The Other Side of Air: Rilke, Strauss & Me

Last Saturday afternoon, I listened to the Met broadcast of Richard Strauss' opera, Der Rosenkavalier, a major work for some reason I have never seen nor even listened to all the way through. In fact, it occurred to me, no matter how much I've heard the orchestral suites or that heavenly trio and final duet that concludes the opera, there was a great deal of music I had never heard before, especially the extended opening of Act III. And following it with the full score, I also was amazed how incredibly complex it really is, especially during much of the activity in Act I, something more easy to see than hear. And all this from a work that, completed 100 years ago (the final page of the score indicates it was completed on 26th September, 1910), was considered by many to be a step backward from the complexity of Modernism.

I was also amused how one of my cats, unused to hearing music in the house (since I rarely listen to music during times I'm composing), would walk around crying until I noticed that nothing really seemed to be bothering him: it was just as if he were singing along for his own enjoyment of it (perhaps like this ass's response to a passing trumpet player).

But Strauss's music has been on my mind – and in my mind's ear – a lot the past two weeks.

Granted, the only resolutions I've been dealing with during this time concern the harmonic direction of chords in the latest song I've been composing, my setting of Rilke's “To Music” which I began on New Year's Eve (you can read more about starting the process here).

Perhaps the big news, though, is this song cycle, rather than being called “Seven Songs About Inspiration and Creativity for Mezzo-Soprano and Piano,” now has a title. The other day, working on the final segment of the song, it occurred to me I still didn't have a functioning name for this piece when I looked down at my sketches and saw the word “air” which was supposed to coincide with a resolution to a shimmering D Major chord:

“Holiest farewell: / where the innermost surrounds us,
like the most practiced distance, / the other side of air.”

Arching an eyebrow in surprise, I realized that would make a great title.

And so now the song cycle is entitled “The Other Side of Air.”

The Rilke is the last of the songs to be composed though it's the fourth out of seven songs, the climactic mid-point (or keystone) of the cycle (or arch). It felt kind of weird, then, putting the double bar at the end of this final song yesterday, knowing not only is it not the last song (that was completed in October), but that I still have to write the first two-thirds of it (and, I should mention, realize the sketches for most of the other songs, too).

In writing most of the other songs, I rarely started working on them at the beginning: after making some kind of graph of the over-all structure, I usually started at the end and worked backwards, more or less, since I needed to know where things would be going rather than starting off and finding myself headed if not in the wrong direction, not in the best one (painting myself into a musical corner). Sometimes I wrote the piano accompaniment first or at least its harmonic structure before going back and overlaying the rest of it, working from the bottom up. A couple of them were written with the “lower” part backwards, phrase by phrase, and then the “top” part forwards.

But this one I knew was going to be a little unusual and for some reason, I began in the middle.

First of all, it started out as a “pastiche,” meaning something in imitation of something else. As I've mentioned before, from the very beginning I knew this song would be “like” the Composer's Aria in the prologue of Richard Strauss' opera Ariadne auf Naxos, his next project after Der Rosenkavalier. Not that I wanted it to sound like Strauss but I wanted it to do, for me, what many of the emotional things Strauss' ecstatic prayer to the power of music does for me. It's like saying, “I like that: how can I do it my way?”

The more I looked at the score – you can hear the aria here and download the vocal score here – the more I realized why not be a little more obvious in my imitation? If I'm using triads prolonged over several beats or measures – something I don't normally do in my typical style – why not use the same kind of accompanimental patterns Strauss (and other composers like Schubert) had used for generations?

The curious thing about Strauss' music – at least at this time in his career – is the chromatic flexibility of his lines even though the overall sound is far more “classical” than the operas he'd written before (notably Salome and Elektra, two scores in the vanguard of 20th Century dissonance and the dissolution of traditional tonality). But that classicism is often more in its texture and its dissonance is usually subsumed in the way his chords fluidly move from one to another.

After deleting over 850 words of technical detail for this post, I'll just say I saw more similarities between Strauss' sound and my own than I would have expected. And yet anyone listening to, say, the Violin Sonata I finished last year, or the rest of these songs I've been working on since then, would not likely think there's any similarity between what I'm writing now and what Richard Strauss had written a hundred years ago.

The biggest laugh of recognition – whether a “eureka” moment or LOL – happened when I discovered the first phrase of a flexible melodic line I'd improvised over a pulsating F major triad (what was to become the actual ending of the song) was made out of the same set of seven notes Strauss used at the beginning of the Composer's Aria which happened to include, as a subset, the same 6-notes that is my standard harmonic and melodic source. Not the same pitches (a different transposition), not in the same order and not even in the same relationship to Strauss' pulsating C Major triad: but the fact I had quite arbitrarily come up with something that close to Strauss – and in something that some people would say was an “atonal” context (the F Major triad aside) – just tickled the hell out of me!

Now, Strauss' aria is not quite three minutes of powerful, ecstatic singing. My song, with its longer text and structural proportions within the whole cycle, ends up being a little more than twice that long, so I didn't want to try running this musical homage full bore from beginning to end (considering the singer's as well as the listener's stamina).

The climax of the song (which also happens to be the climax of the entire song cycle) happens before the line “Holiest Farewell,” very similar to Strauss' line “Music is a holy art,” a moment of spiritual revelation. After experimenting with the ending, I decided to start at this climax whether my “hommage to Strauss' aria” would begin there or not: frankly, if I couldn't get this to work, there was no sense starting at the beginning, then reaching this point only to realize, “oh, snap! (scratch scratch scratch)”...

Since the tonal scheme of the whole song cycle – regardless of its chordal and harmonic structures – begins in D Minor and ends in D Major, the climax would be in A-flat (instead of tonic/dominant chords in traditional tonality, my triads tend to move either by whole steps or tritones: if one chord is tonic, its “dominant” is a tritone away; stepwise motion is reserved for half-cadences and the subdominant). While the other songs are “closed” in their tonality (beginning and ending in the same tonal area like most traditionally tonal works), this one, I'd decided, would be “progressive,” much the way Mahler or Nielsen had been doing with (or “to”) tonality in the late 19th Century, beginning in one key and ending in another. Subsidiary tonalities (like subdominant or mediant relations in 19th Century Romanticism or relative major or minor ones in the 18th Century) would be related by thirds: so my tonal scheme, over all, is d - F - A-flat - b - D (instead of D-G-A-D with maybe a side-step to b minor) – anyway, here I go again with the technical mumbo-jumbo. So I begin this song in B Minor, climax it in A-flat Major and end it in F Major (a tritone relation to the opening). In between, two important cadences are on D major and minor chords, so the whole scheme in this one song is b - d - A-flat - D - F which, in addition to being a smaller version of the whole cycle, is also a progression from “dark” to “light,” a tonal trick going back long before Mozart and Haydn.

So now I'm done with the song's ending but still have the first two-thirds of it to sort out: the ending gives me material I can use in the opening sections and chord progressions I can replicate leading toward the climax knowing it works, pushing it onward to the end. It's like having half the effort already done for me: just go back and fill it in (which, granted, is a very simplistic way of looking at it, but it saves me time sitting there, thinking, “oh, what would be nice, here?”).

It's interesting that each of the seven songs also “sounds” different – not so much in style but on its surface, the Rilke setting being the emotional high point of the cycle that begins with a fairly abstract Shakespeare sonnet (which is, really, a chaconne – how old-fashioned is that?) and ends with a rush of almost non-harmonic energy and urgency in Rumi's “Say 'Yes' Quickly!” The “Lazy Poet” is a barcarolle with its triadic arpeggios in the accompaniment but the call to Inspiration by Li-Po is crunchy, dissonant and almost completely non-triadic, an extreme contrast after the lushly emotional Rilke “To Music.” And yet the basic language behind it all is exactly the same – the same 6-note basis just used in different ways. Which is not very different, when you think about it, from how composers worked in the past two or three centuries to create a great deal of variety out of very similar material.

But meanwhile, the cats have begun chasing each other from one end of the house to the other, so perhaps in the midst of this chaos – if the news from the outside world isn't unnerving enough – I can find a little bit of peace to contemplate “the breathing of statues.”

Dr. Dick

Finishing the Lazy Poet

Since I can't get anything longer than 30 characters to post to Twitter and given the time already spent and the frustrations I've had while dealing with that hassle, I might as well have written a full post for the blog...

The news, basically, is this: at 11:45 this morning, I managed to finish the second of the seven songs I've been working on this summer. Despite a couple weeks of expert procrastination and general laziness, I managed to finally complete my setting of Saint-Aimant's “The Lazy Poet.” (The text I'm using is included in this earlier post.)

Part of the problem was trying to create some kind of structure – formally and harmonically – that would reflect the structure of the poem which, despite being about a lazy poet who can barely bring himself to write anything, is a full-fledged sonnet.

Distractions aside, I'd finished the piano part – having spent a month working out the harmonic and formal frame-work of the song – and had only begun setting the first line of the vocal part when, suddenly, I stopped.

After three weeks of doing nothing (as far as the song was concerned), I then picked up and started the voice line over again. Then in three days, I succeeded in setting all fourteen lines of the poem – working out the melodic structure and relating it to the specific harmonies I'd previously composed – and completed it before any further distractions set in.

Part of the problem was creating some kind of arpeggiated accompaniment like an indolent barcarolle but still using my 6-note pitch-groups that are part of my standard musical language. I'd come up with a pattern that could fluctuate as needed, modulate where required and give an overall sense of expectations, much the way standard tonality would. Writing a melody that would fit its own parameters linearly and then ground itself at the right points with the underlying harmonies is no different than how a composer would work when composing in D Major.

But I've been trying to come up with comparable procedures (if not “rules”) for a non-tonal system (or at least a non-traditionally-tonal one) that sounds different on the surface level yet works just as consistently with what we normally think of as traditional music's inner-workings, rather than sounding largely “arbitrary” or “esoteric” as many listeners usually dismiss atonal or serial compositions.

So the linear challenge was to create something that could, first of all, be sung and that worked melodically, reflecting the delivery of the poetic text. That's the primary focus. By limiting myself to certain chords created by the convergence of melody and harmony, I found the possibilities were more effective than just sitting there plunking out more arbitrary options, wondering “how does this one sound?” and “how does that one sound?”

Anyway, now I need to turn the sketches into something legible. I doubt the “Finale Notebook” software I'd been using before will be sufficient for any examples, but I'll see what I can manage – or just scan the handwritten manuscript and post it. Ah, but I need to get a new scanner for that, or maybe just break down and get real music-writing software instead of hand-copying it (which also entails buying a new computer, but hey...).

I'm still not sure what to call these songs. The theme of all seven texts is basically “inspiration,” but if I call them “Songs of Inspiration,” people may be expecting up-lifting biblical quotes or texts culled from greeting cards. Inspiration here is more about the creative process – for instance, my lazy poet is balanced by a hard-working web-weaving spider, a more industrious kind of artist – but “Songs of Creativity and Inspiration” sounds more like a sub-title while “Musings” reflects only one aspect of it.

But anyway, this one song is now done: two down and five to go. Now, which will be the next one?

I'm tempted to attack the last one, next, a driving brush-fire of a text that needs incredible energy, both to perform as well as compose. After two months of summer indolence deep in the heart of Dog Days, is this really what the doctor ordered?

Dr. Dick

The Next New Work: Deciding on Songs, Finding Texts

When I finished the violin sonata in February, I spent the usual post-part-copying depression (or more accurately, ‘down-time’) thinking about “the next piece.” For a while, it sounded like it might be a piano quintet for no particular reason except it seemed too complicated a piece to work on right now. More practical – at least from the compositional sense – would be a song cycle: I enjoy writing for the voice and haven’t done much in the past 8 years aside from last year’s biblical settings, “Evidence of Things Not Seen.” So basically, several miniatures that individually shouldn’t take much time sounded increasingly more realistic. Besides, I need to work on my piano writing (and playing) before I should be doing bigger, more serious stuff like a piano quintet.

So once the songs won the draft, the old question took up several weeks of research and contemplation: what texts? Unrelated, random poems or should there be a theme?

Much time was spent browsing through the few volumes of poetry I have, then at the library and a couple of bookstores and, of course, on-line. I find I tend to read poetry with a look to how it might work as a song-text rather than as a poem in itself and therefore I tend to avoid it, especially poets that are not in the public domain. Even Dead Poets might not be very accessible because their modern translators may be under copyright.

There was a brief flirtation, after listening to two of my favorite song cycles, both by Domenick Argento – “Casa Guidi” (from letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning) and “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf” – about choosing similar non-poetic texts. Or maybe a dramatic scene, some soliloquies from Euripides’ “The Trojan Women” (which I’d set as an opera back in the ‘70s) or Aeschylus’ “The Persians.”

Then, for some reason, I picked up my grandfather’s c.1905 copy of Shakespeare Sonnets (one of those little pocket-sized volumes) and took it along with me for odd moments of browsing – stuck in a line somewhere, waiting in a restaurant or sitting on a park bench.

I’d already set Sonnet 30 twice – “When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought,” one of my favorites – so I tried to think of something else this time, despite the fact I kept coming back to it, wondering how it might go now, 25 years or so after the last time. Somehow, I landed on Sonnet 100. I don’t think I’d ever read it before but then quickly realized I’d probably only ever read a dozen of them before: like Schubert songs, you think you know lots of them then realize, out of 600, you probably really only have heard a fraction of them.

- - - -
Where art thou Muse that thou forget'st so long,
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend'st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?

Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,
In gentle numbers time so idly spent;
Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.

Rise, resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey,
If Time have any wrinkle graven there;
If any, be a satire to decay,
And make time's spoils despised every where.

Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life,
So thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife.
- - - -

This seemed an appropriate poem for a composer still recuperating from a long dry-spell who hasn’t found it as easy to write as he once did (“when in doubt, blame it on the Muse”).

“Here,” one commentator writes, “the Muse is blamed for having dried up. She has spent her energies in worthless pursuits and is castigated for being devoted to trivialities, being forgetful and slothful.” Turning 60 certainly inclined me to think of many things, not the least of them “time’s spoils.” I imagined this as a fanfare-like song, opening a set of songs of… uhm…

A series of Shakespeare Sonnets? Can’t argue with the copyright… A series of poems about muses? Hmmm…

Then, paging through Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way,” a wonderful workbook for recovering artists (or for those who want to recover their creative selves), I saw a quote attributed to the 13th Century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Jalai ud-Din Rumi:

- - - -
Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about…
Say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.
- - - -

As slow as the composing process is for me, the creative process – the actual inspiration – sometimes comes in a flash. These three words – “Say yes quickly” – quickly informed me I would do a song cycle on “inspiration” and that Rumi’s poem, balancing Shakespeare’s call to the errant muse, would be the final poem.

It took a while to find the source of these lines. It’s translated by Coleman Barks, the single best-known translator of Rumi’s ecstatic poetry today. And so it came with additional burdens: copyright, mostly. I could set it without permission, but then it’s unlikely the songs could ever be published or recorded. I could write to him to ask permission and perhaps he would grant it. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to pay too much in the way of royalties for his work. I was curious, though, what the original may have been like.

Now, despite actually having a Persian dictionary in my library (over the years, I have accumulated many things I would never have thought realistic), finding Rumi in the original Persian would be, no doubt, a challenge even on the internet. But more of that, later.

So now I had an alpha and an omega – what would fit in between? Urging a recalcitrant muse would be a good way to start, ending in a flash of inspiration (ecstatic indeed) the logical way to end.

Then I remembered the Composer’s Aria from Richard Strauss’ opera, “Ariadne auf Naxos,” as the young composer of the opera-within-the-opera is about to see his work trashed by realistic circumstances and practicalities. The line “Music is a holy art” (about 1:30 into the linked video) has long made this a favorite hymn of mine, the importance of maintaining one’s own artistic integrity in the face of those who would cheapen it to attain popularity.

Not that Strauss’ aria was what I was looking for, but maybe something like that, something that gets to the core of being a creative person.

Several years ago, I had come across Rilke’s poem, “An die Musik” which intrigued me, given Schubert’s own hymn on the subject with the same title (setting some amateurish but directly emotional poetry by his friend and sometimes roommate, Franz Schober). I soon found it again and wondered if it were what I wanted. Yes, I thought quickly: it would become the mid-point in the path between Shakespeare and Rumi.

For the next few weeks, I continued to scour around for poems about inspiration: given how frequently poets write about it, needing it, not finding it, celebrating having found it, you’d think I could find more of them. I found a few by Pushkin that might work but I was unhappy with most of the translations I found or with the poems for what I wanted. I even found a few of these in the original Russian which then of course begged another question: do I set these poems in their original language? I now had English, Persian, German and perhaps Russian.

While flipping through a slim anthology of French poetry, an example from the 17th Century caught my eye: I figured was not going to provide me with anything likely, anyway, but then I read “The Lazy Poet” by Marc Antoine Gérard de Saint-Amant – if anything, a hymn to sloth and a witty take-off on all those caricatures of creative wanna-bes lying around waiting for Inspiration to strike. From what turned out to be a strict sonnet and no lazy man’s work, the final lines clinched it for me:

- - - -
And I hate work so much that, with my eyes half-closed,
With one hand out of the sheets, my dear Baudoin, I scarcely
Was able to bring myself to write you these verses.
- - - -

It was nice to have something light-hearted in this mix, looking at different ways creativity – inspiration – the muse – works at different times. Even though I’m still not sure how I’m going to set it to music, I figured it should go right after the Shakespeare.

A big fan of symmetrical forms, I figured this would need to be an arch-form that now required something to balance Saint-Amants’ Lazy Poet. Something… industrious, hard-working, “steady-as-she-goes”… like a spider, maybe, building a web.

That’s when I remembered Walt Whitman’s poem, “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” For some reason, I couldn’t locate it in my volume of “The Leaves of Grass” which I thought included everything and this, I was sure, was one of his more famous poems. Once again, I went on-line to locate it and copied it from there.

This one, however, I knew exactly how I’d set as soon as I read it. Two parallel verses (though of very different metric structures), the first about the spider, the second about the poet’s “soul” and how, like the spider spinning its web, the poet might… well… that’s not exactly clear. What a poet means and how a reader interprets it may be two or three different things and unless Whitman specifically wrote somewhere “this is what this poem means,” it’s really up to the reader. The fact a poem can offer different interpretations is a mark of its being great art, something you can return to and discover something new about it each time.

In this particular sense, I saw it as a poem about creativity, the hard-working spider spinning out filament after filament of its web and the poet, casting a similar effort out from his “soul,” writing a poem. It doesn’t specifically say that, but what is the soul of a poet meant to be if not something creative, constantly spinning out lines, some of which take and others of which do not? It would consist of a steady filament of eighth-notes in the piano under a free-floating vocal line that circles around certain key pitches.

- - - -
A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them — ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, — seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d — till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
- - - -

Now I had five poems – by an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, an American and a Persian. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something from China and Japan? Now, my search for thoughts on inspiration, muses or not, was becoming more culture-based.

When I was at Eastman, I wrote a work for soprano, mezzo and small ensemble, a George Crumb-inspired cycle of seven random poems by the great Chinese poet usually known as Li Po. Having found them in the original Chinese, I managed (with the help of a very good Chinese dictionary courtesy of the Rochester Public Library) to come up with my own translation. It was a very interesting project for a lazy summer week, much of the time spent lolling around under the trees of Rochester’s Highland Park. If nothing else, I was able to use Li Po’s poetry without worrying about copyright regulations. I even sent the result to my former college roommate from Hong Kong who gave me the equivalent of “thumbs-up.”

So, over 35 years later, I went back to Li Po. Most of the poems I found were more about nature or the joys of drunkenness. These lines, whether they’re from a longer poem or just a self-contained haiku-like aphorism, struck me as just what I needed. Unable to find the original Chinese and no longer having access to that Chinese dictionary, I paraphrased them this way:

- - - -
Inspiration! My pen with each stroke shakes the Five Mountains.
A poem becomes – I shout, ecstatic, “I’ll bend the river!”
- - - -

This would fit into the second half of the arch. I now had a progression of creative involvement, starting with Shakespeare’s call to the muse to appear and inspire him again, then Saint-Amant’s lazy poet, lying in bed barely able to write a sonnet, reaching a climax in Rilke’s passionate view of music’s interior world before turning to Whitman’s spider-like view relying more on constant work (this is what a spider does, this is what a poet does), the antithesis of waiting for inspiration to strike, before ending with Li Po’s and Rumi’s ecstatic avowals of a flame-like creativity bursting forth in the moment.

At this point, I needed a complement to Li Po’s lines for the first half of the arch, something contemplative. The Japanese form we know as haiku meditates on one small glimpse of nature – a fly in springtime landing on a bamboo shoot, a frog jumping into a summer pond. I was not able to find something that opened so overtly with the word “Inspiration!” but after reading through several collections of haiku, some strict according to the original rules, others just simply short aphoristic lines glimpsing a moment in time, I found one by one of the great masters of the form, Basho.

After reading over various translations of the same poems, whether from French or Persian, I decided, now, that I would once again do my own “translations.” In the sense of Japanese, the characters used for haiku are not necessarily exact nouns and verbs with syntax but often images that the listener would put into some context. English, by comparison an OCD language, requires a different approach yet still needs to fit into the pre-ordained restrictions of numbers of lines and syllables. So my paraphrase of Basho’s poem became

- - - -
Endless misty rain
Can’t see Fuji in the haze
Interesting. Once more…
- - - -

The antithesis of Li Po’s and Rumi’s moments, Basho’s haiku reflects the “if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed” reaction that parallels Whitman’s spider. But the brevity of the Japanese and Chinese poems required that they be placed in parallel locations: the only question has been which ones? At the moment, I see them flanking Rilke’s “An die Musik,” though every time I look at the texts, I begin to wonder perhaps if they should be in the 2nd and next-to-last positions. We’ll see…

During April, I finalized the texts if not their exact order – conceiving the songs as a single work rather than just a collection of seven songs – but because a bout of flu prolonged itself into an annoying sinus infection that lasted several weeks, I didn’t really start composing the music until mid-May. Out of the past three weeks, two were spent spider-like spinning out 32 measures. I finished it two days ago. I was joking that the original sketches reminded me of something created by one of Gary Larson’s less-than-competent spiders from The Far Side, so perhaps I should realize the sketch into a more finite draft before I go on to the next one, but more of that in a later post.

- Dr. Dick

Caught Between Seasons, Between Works

It is that time of year when I look forward to leaving Winter behind and welcome warmer weather, though it may take a while before Spring finally asserts itself enough to make me feel totally comfortable with the change of season. Flowers help.

There was a patch of “aconites,” tiny wild-flowers growing near the edge of the yard that had begun blooming even in late March, delicate green leaves with buttery-gold flowers. So I transplanted some of them to my little garden spot off the back porch where I could see them better, where they were quickly eaten by the deer. But at least it was a sign of spring-to-come, and that was enough to make me feel better about things.

This year, it is also a time when I find myself “between works,” an awkward state I haven’t experienced often over the past couple of decades, after having finished one composition but not yet started on the next one or made the decision just yet what it should be. In addition to blogging about the Guarneri Quartet for Market Square Concerts, I have been trying to get my thoughts organized to get back to some creative work.

The Violin Sonata is not only completed but copied, finally – the old-fashioned way – mailed off and now officially received. Since it started life as a single piece for John Clare and I to play before growing proportionally into a few more, dedicating the whole thing to him out of friendship for having brought it into being seemed natural. I mailed it off on Wednesday in time for him to receive it on his birthday Saturday! Having turned 39 – now entering the Jack Benny Decades, complete with the urge to play Kreutzer’s 2nd Etude and “Love in Bloom” – John now looks ahead to another project ofr his next birthday: a recital of violin and piano pieces written especially for him by composer-friends. Though we’d played the first piece almost 3½ years ago, I was still concerned I might not finish mine in time for his 40th... Whew...

But whereto next? Having finished the Sonata on February 28th, I wanted to focus on copying it before I got distracted by something else – the full score for the songs, “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” has yet to be completed – but in the past few weeks, the itch to write started manifesting itself in stray thoughts while I’m trying to focus on copying. Afraid to say “Go away, I’m busy,” because there was a time (many years’ worth) such thoughts never came, I started dutifully trying to figure out where things would go.

Having heard some of Lee Hoiby’s beautiful songs and thinking of them as models of simplicity and directness as well as extremely well-written piano parts – all aspects my music lacks – I thought it might be time to go back to write some songs with piano. I don’t think I’ve done this since I was in college: any vocal music since 1971 had been with chamber groups or orchestra.

Usually, I dislike reading poetry not for any dislike of the art but because it usually means I want to set them to music and that usually means a whole series of legal hoops to get (and usually pay for) permission to do so. The one time I asked a poet for permission, back in the late-70s – Richard Thomas, the actor and also a very fine poet – he offered to write some new poems specifically for me that I could set before they would be published, thus avoiding that particular hurdle: this coincided with a sea-change of a style change for me, along with other major events undermining my life at the time, and instead of songs with piano, they became songs with guitar (which I’d never written for before) and turned out to be among the worst things I’d ever written in my life. And so they, along with that and other similar projects, were set aside.

But what texts, if I’m looking for something in Public Domain? My musical affinities do not normally attract me toward 19th Century poets – and then, even if I chose earlier poets like Michelangelo or Petrarch, I would have to deal with paying rights to use English translations. When I was at Eastman, I even learned enough about Chinese to be able to translate some of Li Po’s poetry myself rather than rely on published translations, all still under copyright. These became my Seven Songs from the Middle Kingdom for soprano, mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble which I conducted at Eastman in 1973, my studently answer to George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children.

But once I started reading some possible sources – getting out my grandfather’s 1905-ish copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, for one – I started thinking “if you want to work on your piano-writing skills, why not just write piano pieces?”

Off and on, I had seriously considered writing a collection of short pieces for solo piano. It would make sense, maybe even something I could play myself, since I have nothing to show when people ask me to “sit down and play something,” the typical “roll over/sit up” response many people have when composers admit to being composers. These would be short, like etudes but setting up creative challenges for the composer, not the player (unless that player is me, in which case, yes, anything is a technical challenge).

So as soon as I started jotting down some ideas, what started coming to mind was – a piano quintet...

Now, there is no reason for me to write something for piano and string quartet. If I write piano pieces or songs, there are ample opportunities for performance, thousands of models no one may think about when hearing them, but when someone hears I’m writing a piano quintet, suddenly there are a small handful of works – like Brahms, Schumann, Dvořák and Shostakovich, much less Schnittke or Adès – to be compared to, to be accused of trying to replace, to fight for space on a program.

While listening to the Harrisburg Symphony rehearse Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony or the Guarneri Quartet play Kodály, I found myself jotting down ideas for a piano quintet. There are 35 different possible combinations for these five instruments that I can use in the course of the structure. How can I make that structure work? I’m not writing down notes, yet – I’m writing down shapes, forms, details, framework. Once any of those make sense, bam! I’m sunk...

So far, the Piano Quintet is winning...

Violin Sonata: Scherzo II - The Opening

Yesterday was a nice quiet day. In addition to recuperating from a day-long bus-trip to the Philadelphia Flower Show on Wednesday, it was also a chance to vedge-out after having finishing (finally) the last of the movements for the Sonata for Violin & Piano (a.k.a. Violin Sonata or originally “X-Number of Pieces for Violin & Piano” which started as 3 before ending up as 5). Officially, this occurred on Saturday afternoon – read the post about it, here – but most of the time on Sunday and Monday was spent blogging about the premiere of Philip Glass’s new Violin Sonata which was premiered here in Harrisburg Saturday night (and you can read those posts here and here).

Today, I got down to the task of copying out the opening of this second scherzo, first putting it into my “Finale Notebook” software (which I have because it is free and easy, if limited for what I really want to do). Unfortunately, the cats (who are not members of the official Union of Copy Cats) were trying too hard to help which made the process a little more harrowing to deal with, though I’m sure some listeners will be convinced they helped me write it in the first place.

Since 16th-note sextuplets are either impossible or imponderable in this software edition (no fault of its original intent, after all), I translated the opening (and closing) sections, marked Presto scorrevole (which, now that I see it in print, looks rather redundant), from 4/4 at 1/4 note = 90 into 12/8 with 1/8-notes and a whizz-bang metronome marking that should be dotted-1/4 = 180. I’m not sure which looks more like a nightmare...

This is really just a rough draft, having transcribed the original sketches where I use numerical notation (where 0=C, 1=C#, 2=D and so on) into something people can actually read and make some sense of. There are many details still to work out – like dynamics plus pedaling, disbursement of right and left hands, perhaps some register placement in the piano – and I forgot to mark the violin con sordino and the piano, u.c. throughout.

This brief movement – in all about 2'30" – is an odd interlude (a speed-bump, perhaps) between the lyrical mid-point Aria & Chaconne and the Nocturne finale. I’d considered calling it “Nightmare” to balance the “Nocturne.” Unlike the other movements, this one doesn’t stand too well by itself (brevity aside) but could work as a pair with the Nocturne (which could still be played on its own).








&c &c... The movement begins by just jumping right into the middle of things: the ending of the movement seems to be building to a climax when it just suddenly stops. There should be just a slight pause before continuing into the Nocturne, however.

You can see the ending of the movement here, in this earlier post. Like Benjamin Button, I was composing much of it backwards, the ending sketched during the week after New Year’s, just a couple of weeks after I started writing the movement (and beginning it at measure 8). The excerpt posted above is basically the equivalent of the opening 8 measures, the last part to be composed (and again, written in reverse).

The whole movement, as I explained in the earlier post, is really four different sections all blended together in larger or smaller chunks. For instance, there are only 4 sections of this scorrevole stuff amounting to just 19 measures (in the official 4/4, 1/4=90 format) or less than a minute of the entire length. There are five bits of a slow , icy, almost static section (built almost entirely on whole-tone scales) which begins abruptly at the end of this excerpt, four segments of a more rhythmic idea but only two of a shorter, more lyrical passage, none of which ever start at the beginning or end at the end: like the opening and closing of the movement, it’s just a kaleidoscopic series of fragments. They don’t occur in any particular order and you couldn’t play all the “icy” sections by themselves to find out where it begins or ends. Like listening to a radio with bad reception on a windy night, you probably missed those parts as the signal tunes in and out...

Now, to get down to copying the rest of it...

- Dr. Dick

Finishing the Violin Sonata - Finally

When people wonder why it’s taking me so long to finish this piece, they look at me with a sense somewhere between pity and understanding, assuming that “he’s a slow composer.” I would rather think of it as being a “painstaking composer,” but no, it’s true, it took me two years to complete a symphony, a year to do a string quartet and a little over three years to come up with a five-movement violin sonata.

And I’m delighted to say – slow, painstaking or whatever – that the Violin Sonata was “finished” on Saturday afternoon at 5pm. There was a certain thrill to have it move from the “in” box to the “almost out” box the same day I was going to hear the world premiere of the Violin Sonata by Philip Glass, though if anyone heard the two of them back-to-back they would never accuse me of cribbing anything from Glass’s latest work. (I blogged about the Glass Premiere over at the Market Square Concerts blog here and here.)

Actually, one of the ironies of my finishing this piece and attending this concert, then, was hearing the Ravel Sonata in G Major, always a favorite of mine. The Ravel’s 2nd movement is the famous “Blues” movement. It was a nod to Ravel that my sonata’s 2nd movement is called “Blues Interruptus” (see two earlier posts here, here and here). But beyond that, there’s not much similarity.

I shouldn’t be too concerned about taking my time, though, especially since (being laid off), time is one thing I have, now. After all, Ravel spent four years working on his violin sonata and then Brahms spent some 20 or 25 years between the time he started a symphony and finally completed one.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

It didn’t start out being a Violin Sonata.

The first sketch for it came up during work on the last movement of the Symphony in October of 2005 but it didn’t work for the orchestra and sounded more like it might make a good piece for violin and piano. So I thought I would use it for that once John Clare, a former work colleague of mine and an amateur violinist, talked about performing together. So I took a break from the Symphony and quickly wrote out what I called a “Nocturne.” It was sketched between October 22nd and November 5th, 2005 – a very short time for me, two weeks, even for a three-minute piece – followed by two days of realizing the sketches into something we could play from. Five days later, we performed it at a Volunteer Brunch at work even though, since it was part of the luncheon music, no one really heard it under the talking and clinking of glasses and silverware.

As I worked on it, I knew there would have to be a few other pieces, at least two more. I figured maybe a scherzo and then something more substantial to begin.

In April of 2006, I began jotting down some ideas for a “chaconne,” a rather large idea considering the historical baggage this trundled along with it – Bach’s famous one was daunting enough. I thought this would be the last piece. Each of them, however they turned out, would become independent enough to be played on their own but convincing enough with their own internal logic to make a complementary set. There were things jotted down in May I labeled “possible ending for scherzo?” There were plans for three pieces, then four pieces.

Instead of writing the Chaconne, I began a set of Theme and Variations, taking up composing again in July of 2006. July 30th is the first sketch of something recognizable for what became the opening of the 1st piece. I finished it on September 28th, 2006, at 12:15pm, just before heading into work for the day. Two days later, I jotted down some ideas for the Scherzo and mapped out a possible set of five pieces, now. There was the Nocturne in 5th place, the Theme & Variations in 1st place, a large nondescript area blanked out for the middle of the arch, and two short scherzos, now, one a Blues pastiche and the other some kind of rapid scorrevole interlude in between in the 2nd & 4th places. There were questions if this wasn’t too much or too long – not to mention a concern for how realistic it was for me, at the time, to be writing this much if John and I were planning on doing some kind of recital in the spring of ‘07. I would have to write the whole thing to match our playing levels and I knew mine was on a pretty low level, not having practiced seriously for well over a decade...

The first scherzo, the Blues, was begun almost immediately. The idea from the beginning had been to take a blues-like idea and treat it in my own musical language that uses all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, is not traditionally tonal, and bases its structure on the Golden Mean which means, rather than standard blues patterns, the phrases would be of unequal lengths and usually in combinations of, say, 5 + 3 or 8 + 5, following the Fibonnaci series. And the “trio” of the scherzo was an interruption based on a beat-box rhythm often heard in my mid-town neighborhood frequently serenaded by drive-by boom-boxes. There would be a little bit of theater involved between violinist and pianist as the piano-player starts drifting off into the world of rock and the violinist keeps trying to drag him back to the music at hand. Finally, the rock beat gets too enticing, the pianist gets carried away and eventually the violinist gives up and joins in before, in true da capo fashion, they decide to return to the opening Blues material.

This was almost completed by December at which time I got side-tracked by the idea of writing a Christmas-related piece and then clobbered by new upstairs neighbors who made it difficult to compose in my usual before-work schedule. As luck would have it, my new neighbors also worked 2nd shift and were sleeping-in right over where my piano was.

Then my mother went into the hospital unexpectedly in mid-February and died a week later, so I was now no longer in the mood to be working on a silly kind of scherzo. Moving into the house by April and getting away from my neighbors, I still wasn’t able to get my stuff out of the apartment because of health reasons until November. The piano made it by July by which time I was ready to start writing again, but this time I wanted to do a song cycle based on some of my mother’s favorite biblical verses for mezzo and orchestra, a work I called “Evidence of Things Not Seen” which I began in September, finally, and finished around the first anniversary of her death.

Then I went back, polished the sketches for the Blues Interruptus and began work on the Chaconne which had originally surfaced back in 2006 as a germ of an idea but now, in April of 2008, began taking shape. Preliminary sketches and trial-runs – basically two months’ worth of “pre-compositional” issues that needed to be ironed out and began on May 20th – took me through the period when I was “laid off” at work, the actual composition not beginning until July 20th.

Oddly enough, this piece was in two parts – “Aria & Chaconne” as it eventually evolved. Instead of being like an “Introduction and Allegro,” these were two simultaneous movements: the violin played the Aria, the piano played the Chaconne. So I wrote the Chaconne (the piano part) between July 20th and October 2nd, then wrote the Aria (superimposing the violin part over the now existing completed piano part), finishing it on November 1st, 2008.

After writing some 70,000 words toward a novel during November, I spent the next few weeks “doing the dishes” – copying the score out for both the Scherzo and the Chaconne into a more finalized draft from the original sketches. I always thought composing is like cooking, though cooking is not something I can actually do (and sometimes feel like I should add “either” to that statement). “Pre-compositional planning” is like putting together the menu for a big dinner party. Writing the music is like cooking the meal. Finishing it and going back over the now completed work is like eating the meal. The drudgery of copying is like doing the dishes afterwards: not much fun but necessary before you go on to the next day’s chores.

But then, looking at these four pieces – the Nocturne, the Variations, the Scherzo and the Chaconne – I tried to come up with some kind of order for them. I now went back to the sketches I scribbled down in the fall of 2006 with five pieces and the Chaconne, now the longest and most weighted movement in the batch, in the middle or keystone position of a 5-piece arch. I didn’t really want to spend more time writing yet another violin-and-piano piece...

But I really began thinking it did, in fact, need the contrast between the Chaconne and the Nocturne which now, first-written, became the last piece. And some fast scorrevole (scurrying) interlude would be just the thing. Besides, proportionally, compared to the other pieces, it would only need to be about 2½ minutes long – how long could that take, right?

The idea that it would be several different “elements,” each one of a recognizably different nature, came early. The trick was figuring out how it moved from one to the next. Work began on December 20th, 2008, starting not with the opening but with the second segment, a static, icy-sounding section. Now, considering how quickly all of this would fly by, some of these segments were only going to be two measures long: they didn’t need to blend one into the other since I had the idea it was more four sections – label them A, B, C and D – thrown into a blender, chopped fine and then reconstructed almost arbitrarily. In one sense, it was like listening to a radio where the signal kept drifting and you’d pick up one station and then another. Or, bored with the commercials on one TV channel, you click on the remote and move to another channel to see if there’s something interesting to watch there for a moment. Some of them, especially through the middle, would also overlap a bit. But even the contiguous segments of the A-section would not necessarily mean the music began at the beginning!

So I forged ahead, writing the C and D segments before trying to figure out how the scurrying A-sections would work out. By January 4th, 2009, when the first third of the piece was done (except for the very opening), I decided the best thing to do was skip to the ending, the last scorrevole section. Once I figured out how it would end, I might have a better idea of how to get there.

Over the past few years, I frequently realized if I wrote “in order” – from the beginning to the end – I often found myself with fewer working choices when I got to the end. This could be on various levels: frequently, a phrase needing to end with a certain cadence might not work out that way. So I ended up working phrase-by-phrase but from the end, backwards to the beginning. This meant the structural points were strong and the choices I needed to start the phrase were less intensive.

This of course is a problem because while you’re working in one direction, you have to keep in mind exactly how it’s all going to work out in time, playing it in the correct direction. It’s not as difficult as it sounds (and it would not sound good to play it backwards, anyway) but it takes getting used to.

After writing the ending - which was, curiously, not finishing the piece – I worked my way backwards segment by segment until I got to the point where I’d stopped writing on January 4th. But in the midst of this, I had to have surgery to repair a couple of work-induced hernias that would soon be approaching their own second anniversary. I didn’t feel like doing any composing – in fact, much of anything – for a week afterwards and even then it was difficult to concentrate (or even sit that long) for another week. But by February 20th, I was now ready to attack the beginning!

It felt odd, closing in on the opening, seeing the light at the start of the tunnel after two months of writing. Working backwards made me feel like the composer, Benjamin Button.

Then too, this was eight measures of 16th note sextuplets so each measure involved 24 notes in the violin, 24 notes plus the occasional chord in the piano - about 400 pitches that go by in about 21 seconds. And working with pitch-sets of six notes each – I’ve tried explaining my compositional language in earlier posts here and here – it became a long, slow schlog, not helped by the fact that frequently I would start the next day looking back and realizing there had been some mistake or tactical error the day before and I might spend six hours reworking what had taken three hours the previous day. It was like I was ready to do that last – or rather, first – measure for a week. Well, three days, actually, but it felt like a week of Mondays.

And then I saw how the opening beat should get things started – one of those “jump right in” beginnings, like tuning into a radio broadcast that started a few minutes ago – leaving just the second and third beats empty. Finally, as I was glancing at the clock and thinking “I have to stop, I have to get ready for the concert tonight,” these last two beats fell into place. It felt like the right choices – there were only a few that might work – and I hoped (dear God) that this would in fact be the END of the piece!

And so I looked through it later and thought “so be it.” The end was, in fact, my beginning. 3⅓ years later, one thing I am sure of, now: there will not be a sixth piece.

Now, the question came up a few months ago: is it “Five Pieces for Violin & Piano” or is it really a Sonata?

To me, a sonata, with all its historical baggage, implies more integrity between the movements and that’s what was stymying me. But as I kept going from one piece to the next, starting back in October, 2005, I realized how much I was concerned about making the harmonic set-choices work between pieces within some kind of logical structure, how each piece fit into a proportional balance (of course, it’s also very Benjamin Button-ish that the first piece I began so long ago is now the ending). But I think, finally, it really is a more integrated work and suitable to be billed as a single piece in five movements rather than five separate pieces.

But at least at this point – it’s done. And what’s next?

Well, I’m not going to Disneyworld, that’s for sure, but after I copy the score and the violin part, I’m looking forward to starting a new piece. What exactly, I don’t know, but we’ll see. For now, I need to “finish the paperwork” on this one.

- Dr. Dick

The End of the "Nightmare"

Sometimes it helps me, as a composer, to write the ending first. My rationale is, that way I know where I’m going. Maybe not always first but early in the creative process, one way or another. That doesn’t mean it can’t change by the time I get there: it just helps put everything else in some kind of focus.

So I’d been working out the different segments of this little two-minute scherzo, the one where four contrasting elements are “blenderized” into an interlude before the final movement. It’s not pulverized into a scherzo slurpie, just the idea of some kind of seemingly random juxtaposition of these fragmentary sections, a little more scrambled than your standard rondo with some of them overlapping and no real connection between them.

Because of its brevity and odd form, this is the one piece of the set of five (which has now become, somehow, a Violin Sonata) that probably wouldn’t stand on its own. Since the Nocturne (the first piece to be composed but the last of the five pieces as it’s set out) is also fairly short, these two could make a pair. The fact that the opening of the Nocturne is essentially the resolution of the 4th piece helps connect them as a unit which at this point could be called “Nightmare and Nocturne.”

I’m not sure how nightmarish this interlude really is: the recurring scorrevole section evokes that kind of mood, unsettling and a bit scary, followed by the kind of “suspended animation” where one might stop suddenly as if thinking “what was that!” The two other elements are too normal, perhaps, but then the more frightening aspects of a dream might be more frightening when compared to something fairly normal.

The only problem is the “suspended animation” bits may not be anticipatory enough. Each segment is built on different groups of six notes (hexachords), each with different harmonic content and what I’d chosen for this second element is basically a whole-tone scale. That makes it harmonically ambiguous but it also doesn’t really have an edge to it, lacking the tension implicit in the others’ dissonance. While Debussy’s whole-tone impressionism can be vague and, depending on how it’s handled, unsettling, I’m not sure yet how well that’s going to work, here. We’ll see. I’d already sketched out a few of these segments, but they, too, might change.

The past week or so was focused primarily on Mahler for my pre-concert talk with the Harrisburg Symphony and now I’m looking ahead to next week’s event, a school presentation at the Capital Area School for the Arts for an up-coming recital with Market Square Concerts, where the major work to be presented is Bach’s Goldberg Variations as well as several somewhat newer pieces by Ligeti, Carter (his “90+” written to celebrate a friend’s 90th Birthday) and Harrisburg’s own Jeremy Gill (his “Eliot Fragments” written to celebrate Elliott Carter’s 100th Birthday). In the midst of all that – and doing a little bit of blogging – I’ve been working on the last five measures of this piece, the end of the “Nightmare.”

Now, at this tempo, it literally flies by in about 13-14 seconds, so spending 7 of the last 11 days on it may seem “inefficient” but that’s the way it goes. Over the years, I’ve become a slow composer and I’ve found that writing fast music takes longer than writing slow music (actually, Berlioz complained about that, too, so it’s nothing new).

Scorrevole means just what it sounds like – scurrying. The original idea was that the whole brief piece would be barely audible, but then I thought I would make each of these fragments a bit louder till we’d reach the climax and then it would fade back into near-inaudibility. But then I started thinking a gradual crescendo from beginning to end might be more compelling. Chopping it off in mid-air at the very end would probably be even more effective, dramatically, like dreaming you’ve fallen over the cliff but you wake up in a cold sweat before hitting the ground. That kind of thing.

(There’s a cool piece by English composer Alastair King he called “Hit the Ground (Running, Running Running)” but I wanted to avoid thinking of this as “Hit the Ground (Splat)”...)

The other problem was how to write something like this that could end loudly.

It would be difficult for the piano to control the kind of rushing figures I had in mind at that dynamic level, so they should go from a single scurrying legato strand to playing them in both hands, first an octave apart and then two octaves apart. As the violin moves from a couple of beats per bow to fewer and fewer notes per bow until the final measure where it’s one bow per note, the piano then breaks into pounding octaves alternating between the right and left hands (a Lisztian approach I’d already used somewhat differently in the Chaconne). This helps the crescendo but also helps propel the momentum forward: it feels faster even though the tempo remains the same.

So here are the last five measures of the 4th movement of my nearly complete Violin Sonata.

Now, the freebie software I’m using is very limited (it wasn’t designed for the kind of stuff I want to do), so take these grains of salt as you check it out: the original is in 4/4 with 16th note sextuplets at 1/4-note = 90 – but since Finale’s Notebook doesn’t permit me to write it that way, I’ve transcribed it as ten measures of 12/8 with 8th notes at dotted 1/4-note = 180. Same thing, audibly, but I have to admit seeing all those 16th notes just makes it “look” faster!

Now, I haven’t figured out how to record the play-back with its geeky synthesized sound-approximations, so you’ll just have to look at it. At least it’ll give you an idea.







And now to write the opening and finish the second half...

-- Dr. Dick

On the 12th Day of Christmas: Wow, a Revelation

So these past few days, I’ve been trying to work pretty hard on this last of a set of five violin and piano pieces when I started realizing how much I’ve been integrating different aspects from the other pieces into this one. Paging through my notebook full of sketches from the earlier pieces, I saw, back in April of 2006 when I started on what became the first of the set (the second piece to be written after the initial “Nocturne”), I was already anticipating there would be a five pieces and that in September of ‘06 (when the “Theme & Variations” were finished) the 4th one would be marked “scorrevole” or scurrying.

Since everything’s based on an arch-form (and subdivided proportionally according to the principals of the Golden Section), this brief 55-measure, 2-minute scherzo is supposed to balance the 2nd of the pieces, the “Blues Interruptus.” I hadn’t realized it, at first, but the sudden shifts between the four different “elements” of this piece is itself a kind of “interruption” and some of it over-laps much the same way things did in the 2nd piece. I’ve described the form of No. 4 as being four separate, easily identifiable fragments as if its four consecutive segments had been put through a blender so they’re all jumbled together in no particular sequence. But this morning I realized it would be more like putting them through a shredder and then reassembling them in no particular order – a few measures here, a few measures there.

I’ve written – or more officially, sketched – about 42% of the piece so far, just working on the individual segments or “elements.” But yesterday, after a couple of days spent largely looking at a blank sheet of paper, I got the idea how to end the piece.

For me, this is very important because now I can more easily shape the opening (which I hadn’t started working on, yet) and pace the piece as it moves toward the end. Unlike the other pieces which climax in the “middle,” this one ultimately drives toward the ending. I can see how that will work better, now.

And the interesting thing that happened this morning was realizing that the last notes lead directly into the opening notes of the last piece of the set, the “Nocturne” which I finished in November 2005, another way of bringing this set of supposedly disparate pieces full circle.

But more “eureka”-like was the realization how to begin this one – and more importantly, why.

I never really felt comfortable with the set of pieces making something as organic a whole as a Sonata ought to be, by definition: the primary issue was how the Nocturne started and ended. “Closed form” is a term we use in classical theory to indicate something that begins and ends in the same tonality. “Open form” means it doesn’t: in other words, there’s no sense of tonal closure. The Nocturne began on E-flat and ended on A – I’m not saying “in” E-flat or A because I’m not using the pitches as key areas, but they’re emphasized pitches and create tonal attractions, regardless how the harmony sounds around them – and I did that primarily because, when I quickly wrote this one, it was going to be the middle of something, maybe the 2nd of three pieces.

But once I started thinking about the other pieces, it eventually migrated to last place, a quiet, rather soft ending - “vague” would be a good way to describe it, as far as finales go. When I wrote the Theme and Variations that were intended to open the set, it never occurred to me I should have paid more attention to how this opening piece balanced the closing piece because at the time, the Nocturne was not yet the last of the pieces. They’re based on different pitch collections and focus on different pitches as tonal centers: in fact, the variations are pretty vague about that in the first place. So between that and this “open form” finale, it was like “okay, so what: they’re just a bunch of separate pieces, not movements of a single, long-form work.”

As the arch form balances the pieces structurally, the 4th and 5th pieces equal the length of the first piece; the first and second piece equal the length of the third piece. The climax of the whole set of pieces occurs at the “mid-point” of the middle piece.

But if I open the 4th piece in the tonal area the 5th ends in, I create a two-part unit that is, then, closed: No. 4 starts on A and builds to the E-flat; No. 5 starts on E-flat and ends on A. In fact, except for the natural break between them, the last note of No. 4 is really the first note of No. 5.

Now, initially, I had thought of this 4th piece as a scary little scherzo, “A Little Nightmare Music,” but as I started sketching out three of the four elements, “scary” didn’t really cut it any more. But once I started planning the very last segment, all five measures of it, it suddenly took on very scary possibilities. This cutting back-and-forth from one element to another is kind of unsettling if not exactly scary but often that’s the way nightmares are: we experience a bunch of things, sometimes seemingly disconnected and at random, which may not seem scary by themselves but there’s something underlying them that scares us, that begins putting the other things into a different context and there, at the end, it’s staring us in the face. And we wake up. Sweating.

That’s how this short little piece works. The “scorrevole” at the end starts quietly but grows quickly louder and more aggressive, the music speeding along with 6 notes to a quick beat. The violinist bows 12 notes to a bow, first, then 6 notes, then after a climax 3 notes and finally a separate attack for each rapid-fire note, sawing away frantically with these rushing scale-like patterns that run from the lowest notes of the instrument to the top register. The piano, meanwhile, is playing similar kinds of patterns first with just a single line, legato, then in octaves, then three octaves apart and then finally alternating right and left hands in a rapid-fire four-octave rush. The last note, an up-beat, leaves you hanging. And I’m sure the performers will be sweating...

So I’m dropping the cute little “Four C Interludes” I’d thought of calling it and going back to the nightmare aspect of it: which fits like a glove with the dreamier mood of the Nocturne that follows: calm is restored and resolution has, by the end, been accomplished. Thus, these two pieces become “Nightmare & Nocturne.”

And – eureka! – suddenly I start realizing how different aspects of the other pieces were accounted for in writing the “Aria & Chaconne” for the middle piece, how the Blues Interruptus, though a complete contrast, was reflected in the more manic Nightmare, and how the mood of the Theme & Variations is reflected in the Nocturne – as well as certain technical things about pitch-sets between the pieces themselves, in lieu of one overall primary pitch-set or tonal scheme that might indicate a more unified whole piece. But it is, now, far more unified than just being five separate pieces. Yeah, they could still be played separately, independently, and stand more or less on their own, but there’s still a quality about them that makes them parts of a whole piece.

And so now, instead of “Five Pieces for Violin and Piano,” I’m going to call it “Sonata for Violin and Piano.”

And that just kind of made my day.

But then let’s not get into the Reality Episode that began a half-hour later over my health care coverage, speaking of nightmares: I had to call them about some form I received that didn’t, as usual, make any sense to me. Since this was really a problem further down the line, this entailed several other calls, one of which involved 28 minutes on hold listening to the most god-awful smooth jazz muzac, as if the rabbit-hole this was leading me into wasn’t bad enough already. When faced with such a byzantine labyrinth – a few years ago, I even took one of these forms into a doctor’s business office and they couldn’t figure it out either – sometimes I think Anna Karenina had the right idea... But though this one seems to have been addressed and perhaps solved, it will still entail more follow-up calls in the next few days just to make sure. While I thought this was all settled before, since I’ve scheduled some minor surgery for next month and it’s still not settled, I can only hope for another epiphany on this front – soon!

By comparison, composing music is simple!

- Dr. Dick

On the 5th Day of Christmas: Five Pieces for Violin & Piano

The plan had been to do some composing this morning and then write about the Five Pieces for Violin and Piano for this “5th Day of Christmas” post. But then the Lawn Guys showed up to get caught up on the shrub pruning and leaf-raking-and-hauling. Since they used leaf-blowers and chain saws, the noise was more than just a distraction and since there were five guys working all around the house, I felt like I was surrounded with no place I could go to get away from it.

Anyone who knows me knows I have sensitive hearing – I was told it’s called “hyperacusis” – where certain frequencies and volume levels seem intensely magnified, ranging from annoying to intolerable. It’s not everything, mostly motor-noises and certain types of fans that produce loud hums whether it’s a vacuum cleaner or a lawn mower or, ironically enough, those “White Noise” noise-masking systems office buildings use these days in highly cubicled areas like my former place of employment.

It always sounded to me like there was a loud vacuum cleaner in the next cubicle. Constantly. It was one of the reasons I have been a lot happier and feeling a lot healthier since being laid off, not having to deal with the constant bombardment of that sound. I used to have headaches every day since we’d moved in there, even without the work-induced stress levels. So it’s not surprising, even with other kinds of long-range stress in my life now, that I’ve had hardly any headaches since leaving there.

Until today.

By the time these five guys were done five hours later I had a five-star headache. Consequently, I’ve gotten no composing done and didn’t feel like focusing on writing for the blog, either. Or reading. Or much of anything else, just sitting around in a kind of glazed-over mode all afternoon. It was only by 8pm that I even started to feel sub-human again.

I had wanted to summarize what’s going on with these pieces I’ve been working on, my latest compositions. It shouldn’t seem like a big deal, five relatively short pieces for just violin and piano – as opposed to a symphony for full orchestra of nearly a half-hour’s length or a string quartet with all the historical baggage and expectations the medium brings with it. But for some reason, I’ve been working on these for a period of over three years, now.

The first one I wrote came about accidentally. In October, 2005, there was a passage I was working on for the last movement of the symphony which not only didn’t seem to fit the flow as well I’d hoped, it didn’t lend itself well to being treated by an orchestra. So I thought it might make a reasonable thing for violin and piano. So I put it aside and started that passage from the symphony over again.

Shortly after that, John Clare, a friend and former co-worker of mine, started talking about maybe doing some kind of recital with him – in addition to being a radio host and interviewer of composers and performers, he is also a violinist. I don’t remember which came first, then, the idea of the recital or the opportunity of playing something for a reception for the Volunteers’ Brunch where we worked, but since that was a few weeks away, I thought it might be cool to write something for the occasion. So I went back to that small sketch I’d started and put aside.

I began composing it on October 22nd and finished it on November 5th, a fairly short time for me, considering the symphony took two years and the string quartet, one. True, it was only a three-minute piece and fairly straight-forward. Plus, given the amount of time we had, it couldn’t be anything too challenging to learn, much less play. It was finished a week before the luncheon and I think we had two, maybe three chances to rehearse it. Not sure what it really was, I ended up calling it “Nocturne” for no better reason than it fit the mood. It was quiet, fairly simple texturally, and sounded kind of French, for some reason. It had a fluid sense of rhythm which actually undercut the existence of any sense of meter. So, “Nocturne” it was.

Putting the notes in the right place was probably harder than just trying to play the right notes. It was a challenge as we read through it, especially considering John didn’t really know what my music was like and I didn’t really know his playing. Plus I hadn’t been practicing the piano for most of the past 16 years and I was never a terribly efficient pianist, anyway.

At one point, I told him the story how the singers working on Stravinsky’s new opera, The Rake’s Progress, had come to the first rehearsal armed with metronomes – even though it was still in a very Handelian “neo-classical” style, the tempo-relationships and rhythms were not easy – and Stravinsky admonished them to put them away and just, as he put it with his thick Russian accent, “make myooooo-sic!” So John and I read through the piece without trying to count each beat and subdivision. Besides, I could follow him and like, who would know, anyway, if we weren’t playing it correctly?

When the Luncheon came, we played through our other prepared stuff for the reception – the Meditation from Massenet’s Thais, some folk-inspired pieces by Andrzej Panufnik, John’s favorite composer, some Bach – I played a few short pieces by Chopin and Schumann that I was able to get back under my fingers . I had asked for three minutes of the program so that the audience could sit and listen to a world premiere of a piece hot off the press, written by one of the company’s employees, but they were very tight on time, so we had to play it while everybody ate dessert and continued talking, before the presentations were made.

Afterward, one person came up and said they liked my piece. The next person came up and wondered when we were going to play my piece. I would say 98% of the people there didn’t even know we were playing, much less what we were playing, but hey...

At least John and I felt comfortable having done a reasonably good job with it and it gave me a chance to think that it needed more to go with it – either other movements to become a sonata or other pieces to form some kind of set. There’s a difference between a sonata where the movements are somehow more integrated (or should be) and just a collection of loosely assembled individual pieces. I thought three would be a good number, but I’d come back to it later – first, I had to finish the last of the Symphony’s five movements.

It wasn’t until mid-April of 2006, then, that I got back to the violin pieces. The “Nocturne” would be the middle of three, so I needed an opening movement of some weight and then maybe a lively final movement. I thought about four or five pieces, but figured three was more practical: time, if it was to be part of a recital, was of the essence. And if I wanted to, I could always add more to it, later.

This opening piece turned out to be a set of variations on a theme that starts off with the open strings of the violin, an inside joke for John, since we’d just been talking about how certain concertos open and then mentioning how the Berg Violin Concerto began, the violinist playing a slow arpeggio on the violin’s open strings (you’d expect either a big theme or something a little flashier than something a beginning student could handle).

By the time I had completed the opening theme, I transcribed my sketch and put the Theme up on a blog-post here.

It was finished at the end of September, over six months after I began, a long time for a piece that’s only five minutes long. But by that time, I felt there needed to be more contrast between the Variations and the Nocturne, so a week later, I began sketching out a scherzo. It had now become most likely four pieces – the finale was still just a vague image, not even really an idea at this point, something about a Chaconne. Maybe.

So I put the Variations aside and never transcribed them from the rough sketches I’d been scribbling down.

During work on the variations, an idea had come to me that didn’t fit in with this piece. It happened when somebody parked their car out front of my apartment and left their CD-player blasting, turning the car into a four-wheel boom-box. It was loud enough, the aluminum storm door at the back of the apartment was rattling to the beat. There was no one in the car and I debated calling the police: after all, the guy’d probably be gone before the cop would get there.

Anyway, I was so annoyed by this incessant beat-box rhythm that I started banging away on the piano to the rhythm but just hitting arbitrary pitches like a petulant child wanting attention. But I kind of liked the sound I’d come up with and I wondered if I could “do” this in my own all-12-note style. In a matter of five minutes, probably, I’d found the pitches that “worked” for me, created out of the same six-note set I was using as the basis for the Variations! Even funnier was the realization that a little flip gesture in the violin was based on the notes that Dmitri Shostakovich used to spell out his “name motive” – D-S-C-H (or D, E-flat, C, B-natural). Since it was the Shostakovich Centennial Year, this seemed quite an appropriate if inside joke between John and myself.

The question, then, was what to do with this little “inspiration,” a gift – it reminded me how Henry James would talk about how the germ of a novel or short story came to him as a “gift” from someone telling him a story or relating an incident that had happened to them. So my Scherzo came about because some idiot left his boom-box blasting away on a week-day afternoon. Even oysters can form pearls out of lesser irritations.

I started realizing how pervasive this “rock motive” is, in everything around me – even in a chorus number from Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George – Boom! Chick-a-boom boom Chick!

So when I got around to finishing the Variations, I took this “rock motive” and tried to work on it. There were two items: the original beat-box rhythm, but played in 7/8, not the usual straight 4/4, and then a more “melodic” one measure gesture that kept repeating but changing underneath the surface, shifting meters almost constantly. But this was going to be the middle section of the scherzo, the contrast – an interruption.

But interrupting what?

While I had recently played Maurice Ravel’s Violin Sonata on the radio with its delicious Blues movement – was that around the time Leila Josefowicz played it in Harrisburg with her Market Square Concerts performance? I know the Messiaen Variations she played was something I had to keep out of my mind while I was working on my own Variations. Anyway, I decided to do a “tribute” to Ravel by writing a “mock blues” movement, again in my own all-12-note style and in a form that was not conducive to the standard 12-bar blues form. I wasn’t trying to write real blues, just translating the surface of the style into what was clearly more pastiche than parody (though in a “classical” sense, there’s little difference between the terms).

The funny thing is, as all this started to gel in my brain consciously or not, my upstairs neighbor was playing a jazz disc one morning, louder than usual – and while I was trying not to listen to that, another car drove down my street rattling to the “Boom! Chick-a-boom-boom Chick!” motive. Aha – my interruption!

And so the movement would now be called “Blues Interruptus.”

As the blues line spun out, the pianist, not unlike a car driving by with its radio blasting, would break into this “beat-box motive.” The violinist would then play something irritably to bring the pianist back into line. Eventually the rock motive takes over and finally the violinist just joins in before finally realizing he has to bring the blues back to wrap (not rap) things up. And so eventually the pianist is subdued but not without an echo of it at the very end and a rather bluesy-sounding cadence, for all its 12 notes.

I also blogged about the blues and the intrusion of the beat-box motive here and here. Unfortunately, the simple notation “notebook” software I had freebily downloaded doesn’t permit changing meters, so I had to write everything out in 4/4 which would be more of a nightmare to count. But it’ll give you an idea.

This piece was basically done in late November 2006, about two months in the making. Then I was side-tracked by the idea of “A Christmas Story,” revising what I’d started the previous Christmas and expanding it. Then new neighbors moved in upstairs and now, it was a problem to compose and so for a while I stopped.

Then my mother died and I didn’t feel like composing at all – and going back to work on the Scherzo didn’t seem appropriate in the months afterward. Instead, I finally began composing again in the fall, with a song cycle based on biblical texts, “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” which I also blogged about here.

So once that was done, I began thinking about the violin pieces again. I had one complete piece and another one almost finished, but both still in sketch form which needed to be written out so a violinist could actually play them.

I’ve often described the process of composing a piece as being very much like planning a dinner party. You pick an occasion (what will I write this time?), invite the guests (decide what you’re going to write it for) and then plan the menu (the pre-compositional preparation). Once you’ve assembled all the ingredients, you begin cooking the meal (composing the music). While finishing the piece may be comparable to setting the table, eating the meal is more like performing the piece, but the analogy breaks down because before you get that far, you need to copy the music into a final legible form, getting it ready for a performance. This part of the process – the drudgery of copying it out (and I still do mine by hand, not on a computer which only makes it less drudgerisome) – is like washing the dishes only not as much fun. I have a sink full of dirty dishes so it’s no surprise I have a desk drawer full of uncopied but mostly finished pieces of music...

But first, before copying out the Variations and the Blues movement, I’d already been thinking about the last piece. I’ve blogged before about how the Chaconne came about and how it materialized into a piece. I’d finally begun it in late-May, 2008, and finished it on the 1st of November. Basically five months of composing. It’s a little over 9 minutes long, the most substantial of these pieces.

But now the problem was one of balance. I had four pieces – the fairly mellow Variations, the raunchy little Blues & Rock pastiche, the very mellow Nocturne and now this fairly large-scale Aria & Chaconne. Usually, the weightiest movement opens a work – though, true, Bach ended his D Minor Partita for solo violin, a series of short dance movements, with the vast Chaconne, a masterpiece in its own right. My sense of symmetry usually flows in an arch form – the largest if not the weightiest piece would be the keystone, the middle of this arch and the movements on either side of it would reflect each other – so I had the mellow Nocturne at the end, now, reflecting the mellow Variations at the opening, with the Blues Scherzo leading into the serious Aria & Chaconne. What it needed to complete the symmetry was a mirror for the Scherzo – a second scherzo.

The other thing is, the proportions of all five pieces more or less work according to the same “Golden Section” floor-plan I’d used for the String Quartet, the Symphony and even the biblical songs (see a previous post about “patterns”). Each individual piece is based on this framework and at one point I had thought to organize the Chaconne as the central panel, even expanding it after I’d already outlined it once in order to make it better balance the rest of what would probably now become FIVE pieces...

And so, having washed the dishes on the Chaconne and the Blues Interruptus movements, I’ve now started the second Scherzo.

Yesterday, I posted a little about how its form evolved, the idea of kaleidoscoping four separate, contrasting elements – at one point, even literally labeling them descriptively as “earth, air, fire and water” – and how I decided to call this one short piece – it’s only supposed to be two minutes long – “Four Interludes” and then thinking if the pitch C is the central structural pitch, not quite like saying it’s in C Major, of each segment of this kaleidoscopic treatment, I could jokingly call it the “Four C Interludes.”

And that’s where it stands. The opening scurrying passage has already been hinted at it in the Chaconne but I’ve written the first appearances of the other three “interludes,” the “suspended animation” one, the rhythmic one and the lyrical one which is where I was this morning before the Five Lawn Guys showed up to get my yard ready for winter (it looked like they’d blown several cubic tons of leaves over to the roadside by the time they were done). But at least the piece is falling together quite nicely, so far, which is much better than having it falling apart, which can still happen. How many times have I gotten to a point with some new piece I’ve started working on before thinking, “Gah! This is horrible” only to have some eureka moment when I realize “wow, this is just what it needs,” and off it goes? The best way to work yourself though a creative block, after all, is to beat your head against the wall until you break it down (the wall, hopefully, not your head). It may also explain some headaches I’ve had in the past, but not the one I had today.

So tomorrow is another day and hopefully I will be able to approach it fresh enough in the morning that I can sail right through it. Then, having enough raw material down for the first four sections, I can quickly (well, fairly quickly) fill out the remaining ten sections and not only finish the piece, but consider the whole set of now FIVE pieces not only finished but complete.

And then do the dishes right away...

- Dr. Dick