another or add it to a single measure as harmonic color. I need to think about that.

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Orchestral Study #3 (adagio with melisma)

Orchestral Study #10 (rupture, slowed down and from different angles)