Category: Personal

The terror

Over the past few months I’ve had several episodes of night terrors. Well, probably not the extreme textbook diagnostic instance but more a sudden shock, waking me up, and taking a minute or so to re-orient. I’m not sure what wakes me, but when I do wake I see someone floating or standing in the darkness. I panic and shake Lisa awake and tell her what I saw. She freaks, turns on the light, and we both have jacked up adrenaline for the next half hour.

I swear the first two instances when it happened a couple of months back happened to her and she woke me up. She doesn’t remember them, just me waking her and telling her she was calling out in a panic, and so the current episodes that are definitely me make those seem pretty suspicious. Am I remembering it completely wrong?

It’s happened enough that I’ve gotten to the point of needing to keep the door opened when we sleep to let some light in. I’m, as they say, a grown-ass man and yet here we are. I don’t feel more likely to see anything, just more ready to have it startle me in the middle of the night. It’s a weird reason to have insomnia.

Anyway, Lisa’s going out of town this weekend.

Orchestral Study #8 (toccata)

  1. Orchestral Study #1 (flowing and hymn-like)
  2. Orchestral Study #2 (driving and chaotic)
  3. Orchestral Study #3 (adagio with melisma)
  4. Orchestral Study #4 (allegro)
  5. Orchestral Study #5 (variations)
  6. Orchestral Study #6 (space)
  7. Orchestral Study #7 (dialogue)
  8. Orchestral Study #8 (toccata)
  9. Orchestral Study #9 (seven interludes)
  10. Orchestral Study #10 (rupture, slowed down and from different angles)
  11. Orchestral Study #11 (a crowd, disassembled)
  12. Orchestral Study #12 (thesis)

Updated 26 Aug 2019

My focus for this piece was to start scoring percussion.

The music has some instances of #6 (mildly dissonant, held clusters) and some of #2 and #4 (fringe-tonal counterpoint with imitation across voices). I’m getting my footing with having a consistent orchestral style though still learning and experimenting.

  1. Prelude with dissonance (A1)
  2. Rapid polyphony with increasing complexity in the percussion, using timpani, snare, and cymbal (B, C, and D1)
  3. Return to A in style, with gradual reentry of polyphony from previous sections as an extended bridge (A2)
  4. Chord progression and arpeggiated melody from D1 with written repeats (D2)
  5. Short coda with percussion (E)

Once I got the first notes down for the polyphony and percussion, I was surprised how easily those new elements flowed. I had to reference Piston for the limitations of the timpani and the range it can handle, but snare and cymbal pretty much explain themselves. Like the allegro in #4 this was kindof exhausting; there was an inner conflict of how easily it flowed and just how much music I could manage in this style. And, even though I feel it’s relatively complete, the month puts pressure on how much to put in. I’m beginning to think, after these 12 are finished, of the limitations I’ll encounter writing longer, 20+ minute pieces.

Next will likely be a spare, arrhythmic study with further exploration of articulation in the strings. Before that I will go back to #5 to fix a section that I just, just hate.

orchestral-study-8

Updated 26 Aug 2019

Piston showed the timpani with trills but the playback from Musescore sounded awful so I switched to tremolo. Much better. I also exported the score in four parts (woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings) as wav files and mixed them in Audacity with some reverb and stereo separation.

Orchestral Study #7 (dialogue)

  1. Orchestral Study #1 (flowing and hymn-like)
  2. Orchestral Study #2 (driving and chaotic)
  3. Orchestral Study #3 (adagio with melisma)
  4. Orchestral Study #4 (allegro)
  5. Orchestral Study #5 (variations)
  6. Orchestral Study #6 (space)
  7. Orchestral Study #7 (dialogue)
  8. Orchestral Study #8 (toccata)
  9. Orchestral Study #9 (seven interludes)
  10. Orchestral Study #10 (rupture, slowed down and from different angles)
  11. Orchestral Study #11 (a crowd, disassembled)
  12. Orchestral Study #12 (thesis)

This started late in the month because of an extended stay in Curacao, but the structure came to me almost immediately. I’ve been wanting to try to bring solo instruments in more prominently. The last study at various points gave the melody to solo violin and viola; here I’ve used the violin throughout as a proper soloist. The intent was to have the contrasting sections be a dialog between soloist and orchestra (like so many concertos), but to think of them not as separate entities but the same. An internal dialogue. It’s more conceptual than actually achieved.

  • Melancholy statement (soloist)
  • Chorale (orchestra)
  • Minimalist perpetuum mobile (soloist)
  • Prelude and fugue book-ended with reference to chorale (orchestra)
  • Closing lyric statement (soloist)

For the soloist sections, I would create a general sketch of the melody then insert measures as I orchestrated to either extend a phrase or add a new idea for variety. It’s very much like painting, where rough ideas become more precise as you progress. The orchestration, at least for the soloist sections, has much more color that the previous studies. I’m getting confident with a wider range of instrument combinations. That being said, for the soloist I did not verify that the double- and triple-stops were actually playable or at least comfortably playable. That skill is definitely a work in progress.

I’m continuing to run against limitations in playback, mostly crescendos and decrescendos, so I end up adding over-detailed dynamic markings. And I heard pizzicato and harmonics in certain areas but those are almost completely unavailable with Musescore. I had to settle for staccato and ppp respectively.

(Realization: I remember at the beginning of the year, I was concerned that I would over-rely on explicit repeats and not be able to create sections that are written variations as repeats. I happily have not fallen into that type of laziness.)

Next up is a toccata with percussion added.

orchestral-study-7

Orchestral Study #6 (space)

  1. Orchestral Study #1 (flowing and hymn-like)
  2. Orchestral Study #2 (driving and chaotic)
  3. Orchestral Study #3 (adagio with melisma)
  4. Orchestral Study #4 (allegro)
  5. Orchestral Study #5 (variations)
  6. Orchestral Study #6 (space)
  7. Orchestral Study #7 (dialogue)
  8. Orchestral Study #8 (toccata)
  9. Orchestral Study #9 (seven interludes)
  10. Orchestral Study #10 (rupture, slowed down and from different angles)
  11. Orchestral Study #11 (a crowd, disassembled)
  12. Orchestral Study #12 (thesis)

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.

orchestral-study-6