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 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

On the 4th Day of Christmas: Another Violin Piece on the Front Burner

After waking up to find the dense fog from last night had dissipated – fog so thick, whether it inspired me to have pea soup for lunch today or not, I could hardly tell there were houses across the road if it hadn’t been for their Christmas lights – I saw four large crows in the faint light of dawn, strutting around my front yard before taking off with great yawps to disappear around the corner of the house. Four cawing birds, indeed.

Yesterday was overall a blah day. The weather was blah, my energy level was appropriately blah and anything I attempted to do met with an equal and insurmountable blahness. In the evening, I watched TV, something I have never really done for the past seven or eight years beyond catching the news, and after two hours I found myself so annoyed at the constant repetition of the same commercials or the fact that, switching over to PBS to watch a couple of British sit-coms realized for as little as I’ve watched TV in the past 20 years, I had seen both these episodes and new exactly what was coming next (as if the formulas weren’t predictable enough). So instead, I put on a DVD that had arrived in the mail that day, a performance of John Adams’ opera, Dr. Atomic. I watched just the first act but I’ll post about that later.

The chair behind my computer desk, covered with a sunflower afghan and ostensibly placed there so I’d have a place to sit-and-think when I’m writing or maybe needing to take a break to read or on rare occasions listen to a CD, is usually full of cats. In this picture, there are four cats sitting-and-thinking for me: Abel on the back of the chair, Freddy and Blanche on the seat with their mother, Frieda the fur-bearing cantaloupe, in the foreground. When I took this picture, Charlie and Max were stretched out on the desk between the keyboard and the monitor.

Much of the evening was spent in quality time with a few of the cats. While Abel, Baker and Frieda flopped into a furry orange puddle at the opposite end of the couch, Charlie, the alpha of the kitten band (had I realized this when they were born, I would have named him Abel instead), was relegated to a spot closer to the back of the couch once Max, one of the three older cats and therefore more senior than Charlie, curled up tight against my right side. But each got annoyed when I started petting or scratching the other so I tried to keep my right arm between them to more easily alternate the attention.

At one point, Charlie put one paw out over my wrist, keeping it there whenever I would move my arm. If I moved it closer to Max, his leg would stretch out to accommodate the move. But when I started to nuzzle Max’s neck, Charlie discreetly extended his claws against my skin and gently pulled my hand back. “We’ll have none of that, thank you.” That didn’t keep both of them from purring almost constantly until the couch felt like it had an automatic vibrator function.

Coming back from dinner tonight, I saw the flash of wild eyes caught in the headlights as I pulled up the driveway, though rather low to the ground for deer. Two weekends ago, there were four doe in the yard. Tonight, as I turned the lights toward the eyes, it looked like a deer, but a very short one. Ah, turned out she was resting in the grass: with a stiff clamber, she slowly got to her feet and stretched before I saw the other three, likewise relaxing in the grass and dead leaves behind the Japanese maple. I didn’t want to scare them off, so I just quietly pulled into the garage but then, without the headlights, I was no longer able to see them.

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

Today had been a less blah if still overcast and unseasonably warm day, feeling as if it was always on the verge of a downpour. Early in the morning, I had settled down at the piano to do some composing. Last weekend, I started the last of the pieces for violin and piano and while I had figured out about 18 measures of this short piece since then, the thought occurred to me, as it had done during Christmases past, to return briefly to a choral work, “A Christmas Story,” which I’d begun in 2005 then started over and reworked in 2006. This time, after jotting down a few ideas for one of the sections that came to me on Christmas Day, I thought I would try to finish the violin piece first, then come back to spend more concentrated time on the choral piece. It would be more practical, perhaps, to use this time to write some piano pieces, but I was never a particularly practical person, much less composer.

This short violin piece, however, took shape quickly: a second scherzo that’s only two minutes long, it consists of four recognizably different sections, each one cut up and interwoven to form a kaleidoscopic form shifting quickly back and forth from a very fast section to a very slow, almost static one, to another one that’s more rhythmic to another one that is more by contrast lyrical. While the static one has no sense of tempo, the other three feel to be each in a different tempo and all of them reflect different moods.

Considering how small the whole piece is, it doesn’t give each section much chance to establish itself, so it has to be a series of easily discernable fragments, creating a quirky interlude that seems not as technically structured as the first three pieces. Since the other pieces all have titles, I was at a loss how to characterize this one: originally, the scurrying first section was going to give it the nickname “A Little Nightmare Music,” though that has already been used by Peter Schickele in his catalogue of P.D.Q. Bach’s music. Once I realized this was not the predominant sound of this movement nor was the suspended, static section all that suspenseful, I thought perhaps “Kaleidoscope” might be more inclusive. Being a scherzo (literally, a joke), I thought having a two minute piece called “Four Interludes” might be humorously accurate.

While my music is not tonal in the traditional sense (if in any sense other than my own), I still wanted to have some kind of tonal organization. Tonality implies a referential central pitch, something a piece begins and ends in and to which other sections, modulating however many ways they might, in some relationship to that center. In the classical era, this might be fairly basic and easily obvious, but as the 19th Century pulled everything else apart, the sense of this “center” did not always hold, either. Though Wagner’s music might be tonal in a nominal sense, sometimes you were often at sea as to what key you might be in at any given moment in between the beginning and ending.

The tonality of a piece or a passage from it can be defined by the progression of its harmonies but in the absence of standard harmonic practice, it can also be implied by emphasizing a particular pitch, a note that might be in the right places at the right times. In this particular piece, I decided at the mid-point of each brief segment, regardless of which of the four “interludes” it may be, would be the note C, either as part of a triad (since you could harmonize a C as part of a C major or minor triad, an A minor, F Major or minor or A-flat Major triad, plus other, more non-traditional chords. One form of choral structure I had used consistently in the Aria and Chaconne was a major triad with an added tritone – a G-flat Major triad with a C-natural. Since there are fifteen of these segments, I will need that many ways of harmonizing the pitch, C...

So that’s how I came up with the title for the piece – the “Four C Interludes,” not necessarily as an homage to Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. It occurred to me, though, that the structure of my piece works in a similar way to his first interlude, depicting the sea at dawn, with blocks of recognizably contrasting elements that flow in and out of one another to create its own form.

It also reminded me one of my Facebook friends, Steve Gregoropoulos (who’d contributed to an earlier post here on his experience meeting Olivier Messiaen and Elliott Carter), mentioned he was looking forward to the newly released film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Britten. I joked that I wasn’t sure how well Brad Pitt would do in the title role of a composer who wrote his last works as a young man, starting with the opera Birth in Venice, not to mention one of his operas that had been turned into the movie, Grimes of the Heart, but figured it couldn’t be any worse than Sylvester Stallone’s turn in the 1997 film, Copland. Stallone must be more versatile than I would originally have given him credit for, after all those films about Rachmaninoff, also playing Elliott Carter in the 2000 re-make of Get Carter when, 50 years after the original film, people were still having trouble “getting” Carter. (Perhaps it’s time for another visit to Stravinsky’s Tavern...)

- Dr. Dick

A Long, Hard Schlog

Over the past several months – since May, actually – I had been working on what would seem to be a short piece for violin and piano. But that was not the “first stage” of the process: there are what I call pre-compositional sketches that started in late-April, though most of that was worked out over a two-month span from Memorial Day to mid-July. Then, a month ago, I finished the “second stage” of its composition resulting in a “sketch.” Now, I’m getting ready for the “third stage” which is transcribing that sketch into a finished piece, the post-compositional work of writing out a final draft, something I could then send out to musicians so the work can eventually be performed. Where it goes from there is anybody’s guess.

During this process, I had thought about “blogging the work” but found myself usually too brain-dead at the end of a day slaving over a hot piano or too depressed after a bad day when nothing seemed to be working.

But that is also part of the process. Part of me was saying “I don’t want to spend valuable time writing about the piece when I should be writing the piece.” And then, if you’re working “9-to-5" on a nine minute piece of music, daily reports can get pretty monotonous and, if there’s writer’s block to work through, whiney.

Since I finished the “Aria & Chaconne” on November 1st, I took the rest of November off to do something else – write a novel. Well, officially to write down 50,000 words toward a novel. This, too, is only the first stage of the creative process: editing it is something else. Again, I thought about “blogging the process” but came up with the same excuses even though the process is slightly different. Here, dealing with words instead of music, it was more “I tried to write 2500 words today so I don’t feel like writing another 1,000 words about it,” in addition to the usual argument, writing about the piece as opposed to writing the piece.

There’s also something different, I discovered, in writing a novel: I could easily have posted everything I wrote – the 2500 words plus the additional 1,000 words about it – and done an on-line novel-in-progress. But writing the first draft is different than presenting a complete work to the public (even if it’s only a few friends reading over it). Since I was not writing the novel chronologically from beginning to end, without that context of where it’s going it might be to easy to form the wrong opinion or a negative reaction to something – “well, of course that doesn’t make sense, that character (or event) is introduced somewhere else.” In most cases, these episodes I was writing were not self-contained – they’re part of an on-going narrative flow that I have in my mind. But I digress...

Creativity is a very private act. It’s not easy and in some cases not very rewarding.

For most of us, it’s not going to bring in the kind of income we could live off of. When I was teaching at the University of Connecticut in the ‘70s, one of my colleagues, a very respected if not very well-known composer, told his financial advisor as they were filling out the annual income tax forms that he made a little over $400 from his compositions that year – performance royalties – and yet he wanted to put down “composer” rather than “college professor” in the little space provided to list your occupation. The argument ran along the lines “but you earn your living as a teacher” countered by “yes, but I spend most of my time composing.” The advisor looked back over the forms with a raised eyebrow and said “Yes, but if you only made $427 from writing music, why would you DO that?” “Because I’m a composer and I teach so I can afford to compose.”

This made no sense to the financial advisor.

In fact, it doesn’t make much sense to anyone who’d consider themselves a practical person, a realist or just plain normal.

But I am none-of-the above.

When I found myself without a distracting job – listening to everybody else’s music for one thing, and most everybody in my profession’s negative attitudes about the kind of music I liked to compose – I decided to take my time and work out the details behind this new piece of music.

One of the reasons I spent about sixteen years not composing – whether through Writer’s Block, distractions from my job or perhaps depression – was the amount of work it would have taken for me to deal with the changes that were evolving in my compositional style.

As a student, I wrote spontaneously and without effort, being fairly prolific if not very discerning (discernment is not a student’s job: a student’s job is to write as much music as possible and learn by doing).

As I got older and had to deal with composing while earning a living, I found I needed more time to write but what I was writing was better. While teaching, there was little time to focus on composing until the holidays – summer, mostly, but I also remember creating a very involved choral piece starting from scratch on Thanksgiving Day and having most of it sketched out before it was time to meet some friends for dinner. Working for a radio station was a year-round involvement and hearing other peoples’ music in my head all day long left little room for my own.

Where I could sit in a practice-room and compose while other students around me were pounding out their Chopin, singing repetitive warm-up exercises or blasting out long-tones on their trombones, eventually the least little noise became an unnerving distraction. The neighbor’s dog would start to bark and I would throw my pen down and complain “How can I work under these conditions!”

If I had a half-hour between classes, I could find a practice room and work on a few more measures. Years later, it would take me three hours to get back into the “zone” before I could even begin to compose from where I’d left off the last time, and then at the end of whatever time I had available before needing to go to work, I might have a fraction of a measure worked out and often found, the next day, that I would probably erase half of that (yes, I know – decomposing).

As my style changed from the simple, spontaneous “whatever-sounds-good,” “play-it-over-till-you-find-the-right-note” method of composing to something more integral, more organic and much more systematic which started to produce something that sounded less like “everybody else’s music,” I realized the amount of work it took to do this – learning new rules or, in my case, making new rules – was more than I had time or, to be honest, interest. It wasn’t easy, any more: now what? So I thought I will do what I did before: put it aside and wait for inspiration to strike. In a few years, I realized I did not even miss composing.

It took several more years to figure out why life wasn’t going very well for me: I wasn’t composing any more. All my life, that’s what I wanted to be. So I started working at it again, slowly at first. I’m still recovering from that long dark emptiness.

Over the past eight years, once I started writing again, I began coming to terms with the technical apparatus I needed to compose.

It’s hard to explain: if a pianist just sat down and played whatever he liked but never bothered to practice – working on “technique” like scales and arpeggios, let’s say, or learning the notes and how they fit together – the pianist wouldn’t be very interesting to listen to. Talent at this level is called “facile.” There is a “facility” that may be impressive but it lacks depth or communication.

That’s what takes the work.

And so in the process of writing my Silmarillion-inspired rhapsody for violin and orchestra (taking its cue from the opening story of the Creation of the World through Music), I began seeing what I needed to do. In each successive piece – the String Quartet, the Symphony, the song-cycle “Evidence of Things Not Seen” – I set different challenges and learned a little more. It took a year to write the quartet, two for the symphony but only five months for the songs and each time I had to spend less time worrying about the foundation.

The first of the violin and piano pieces, a “Nocturne,” began out of something practical – I needed a piece John Clare and I could both perform in a relatively short time – and I had a passage that I wrote for the symphony’s last movement that seemed to make a better violin piece than a theme in a symphony. It was one of the few pieces I’ve written in the last 25 years that “just happened.”

Eventually other pieces were to be added to this to make a set – not a sonata, as it turned out, though if I’d thought more about it at the beginning, it might have worked (I joked with John about calling it the Nada Sonata). But I wrote some variations (the challenge here writing something emphasizing a more melodic element) and then a “scherzo” (still maintaining my ‘system,’ but trying for something light-hearted and, a real departure for me, a take-off on blues and rock elements). These were very different from the “mood piece” of the Nocturne and I wanted something else that would be even more different as a contrast. Perhaps the last movement or maybe – since my structures usually have their climaxes in the middle of an archway, like a keystone – in the middle of five pieces.

What became the “Aria & Chaconne” went through the same gestation as everything else: the idea came in a kind of flash but how it was going to be worked out was always the challenge. What a composer (or author or painter) sees in a flash of inspiration rarely takes a flash to realize. Most people cannot comprehend the amount of time it takes for an artist to get from Inspiration to Final Artwork. Sometimes it can be very long, but always much longer than it takes to hear or read or view the piece.

And if your job is based on bean-counter-friendly bottom-line principles and weekly deadlines, it’s impossible to compare. It’s not that one is better than the other: they’re just different.

So a few years after the initial idea (not a flash so much as a flicker) for the Chaconne, I started working out the logistics. My style would not easily encompass the restrictions a Chaconne by definition expects, so I had to find ways of “stretching” that definition to see if it could still work.

After a few days in April, I settled into the longer work of trying to find the right pattern. This involved lots of trials-by-error but often it got me one step closer to something I liked. Three weeks into this part of the process, I was fired and so suddenly I was relieved of two things – an income aside, there was the limited amount of time I had to compose before needing to go into work, and the distraction of hearing all this music I was playing on the radio. Now I could listen to only music I wanted to listen to when I wanted to listen to it. I had discovered a long time ago that usually when I’m composing, I try not to listen to a lot of music to allow my own music a chance to gestate subconsciously, something very difficult for the brain to do when it’s constantly bombarded by everything it hears, whether you like it or not, whether it’s the Pachelbel Canon or Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Instead of spending three or four hours a day composing, I could spend eight or nine. And now I lived in a suburban house with no immediate neighbors and no distractions beyond the sound of lawnmowers.

So now I had the time, the lack of distractions, as well as the place to compose and, most importantly, to THINK.

This led me to explore many more options than I would have had time for before. Rather than settle for “okay, this can work” just to get it done, I started thinking “but what might work better?”

Three or four times, I had come up with a “final solution” but decided “not yet.” A little more exploring, a few more attempts and tweaks and then a month after I was fired, I had a plan, finally.

So far, other than this nine-chord pattern, I hadn’t written a note of music.

An interesting thing happened during the next process. A Chaconne is also a set of variations on this pattern: the pattern doesn’t change, basically (though I found ways around that so it’s not so literal and became variations on itself as it progressed), but the melodic line in the violin, in this case, would be a theme-with-variations over this pattern and its variations.

Now, the first piece in the set was already a Theme-and-Variations movement. I didn’t feel I wanted to do that again. What I didn’t have, though, was something really flowing and lyrical. My style is primarily “harmonic” and I had to really work hard on developing a sense of linearity (if not melody in the traditional sense) and the combination of those lines into something called “counterpoint.”

Somewhere along the way, I decided the Chaconne, with its rigid structure, was going to be the piano part and the violin was going to be this lyrical flowing song-like part – in essence, two simultaneous movements. And so the title became not “Chaconne” but “Aria and Chaconne.” Usually, that means the Aria would be followed by the Chaconne – as in “Introduction and Allegro” or “Song and Dance.” In this case, they happen together.

Another interesting simultaneity here, I discovered later, is that of stylistic approach: if music is either emotional (Romantic, Dionysian) or structural (Classical, Apollonian), the violin Aria was Romantic and the piano Chaconne was Classical.

The next challenge was, then, working out the Aria so it still belongs to everything that’s going on in the Chaconne and is not just a haphazard thing slapped on top of it (easy enough to do). So I worked on how I would make these two pieces belong to each other. I mapped their structures out – the different phrases of the Aria’s A-B-A structure over a string of 19 repetitions of the harmonic pattern that is the Chaconne (though each one moves through different pitch-levels like it’s constantly modulating so it doesn’t sound like “OMG it’s repeating again.” Climaxes on various levels, large and small, had to match. The one became integral to the other.

Now, another thing I realized early in this process was the other three pieces were just three random pieces. There wasn’t much connecting them. And by that, I mean the harmonic-melodic material which I tried to explain in earlier posts. The Variations and the Scherzo were based on one set of six notes (from which all the harmonic and melodic material was derived) and the Nocturne was a different set. Unfortunately, these two different sets had little in common, theoretically.

Since I had now planned the set of five pieces with the Nocturne at the end – this means there’s a 4th piece still to compose – and planned the proportions of the Chaconne to fit a span based on the Golden Section - blah blah blah - as No. 3, it seemed logical to combine these two six-note sets (a hexachord, if you’re into the jargon). Since I’m dealing with the simultaneity of the violin’s Aria over the piano’s Chaconne, it seemed logical to have the first two pieces’ hexachord form the basis of the Chaconne and use the last two pieces’ hexachord in the Aria.

The structural places, then, these shared climactic points, needed to form a consistent harmony. Forming one of these basic chords gave me three or four possible pitches for the violin part, so I wrote these options down first and then tried to place these in the flow of something that worked linearly, created out of its own hexachord.

Of course, the whole trick of being an artist is to take something difficult and make it look easy – that’s what performers do and that’s what composers should do.

The idea of the structure is to support what you hear (the surface), not draw attention to itself by saying “wow, this is a really complicated piece: see what I did here?” That’s why so many people get lost reading what composers write about the technical aspects behind their music (and if you think what I’ve just written is mumbo-jumbo, you should read this which explains in more technical terms what I am trying to express at all).

So now that the piece – or rather the pieces – is... uhm, are done, I have 193 pages of sketches to turn into a final draft: 68 pages of pre-compositional sketches, 79 pages of sketches for the Chaconne; 26 pages for the outer sections of the Aria and 20 pages for the middle section of the Aria. The piece is 137 measures long, lasts about nine minutes and took a little over five months to create.

And so now I’m ready for stage 3 – copying it out into a final draft.

It hardly seems productive when you figure the amount of time spent on the final “product.” What’s the term, “cost-effective”?

To repeat a story I’ve told in here before, back in the ‘70s I heard Elliott Carter – who turns 100 next week – tell an audience that his Variations for Orchestra was his most frequently performed work, more in Europe than in the United States. Talking to an audience before a performance of the work, he mentioned he’d calculated the amount of time it took him to write the piece compared to the commission he was paid to compose it: basically, he earned less than twenty-five cents an hour (Wow, we were thinking). Then, in the back of the audience, this bejeweled society matron stood up and sniffed contemptuously, “Mr. Carter! You mean to tell me you write for MONEY!?!”

That is not why those of us who create want to create. You don’t go into the arts to get rich. You might be lucky, but it’s very rare. But I know of nothing, myself, more satisfying that closing the book on a new piece I’ve just written and saying “Yeah, I wrote that.”

But after Stage 1 pre-compositional, Stage 2 compositional and Stage 3 post-compositional, comes Stage 4 – turning it into live music-making so that, Stage 5, an audience hears it.

For each creative artist, each stage requires a certain amount of courage. The last two are not always the easiest.

Dr. Dick

Finishing One Piece and Starting the Next

Just an hour ago, as I begin writing this, I closed the notebook on a newly finished piece of music. The “Aria & Chaconne,” one of a set of pieces for violin and piano, is now basically finished – well, the creative part of it. Now comes the realization of the sketches into a final copy, and then sending it out to some friends who might be interested in performing it!

It seems counter-intuitive that a piece that lasts around 10 minutes should occupy so much of my time since late May, a little over five months, especially considering most of that time I’ve been able to work on it almost every day.

But for me, it’s a slow process and under the circumstances, I had set myself some serious stylistic challenges that I really needed to work out. It would have been easier to have ignored them or just written something, anything at all. But for all my lack of organization in my life, my compositional process is very organized which may require some explanation (how it works, not why I can’t apply it to my daily routine which is a whole different issue).

It began life actually a few years ago when I was thinking about a series of pieces I was writing for violin and piano, something John Clare, one of my fellow ex-colleagues and I could play together. What started out as a sketch for a section of the Symphony I was writing then, turned into a mellow, kind of atmospheric piece which ended up being called “Nocturne.”

Whether it was the first, last or middle of a set of three or five pieces didn’t bother me then: I just needed to get it done since we were also going to play it as part of a work-related event (as it turned out, no one heard it: part of a luncheon’s entertainment, everybody continued talking through it and the acoustics being what they were, most people probably didn’t know we were even playing).

After the Symphony was done, I got around to two other pieces – a Theme and Variations to open the set and then a lively scherzo that was part pseudo-Blues interrupted by some pseudo-Rock music (and given my lack of exposure to either and my entirely tongue-firmly-encheeked approach to the whole idea, that would be very pseudo...).

At the time, I felt there should be a substantial movement to balance the scherzo and the Nocturne, probably, oh, I don’t know – a chaconne?

I have no idea why that had popped into my brain.

It’s a very old musical process – going back to the generations before Bach – and not one that’s been of much use to composers since Bach’s day, except for things like Brahms’ 4th Symphony (which is more a chaconne than a passacaglia but if you want to split hairs about it, you’re more anal than *I* am...) or the piece that John Corigliano wrote based on material for the filmscore to “The Red Violin.” While I enjoy both works immensely, listening to them never sparked the “ooh, I’d like to do that” reaction.

First of all, a chaconne is a harmonically-based form. My musical style is neither traditionally harmonic nor does my musical style – which I’d blogged about in the early pre-kitten days here at Thoughts on a Train (for instance, here and here) – accommodate the kind of repetitiveness a chaconne requires (a harmonic pattern repeated over and over again).

But the more I thought about, the more I wondered if I could make it work. Somehow.

One of the things I dislike about many chaconnes is how quickly the obviousness and the boredom sets in – Bach’s great D Minor Chaconne, as ever, aside. Repetitive patterns bore me. Four-quare patterns of 8+8+8+8 measures bore me even more. So how do I not be four-square (or eight-square) or repetitively redundant?

And could I come up with a recognizable harmonic pattern – in my musical style?

However, the creative process then came to a screeching halt for two reasons: still living at my old mid-town apartment, new neighbors had moved in upstairs just before Christmas-time and were using the room directly above the piano for their bedroom and they also slept in until noon-time since they worked second shift (it was always great to have 9-to-5 neighbors who wouldn’t be home during the hours I’d be composing); then in February ‘07, my mother became ill and died, not the best time in my life to be working on a musical joke. Even though I moved out to the house by April, the piano didn’t make it out until July and then when I did start feeling like writing again, it was a song cycle setting some biblical texts my mother considered favorites which became a work for Mezzo and Orchestra called “Evidence of Things Not Seen” (okay, three reasons). When that was finished in February ‘08, I began thinking about getting back to the violin and piano pieces.

And after spending two years on a symphony no one is likely to be interested in performing, the idea of writing an opera just didn’t seem logical. True, every Presidential election, I keep going back to the idea of setting Euripides’ “The Bacchae” (essentially about the subjective, irrational mind subverting the objective, rational mind), but really, come on... I mean, I need to get something performed – and also something performable – something practical. And perhaps something for violin and piano might make more sense, rationally or otherwise.

The Blues/Rock scherzo was still not finalized, though it was probably 95% complete. The sketches for the Theme & Variations have yet to be realized. So instead, I started a whole new piece. Now, ideally, they could be played as a unit or performed independently, but it bothered me to have four pieces with no overlying structure. And being what would be called an “organic” composer – very different from being an organic vegetable – I set about figuring out how to make this Chaconne thing work.

It’s a much more involved procedure to talk about than I have time for, today. I really wanted to blog about it during the compositional process but it seemed irrational to be using creative time I could spend composing writing about what I should be composing.

But today, I just want to say – looking over 193 pages of sketches – that it’s done. Or basically done. The process of realizing the sketches is not all that mechanical and I need to get to it before I start looking at some of these pages and think “whaaaa’???”

And yes, 193 pages of sketches for a piece of music that is 137 measures and about 10 minutes long. 68 pages deal with just the structural planning and working out that tricky challenge of the “harmonic pattern.” Once I got to the actual composing part of it, that’s 79 pages for the piano part and 46 pages for the violin part.

Wait a minute, you say?

That’s because one of the challenges I’d set myself was this: I’d already written a Theme & Variations movement (where the variations move progressively in a logical, standard order) so, since a Chaconne is another variation process, I didn’t want to do the same kind of thing over again.

Normally when you’d see a title like “Song & Dance” that means a Song followed by a Dance. So my “Aria & Chaconne” would imply an aria or a lyrical movement followed by this Chaconne thing, right?

Only this time, I thought I’d do them simultaneously. The piano plays the Chaconne while the violin plays the song-like Aria. But the Chaconne is not the accompaniment to the Aria. The Aria is not the melodic variation based on the Chaconne’s harmonic pattern as definitions would tell you.

In addition to that issue – of two different pieces happening simultaneously – the Aria is straightforward in A-B-A form. The Chaconne is a set of 19 variations (well, okay, 17 variations preceded by the simple unadorned pattern and concluding with a similar restatement of the pattern) that moves toward the climax but then proceeds to the conclusion in reverse order, essentially turning itself inside-out. So as the violin works its way toward the ending, what was underneath it in the piano part is not the same thing it was the first-time around. While the climaxes had to occur together, working with each other and independently of each other at the same time, lots of other structural details had to work along the way – in both directions!

Yeah, I know, it seems a lot more complicated than what you’d hear. But that’s one of the things I like about art – it’s more than just an appreciation of the surface language. There also needs to be some kind of underlying depth to it to keep coming back to, something to discover you hadn’t heard before or realized the last time you heard or played it. I’m sure there are things as I copy it out I will realize that I was not aware of even when I was composing it.

This was something I found fascinating in the process of working out all these details: how much of it was already implied for me. Usually, there were several choices – unfortunately, making one that offered a continuity of further solutions didn’t always happen – and it was only a matter of picking the best one (hopefully, the right one), then going from there.

There were even times it felt like the piece actually WAS writing itself – but if it were, why was it still taking so long? There were other times when I just had to realize “no, this isn’t working” and then go back to some point and unravel the stitches to start a passage over again.

And in that way, I went through the Chaconne first, the skeleton, then working with that off to the side of my desk, filling in the Aria and stretching it skin-like out over this skeleton, making sure this point met that point, this phrasing matched that phrasing. Ultimately it will sound like one piece, because it is, not something that sounds like the violinist and pianist are accidentally playing different movements in the wrong order (“oh, I’m sorry, did you say the THIRD movement?”)...

But now I have a different project to tackle. Heh heh...

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

Ever since I was living in New York City in the late-70s, I had this novel in my mind. Yes, like many other people, I wanted to write a novel. There was a curiosity about the creative process – in fact, I think it’s good for composers to know what it’s like to try writing prose (it’s easier than having writers compose pieces of music – I’d even settle for having writers talk knowledgeably about music, but that’s another topic completely). There are similar issues to consider and I think one cross-fertilizes the other, though it may only be so much fertilizer by the time you’re done with it.

Needless to say, after thirty years, I never got around to writing this novel. It’s always been the same novel and it was always about a composer (working here under the suggestion “write what you know”) dealing with creative issues. But during the decades I’ve had this gestating in my mind, my narrator (like me but not necessarily me) has been growing older if not wiser and facing different issues. And now, some of my characters – whom I’ve been living with all these years – have been evolving in much the same way. It has become, in a sense, a “coming-of-old-age” novel.

Structuring it was a problem – just sitting down and writing from the beginning and working my way towards some end or other didn’t work for me. It was, first of all, not the way I wrote music, so why not experiment with structuring a novel similar to the way I write music?

A few years ago, a friend of mine was telling me about this project he’d gotten himself into: during the month of November, lots of people around the country (actually, around the world) take part in National Novel-Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for short. During the month, you write your novel. You start on the 1st and on the 30th, you stop.

The idea is to motivate yourself to write 50,000 words. Your novel may not be done in a month and maybe you didn’t quite make the goal of 50,000 words but the important thing is, you tried. And whether your novel is good or whether it’s crap doesn’t matter. It’s just simply the idea of creating something, the satisfaction of actually (finally) having done it, in addition to doing it with a dedicated sense of purpose, suffering through it while other people are doing it with you.

Now, back when the mania over Dan Brown’s novel, “The DaVinci Code” was raging – a book I had spent two years avoiding – I decided in advance of the movie coming out, to write a parody of it. This also meant I was actually going to have to read the thing, but it was summer and I wasn’t composing anything at the moment. So I sat down and just started writing. Now granted, writing a parody meant I didn’t have to worry about plot or development or structural issues and character development from scratch, but I did have to make the parody work on its own level: you should be able to read my book without having read the original source material and still enjoy it. And so I transplanted the premise to a musical level, curiously not knowing how the original was going to end before I’d even started the second chapter.

And soon, I had written “The Schoenberg Code,” a serial novel in twelve installments (so many musical puns in there...).

When I was done, I was amazed to have discovered it was 45,000 words long and essentially written in two weeks, but spread out over a little over a month. You see, I still had to read (and sometimes re-read) the original plus I had a job which meant not all of my time could just be dedicated to tapping away on the computer.

So I started thinking, if I can do 45,000 words in 2 weeks, basically, could I manage 50,000 in a month on an original topics?

That’s when I started mapping out my own novel, going at it from an entirely different viewpoint, creatively speaking. But last November was not conducive to putting everything aside and writing a novel. I was, after all, busy composing the song cycle, “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” which I wanted to finish by February and I knew if I put it aside for anything, I’d probably never come back to it.

But now, I, uhm... have no job and, by the way, I JUST FINISHED THIS PIECE OF MUSIC – so rather than going to Disney World, I’m going to write a novel.

And hey, look – it’s November 1st and the day is more than half-shot already plus I’m going to a concert tonight. And here I am, blogging 2500 words in the last two hours. Uhm, let’s see, if I blogged 2700 words last night about the Hallowe’en Party at Stravinsky’s Tavern and then 2500 words this afternoon about the newly completed violin and piano piece, why can’t I write 50,000 words in a month? At 2,000 words a day, that’d be 60,000 words, right?

And what luck – tonight, we set the clocks BACK an hour, so I actually have an extra hour to write my novel! Woo hoo!

Okay, time to get to work. NaNoWriMo is calling me!