Category: Music

Orchestral Study #3 (adagio with melisma)

  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 got away from me.

My intent going in was to write an adagio in simple ABA with more tonal harmonies. Maybe like a Brahms slow movement or more one from a Walter Piston symphony. I’ve been brushing up on Piston symphonies during commutes and am enjoying getting reacquainted. My goals (chosen after I finished the last study) were tone color and dynamics. With this study, I feel like I’m writing better across the orchestra but am still floundering with combining instruments.

I wanted the first section to be tonal and melodic, but I worry that it has too much of a “pops” orchestral feel. That’s the risk I had worried about starting these studies: moving from tonality in rock music to orchestral risks sounding unchallenging.

As I was working through that languid opening, I switched gears to the second section: a major key chant/melisma interrupted with expansive declarations.

While fitting the first two sections together, I made notes on what became the third section, which was intended as a perversion of the themes that came before. This was written more fully on the piano during improvisation and though the polytonality worked very well on the keyboard it was a crazy mess trying to get it to work with orchestra. At one point I was going to leave it out because the tone felt wrong. I went through two earlier attempts before coming up with the final arrangement. The first had a very strict rhythm and mostly for winds, but it didn’t have the “edge” that I felt at the keyboard. The next attempt used written rubato and exaggerated cross rhythms (with almost no meter), but it just created too much chaos along with the polytonal dissonances. The final product ended up with a balance of chaos and structure, edging towards chaos. I think most of my time was spent just on this section.

The piece has an ABCBA structure. Languid and melodic, melisma, perversion of themes, abbreviated melisma, triste languid coda.

I still need to attempt an actual, beautiful adagio. Next goals: vivace and maybe try for a more organic structure without abrupt changes.

orchestral-study-3

Orchestral Study #2 (driving and chaotic)

  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)

My goal: open with a pulsing, harmonically spare section containing periodic dissonances that break the monotony. Twittering chaos in the winds interrupt and finally take over. Close with a celestial echo.

The pulsing section was the initial germ and what I started with, yet I struggled figuring it out and didn’t get it right until the other two were almost fully developed. It was more frustrating than expected and a very dispiriting start. The three voices in the wind section are inspired by some of Elliott Carter’s pieces where each voice is a separate monologue, almost without awareness of the others. In my head I had initially heard music with a complete lack of regular beat but ultimately was not able to realize that texture. The idea for the celestial section came as I was finishing the winds. I heard the initial motif and the cascade texture followed naturally. The overlapping transitions were developed after each section was nearly complete.

The pulsing section is maybe a little too repetitive; the twittering has voice crossing that may-or-may-not work; the celestial echo gets too dense and I could have maybe used fewer voices.

Need to work more on combining instruments and notating dynamics.

orchestral-study-2

Orchestral Study #1 (flowing and hymn-like)

  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)

A year or so ago I decided to start studying orchestration in order to continue composing, even if no longer able to perform on piano. I had acquired a used copy of Walter Piston’s Orchestration book somewhere. It’s bound with an imprint of Allerton High School–England–on the cover. A note pasted on the first page: Frank Snape Music Prize, Marilyn Smith,1960-16, J. J. Morton (?) Head Mistress.

Anyway, cut to a month ago when one of the classical stations I listen to on the way to work was playing a Haydn symphony. Thinking of the 100-plus that he had written, I decided to try to write a piece for orchestra every month this year. Learn by doing, etc. Although I will commit the offense of not fully allowing the pieces to develop their themes and structures, I will benefit from frequent fresh starts, and will be able to grow out of the previous works’ mistakes. I had this idea on January 15th so I’m on target for 30-day composing sessions, but behind for the year. It’s a soft target.

I started unsure what my orchestral style would be. Rock musicians turned orchestral generally produce tonal works similar to their songs but without any of the edge that electric guitar, studio processing, etc. adds to the music. I didn’t want to fall into that. Inspirations are the Russians: Shostakovich and Prokofiev, the sonorists: Schnittke and Penderecki (5th Symphony), and works like Sibelius’s 5th Symphony (for its discursive fluidity) or Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony.

In this first study, I started with the general intent of opening with a section of chattery, fluid strings, then leading to a more homophonic section dominated by brass, and developing off of those. The result is 5 sections and a coda, generally:

  1. Polyphonic theme A for string
  2. Homophonic hymn-like theme B for brass
  3. Theme C derived from the texture of theme A, progressing with more dissonant brass
  4. Theme B in the string section while the brass references theme C
  5. Theme A and C interwoven, closing with coda referencing the simplified texture of theme B for brass and strings

At 3:12, it does feel a bit rushed as if it’s 30 minutes in a 3 minute span, but I feel like it did achieve what I set out to express. (Musescore used for scoring and PDF/MP3 output.)

 

orchestral-study-1

Concerts I had been to but have not written about or maybe only in passing

I like to write notes here, for my own reminiscence, about interesting concerts I have been to. However comma some concerts pre-date this web site and I think of them often and so want to let them be counted. Most of the dates I list are from memory and what I can find on the web, so some may be a different venue, and a different year, and wildly inaccurate, but still my experience of the concert is there. Their documentation is only as poor as my memory. [ed. I made a partial reference to some of these in 2009 and 2016].

Elvis Costello at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1989. This was his King of America tour and the first concert I ever went to. I know. KoA was mostly country–his foray into the Nashville song-writing scene–and not my favorite, but a great opportunity to go with my brother and his then-girlfriend who was, unfortunately all I remember, a very likeable goofy blond pot smoker. We were in the upper balcony?

Some punk bands at 688 Club. It closed in 1986, so it must have been my first or second year in college. I remember being freaked out having never been to any place like that. Things have changed. That locale recurs as concert-related because it’s an urgent care location and I had to go for a freaky looking spider bite I got at one of the Piedmont Park Music Midtown festivals.

GWAR at Masquerade in Atlanta. First mosh pit and hanging out with metal heads from college and some weird drugs and yeah. GWAR spit “blood” and threw “maggots” (dye and rice) on the crowd so clothes were trashed by the end of the concert. And the pope raping scene was… something else. This is where I fell in love with the group dynamics and camaraderie of the mosh pit. I miss that and know I cannot again be a part of it at concerts as an older (?) person. Recommended, though.

Music Midtown several years when it started in 1996. It was at where the Federal Reserve building is now (just up the street from where we live now), then where the Georgia Aquarium is now, then off Piedmont and Pine (near Central Park where Shaky Knees is now).

Philip Glass solo piano at Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts in 2000. This was when I worked at a company in the king (or queen?) building and we went with another couple from work. They sat in the front row of a very intimate setting and left in the middle of the performance. I hate that that’s my prominent memory.

Robert McDuffie performing Philip Glass’s 2nd Violin Concerto at Spivey Hall at Clayton State in Morrow, GA. This I can’t find anything about but I know I was there. Reduction for violin and piano. The joy of the composition was matched by his enthusiasm and passion for the work.

McCoy Tyner at the Variety Playhouse in 2010. I remember his performance being a mix of blocky, forceful and dissonant jazz with the multi-voiced, polyrhythmic complexity of Prokofiev. It was eye-opening.

Terry Riley improvising on the Tennessee Theater’s Wurlitzer organ at the second year of the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, 2010. His performance was hypnotic. Solo on a theater organ performing phased, minimalist feats of brilliance. One of a kind. Lisa’s mom, Mickey, owned that city’s events and so got us free tickets to everything. I was the only one that could go. I missed the first year, with Michael Gira and Philip Glass. It was/is(?) an amazing rock/experimental festival, more so being in Knoxville. Weird, huh?

The band Afterlife

So in college I met some great guys (where?) that were in a band called Afterlife. I wasn’t a real performer but would have liked to have played with them, and so I eventually hung with a different group of friends and more loosely disciplined musicians and they fit my casual undiscipline and let’s face it skillessness at the time. Still…

(The bassist from Afterlife, Jonathan, and I hung as pals and got into girlfriend shenanigans and partied and watched our first John Waters film together, perplexed and laughing, and generally slacked, and dated roommates to greater and lesser results but had an experience all the same. Some good times; some weird.)

Afterlife has been releasing in the last five years or so new albums. Again: discipline pays off. Full discography is:

  1. THE FROZEN SUN (1988)
  2. THE AWAKENING (1990)
  3. CURTAIN CALL (1991)
  4. COMPASS ROSE (2013
  5. BRAVE NEW WORLD (2016)

In our era of purging, I found two cassettes of their first two releases. “The Frozen Sun” and “The Awakening”. I don’t remember purchasing them, but I think the sticker for “The Awakening” says $5.00!

Do not be alarmed by the rectangular shape, these are cassettes!

They have several points of presence online:

I need to decide what to do with those classic, self-produced cassettes.

  

(Odd note: back in 2004 I had posted a random reference to one of the members. Completely unrelated subject though.)