before January ends. Just because.

Lots of things on my mind lately, though not a lot of time to ‘blog about any of it. I’m rushing to finish my thesis, which, as you may recall, is to be a gigantic symphonic work. It keeps shrinking, but is finally about as small as it’s going to get. That means I’m almost done writing.

Next comes the interminable process of typing it into the computer, then the even more irritating and endless process of formatting it just right, then the quick and relatively painless process of printing it out. All this needs to happen in the next twelve days.

After that, I defend the thing, during which my professors will give me valuable insight into how to better shape & present the piece. After one last revision, I turn in the composition a week later and can finally focus on other, more practical things again. Like the classes I’m taking. And the job I need to find. And getting a freakin’ haircut already. Seriously.

I’ve got it all planned out, and I have a schedule right here by my side, reminding me of when I need to get each little task done in order to get the big project completed on time. And for once, I’m actually kinda sticking to it. But it means surrendering what little social life I have for the next few weeks. So until then, adieu. I plan to provide a post or two describing the whole process and/or the piece once this is all said & done. Hopefully I actually remember to do so.

Anyway! Party on, dudes. Be good to each other!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!2

Thank you. We now return to our regularly scheduled hiatus.

23 days: Thesis defense

30 days: Final Project submission deadline

58 days: Graduation

60 days: The amount of time allotted until I must seriously bug out about work/living arrangements/being a responsible member of society.

For now, I shall stare apprehensively at the blank space where the rest of my symphony must go, worrying about how to fill said space in the most effective manner. Maybe if I sneeze a mouthful of rice krispies onto the score…

Maybe I’m getting sentimental in my old age.

Maybe it’s my first Christmas/New Year out of Minnesota, maybe it’s the sense of drifting away from my former life that’s got me feeling. Feeling what, I don’t know, but feeling nonetheless.

I want to be hopeful. And I want it to correspond with the new year. Always ALWAYS before, I considered January 1 an arbitrary date. And yeah, it really is. But I want it to mean something more. I want anything to mean something more. Why not a rollover on the odometer?

The past year kinda blew chunks in a number of ways, for me personally and for the world as a whole. I want everyone to have a better year. I want everyone to find love, find work, find a way to chill out and appreciate what’s left of the world. And I want to be in their number when the Saints go marching in.

Already tonight in this quaint little town, I’ve heard fireworks and police sirens. I got Carla on the playlist, keeping me company and greeting 2010 with brute force. (By the way, can we all agree to pronounce it ‘twenty-ten’ please? I’m a fan of brevity, and it sounds much nicer than ‘two-thousand-and-ten.’ Just a thought). I really REALLY want this to be a better year. I want to get my shit together, both in my personal and occupational lifes. School has been going fine, but I need to find something to do when I get out. Preferably something that will reimburse me for my time and trouble. You know, a job.

Can it happen? Can things improve for everybody? Can we agree that we should reduce the pace at which we destroy the planet, regardless just how bad global warming is or isn’t? Will the people who actually have financial resources do their part to revive/replace the failing economic system? Can we learn to love one another, in word and thought and deed, without condition or qualification?

I don’t know. But I think it’s worth a shot. I’ll try and do my part, let’s see how things go.

“I think faith is just one of those things, you either have it or you don’t.”

I said this once, to a good friend,
who was curious as to how
some people come to believe in God
and others don’t.
What drives some to church on Sunday morning
while others relish in the chance to sleep in
What makes some worry of what the afterlife may bring
while others deny anything but cool earth awaits us.

I am older now, if only a little
and see the error of my youth.
Faith is in abundance everywhere
I can prove it, too:
Next time someone says “There is no God,”
ask them ”how can you be sure?”

So the last movement isn’t complete yet, but I’ve skipped ahead to the first movement.

Sorry, bad habit of mine, confusing with my initial sentences like that. Anyhoo…The first movement is coming along sort of okay. I’m about a minute and a half in, there’s lots to capture the interest in that space, and certainly enough to play around with for another five to seven minutes (a respectably proportionate length to the work as a whole). The introduction, not quite a minute in length, makes use of divisi strings forming cluster chords, then glissing from one extreme register to another. Or sometimes just sitting in place. This intro is then abruptly cut short by a loud tutti chord. This chord is what I described as Hex 1 a few posts ago (the alternating half-step – minor-third scale). As the ringing percussion accompanying the chord dies out, a snake-like melody is weaved in the winds. This is backed with occasional flourishes and harmonic figures which, so far, haven’t really pushed or pulled the melody in any one direction. But the Big Bad Chord has made reappearances.

Now, where exactly to go from here is what’s been bugging me thus far about the movement. I would like to continue with a few more “episodes,” and originally assumed they would be rather unrelated, cut off from one another via the aforementioned Big Bad Chord. However, as my own personal hero Anton Webern put it, unity and comprehensibility go hand in hand, and are indeed necessary for the success of an artwork. And now that I type through my thoughts, I find myself seeing the same necessity here.  So, let us briefly catalogue our basic ingredients, shall we:

1) Cluster chords/dense static figures
2) Registral extremes & sudden shifts thereof
3) Serpentine melodic figures
4) Sudden, jarring, full-force chords
5) Subtle blending of orchestral colours
6) Wide dynamic contrasts (or at least the implied potential for such)

And what have we not so far?

a) Prominent brass parts
b) Rhythmic vitality/direction
c) Significant use of low register (aside from opening strings)
d) Counterpoint
e) Repetition/[Varied] Ostinato

The things that bother me most are the lack of brass, counterpoint, and low register. Counterpoint is actually easily addressed: obbligatto accomp. for the snakelike melodies are a start. Clusters in contrary motion to the main action would also help, as would conflicting tempi (slow part versus fast). So far, my attempts to address the issue of missing brass have fallen flat on their faces. I’m perhaps thinking to much like Lutoslawski, trying to shoehorn repeated-note figures like the ones he used in the Cello Concerto.

I must remember mutes. Straight mutes to force a soft dynamic, harmons to give a distinct tone, plungers to provide irreprehensible swells. All good elements to keep in mind, but I need something more to guide them…

As for the low end, perhaps the best thing to do would be to use the bassoon and bass clarinet at piannissimo to sneak in. OR to blast in on one of the big chords, thus forcing the change of texture. This would allow a memorable brass entrance too…yes, it’s all coming together.

I’m sure I’ll hit another roadblock soon, or just feel like posting some more useless information that no one comes to read. Bye until then…

So I’m slogging my way through the symphonic work, not getting anywhere near 60 seconds per day, but at least moving forward. I started with the most complex of the movements, and as soon as it’s (reasonably) complete, I can move on to greener, more gently rolling pastures. But for now, I’m still climbing the mountain. Anyway, enough mixing of metaphors…

I’ve described this main movement to my perfessor as sort of a Steve Reich piece played in reverse: out-of-sync elements slowly merge together to become one coherent statement. Well, I’ve now reached the point in the piece where those elements do come together. And that’s where I’m stuck.

I was right at the cusp of this section when I retired for the night yesterday, confident that today’s workload would be a breeze. Fill out the harmonies, float a couple of melodies and countermelodies atop it, and bring everything together for the final push to the coda. Turn over the chairs, mop the floors, hit the lights on the way out. Instead, I awoke to writer’s block.

Well, it does no good to sit and wait for inspiration to hit, so I tried a couple different angles to get around the problem. First, I thought I’d build my harmonies, but my perception of the mode I’m working with (currently C#-D-F-G-Ab-B) kept returning to the traditional triads (G and C# Major) that it’s built from. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with the tonal allusion (hell, the triads are a tritone apart – not much of an argument for diatonicism there),  but it just didn’t sound right. I tried fragmenting the 6-note sonority in other ways, but nothing seems appealing at the moment.

So next, I thought I’d try and let the melody decide where we shall go. The symmetrical qualities of the mode put a limit on just how directional and goal-oriented your melodic lines can be, however. I should note that both this approach and the plotting of chords is, in a way, like moving a mountain by spitting on your palms and pushing. Especially when one has writer’s block. Even if you do, by some Herculean effort, manage to get the mountain to budge, you usually step back, take a look at what you’ve done, and decide the mountain was better off in its original location. And so I am taking my musical problem into the world of words.

At other times, I’ve described the current point in this composition more in terms of the disparate pieces drawn together: There is a driving, rhythmic melodic line often featured in the basses, which usually was in a different artificial mode (a series of alternating half-steps and minor thirds), but which slowly has adopted more and more the contours of the second mode, which I paradoxically mentioned in this post first. (Confused? Good). I want that driving melody to be present here, in the new mode, and higher in register. Perhaps it’s a brass thing, since it’s meant to be strong and prominent, and brass are typically strong and/or prominent.

The next element in the work I wish to adapt to this section is what I call the “flurries.” I’m pretty sure that sentence isn’t grammatically correct, but moving on… These flurries consist of motivic fragments of varying length and character which intermittently flutter and float above the texture. Oh, and these motivic fragments typically go on simultaneously, and not at all rhythmically coordinated. As the piece goes along, they start to come together more, sharing downbeats and staying out of one another’s way. When we reach the Point of Coalescence (hereafter POC), the flurries shall have united in rhythm, in pitch content, and in “directionality,” that oh so elusive quality that my modal framework seems to lack.

The third and final element to be brought into this mix is developed from relatively static chords which appear here and then throughout the movement. In this final section, they need to be unified rhythmically with both the driving melody and the flurry-derived countersubjects.

It all seems so simple, when reduced to the language of words. And the modal content has already seeped through each of these sections, thus unifying them in that respect. But the problem I now face is, where to start? Once I get that figured out, the next question will be, just how long is this section? It’s a fairly long plateau of a section, static in that it isn’t meant to drive the listener forward to the next section. But there is a next section, eventually. One which will, in the end, need to be set up properly. So, for how long does this plateau stretch? And when and how do we start climbing again?

Seeing as how the bass line is what I would describe as the most “driving” of the three elements, it would probably make sense to start there. How long does it have to be? Well, how long seems long enough? The movement as a whole is about three and one half minutes; a suitable plateau would need to last at least 20 seconds, if not twice that. It’s not an insurmountable goal – the opening statement of the piece, also a driven bass melody, is about 40 seconds in length. How will we signal the end of this static section? Simple: the melody will refuse to be further developed.

It may work. If not, I may be back.

Just completed the last of my assignments for the Fall Quarter here at WWU, so now I’m free to sit back, blather on the internet, and enter a vegetative state for the next month or so, right?

Of course not! Don’t be silly. Next quarter will be my last at Western (I just filled out the ‘application to graduate’ form) and it’s time to hunker down and knock off a symphony for my thesis.

I’ve already posted a couple of entries below concerning some stylistic points I hope to address in the work, and I don’t really have too much more to say on structure, form, or texture at the moment. Instead, I’m gonna use this space to outline my goals for the next month.

It is my intent to compose a work lasting about half an hour, and so far have between ninety seconds and two minutes down on paper. I hope to have a complete rough draft done by New Year’s Day, which means I need to compose an average of one minute per day to get close. Believe it or not, that’s a lot of music per day, especially in an orchestral medium. Heck, just drawing the rests could take hours ;-) Still, I believe this is a feasible goal, for the following reasons:

1) I have no money

2) I have no life

3) I have lots of manuscript paper

Really, the one thing standing in my way is the blasted internet, with all its b’logs and comics and cats with poor grammar and whatnots. If there were just…some…way…to turn “off” the internets…

In all seriousness, I would like to drop back in and provide occasional updates. For some reason, I actually want to share information on this piece while it’s being worked out. Quite strange, considering how for years I was very secretive about my music, not sharing anything until it was completed.

So yeah, I plan to be busy for the next month, same as I plan to be busy every month. I wouldn’t say to expect updates, because then they definitely won’t happen. But there may be updates on the way, and they will be very interesting (at least to me).

Last time, I went at length concerning one of the tools at my disposal as a composer: the mode. I also alluded to another resourse I’ve been developing starting with the Pocket Mass. In that work, I divided chords into two independent sonorities, capable of moving contrary to one another thus creating new chords. I made mention that different sections of a mode could likewise be divided. Now I’d like to discuss another method I’ve been working on.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been exerting most of my compositional energies on consort pieces: a brass quintet, wind quintet, and string quartet. While each has a distinct and unique tonal language, they all have one important element in common. It is a quality that, for lack of a better term, I here call social cohesion: without the unified effort of all parts, any individual line dissolves into jibberish. Melodies, where present, are passed quickly from instrument to instrument. Rhythmic figures interweave to create macrorhythmic moments. In short, the sum is greater than the parts. Everyone in the ensemble needs to be on the same wavelength for the piece to work.

I first undertook this method with the Brass Quintet, largely to compensate for a perceived lack of melodic invention. By taking a simple, self-evident theme (such as ascending 5ths) and passing it through the instruments, and doing likewise with contrapuntal figures, I felt the lack of clear melodic writing would be compensated by the intricate interplay of parts. This train of thought spilled over into the second movement of the String Quartet, though it manifested itself differently. Taking inspiration from the 3rd movement of Ruth Crawford-Seeger’s quartet, I created the illusion of melody by accenting notes in the slowly enveloping chord played by the full ensemble. By the time I began working on the Wind Quintet, my insecurities concerning melodic invention had largely disappated. Still, melodic and rhythmic interplay was crucial in morphing the piece from a purely technical twelve-tone exercise into a humourous game.

As I make preparations for a chamber symphony (by far the largest work I will have undertaken to date), I contemplate to what extent I shall use this social cohesion method. With larger forces at play, more possibilities present themselves. In fact, one could argue the possibility of two groups – one cohesive, another anarchic – proceeding simultaneously. Possibilities are endless, time is finite…

Composing, like architecture, is largely a matter of knowing what you plan to build. Understanding its function, the size and scope required, the aesthetic demands & limitations of those you’re working for – all these need to be known going in. It would be no more appropriate to write a 45 minute Mahleresque symphony for a grade school orchestra anymore than to attach a hangar to a quaint two-bedroom house.

This is a rather major concern for me, as I gear up to compose a chamber symphony for my graduate thesis. Questions of how long, how dense, how “serious”, how demanding pile atop one another unanswered. So I am devoting a post or three to these questions, as a way to try and work out some idea of what this piece shall be.

My initial attempt to figure out what I’d do was to look through old sketches and random scribblings for inspiration. However, I didn’t really pay any mind to how I would work the material. There is some jazzy stuff, some trilly bird-call stuff, some slow drawn-out harmony stuff, but it wasn’t until today that I noticed the only real connective element in it all. Modes.

Specifically, modes of limited transposition. Modes of artificial devising. Modes of limited usefulness but immediate affect.

Modes have long been an important musical resource for me. My Variations on the Merrimac for accordion is perhaps the most obvious example of this; it is also a teasingly short work – one theme and 7 variations, none more than 24 bars long. The Brass Quintet also had a modal basis, though other compositional parameters play a greater role in that one. For me, the appeal of modality is its ambiguous relationship to tonality. Like tonality, there is a clear sense of “home,” a judicious limitation of pitch material, a sense of order. Unlike tonality, “home” isn’t defined by tonic-dominant relationships, nor are modes so clearly European and utterly bland. If diatonicism is a swimming pool with trained lifeguards on the watch, and atonality a stormy sea, then modality is a little, slightly muddy lake where you can go skinny dipping with your friends.

Unlike your Dorian and Mixolydian varieties, however, modes of limited transposition lean more toward the “big stormy sea” side of the equation. Some are fairly safe (whole tone, “black key” pentatonic, and octatonic), but the ones I’m using these days are a bit more restless.

The first, which I shall call Hex1, is somewhat related to the typical octatonic scale in that both are built of half-step pairs (such as C – C#). However, in the octatonic scale, only one note separates note pairs (thus C-C#, D#-E, etc.) whereas the row I’m using separates pairs with pairs (i.e. C-C#, E-F, G#-A). Essentially, the notes form an augmented triad and the augmented triad a half-step up. Major and minor chords are available, as are leading tones, but Major 2nds are completely unavailable. Thus, melodic lines seem constantly wandering while harmonies are boxed in, immobile.

Hex2, the second of my little modes, is a rather more generous mix of minor 2nds, Major 2nds, and minor 3rds. A typical example of the mode would be G-A-C-C#-D#-F#. Divide the mode in half, and you may notice each group spells out part of a black-key pentatonic scale. Melodically, this mode has the advantage of increased flexibility. However, if one wishes to make tonal allusions, one will notice an absence of major triads, and only two minor chords.

This does not, however, mean that Hex2 is unfit for vertical constructions. Sticking with our mode on G, we note the black key region is a perfect transposition of the white-key region. Furthermore, either of these 3-note collections sounds perfectly consonant on its own. Sounding all six notes at once creates a sense dissonantly-related consonant regions – a simultaneous push and pull is exerted on our ears.

From this point, I posit that we divorce the two 3-note entities from one another, abolishing their modal unity and treating them as independent identities. By moving the two regions up and down the scale, either in oblique or contrary motion, new sonorities of increasing and decreasing dissonance are discovered. Before long, a chordal ostinato could be derived. With luck and patience, a progression with a definite starting and ending point could be developed. And if one or the other 3-note sections was inverted (minor 3rd plus Major 2nd instead of Major 2nd plus minor 3rd), a whole new world of possibilites is discovered!

Of the two modes, I find Hex2 to be the more promising. Hex1 is more intrusive on my consciousness: my improvisations commonly return to that mode. I feel both will play major roles in my next major work, as well as in any minor pieces I tackle along the way.

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