Symphony No. 1 – Page 3 – An Echo That's Reversing

Symphony No. 1 – Finishing the 2nd movement, starting the interlude

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.

Symphony No. 1 – Realizing the original intent

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.

Symphony No. 1 – Finishing the 3rd movement, starting the 2nd

With this movement, and with each in the symphony, I want to dwell on a single theme in the way I did not and could not with my one-piece-per-month freshman exercises of last year. This work is my first major effort after those, and second efforts anachronistically always feel like senior theses to me, eschewing middle courses and diving in with more confidence. (This is a bit opposite to the curse of the sophomore slump but hopefully doesn’t result in an overfull mess.) Along with listening to it for coherence, I shallowly looked to the length in order to get a shorthand sense of whether I’ve committed enough time. The ~9 minutes of this movement feels like I’ve dwelt enough, and more importantly its flow and expression sound like it’s achieved enough. I’m content for now.

Mixing it in Dorico, which I plan after the symphony is complete, is going to take many weeks.

Symphony No. 1 – Time and texture

I realized after the fact that all of the titles except for the last movement have to do with time and the speaker’s relationship to time. 1st movement: subjunctive past; 2nd movement: present tense; 4th movement: past perfect; with the interlude referencing both infinite time and the end of time.

(1) What if this happened?
(2) I am now
Interlude: Everything was forever until it was no more
(3) An occupying army
(4) Decades had passed

Everything feels static right now, possibly because this current slow motion car crash leaves us in an endless nervous state that, when it ends, will cease to exist but will never end. My previous works were about a map that can tell the future and a man looking for the missing parts to his time machine, so time seems to be a general theme regardless of what’s happening in the world. Who knew?

Symphony No. 1 – The start

“16 Jun 2020”. I wrote that down on the first sheet of staff paper I pulled out to start the project that I’d wanted to do for years: compose a symphony. Last year’s monthly orchestral studies were a means to this end.