The Final Stretch

After my meeting with Suzie (01/04/2020) I’d decided to arrange something for a wind band rather than compose. We spoke about my concerns of it being too cheesy and her recommendation was to arrange a piece rather than try to write something new in order to combat this. It was a good plan, and the piece I’d settled on was Stravinsky’s Tango. We had listened to it together and agreed that it would translate well onto wind instruments. However, I found that I was really reluctant to start working on this and I think it was because I wasn’t invested in the project and felt like I was doing it for the sake of doing it. So yet again, I changed my mind last minute.

I still wanted to focus on brass and wind instruments, and put the feedback from the SCO virtual workshop to use. I am a composer, not an arranger, and get excited about composing! I think I’d get excited about arranging if I knew what I was doing/was arranging a piece I really loved. I might have wasted the opportunities to arrange in this module but I think that my instrumental writing will hopefully improve because of the composing I’m doing.

I kept coming back to the idea of writing aleatoric music after listening to Chain 3 in our lecture a few weeks ago. It really captured me but my concern now was that I had to write something more extensive than the last submission. I had another meeting with Tom and discussed this and was advised that it could be longer, rather than have more instruments, and that a piece for brass, winds and light percussion could be something worth pursuing. After this meeting I felt a lot more confident in what it was I was doing now that I had a vague plan, but this was at quite a late stage in the semester. My indecisiveness really takes it toll sometimes. BUT instead of getting into a big panic, I created an extensive plan so that I’d feel more confident to start. It was on paper but my writing isn’t legible so I’ll type it up and take pictures of the sketches of structure and the opening.

The plan:

• Aleatoric music!
• Brass, winds and light percussion
• DON’T worry about harmony
• DON’T feel bad for using Cubase – the unmeasured timeline can/will be really help in testing out ideas
• DO be extremely precise in notation – show that you know exactly what sounds you’re hoping to achieve
• DO think about how it’d work in practice
• DO think about if it’d need a conductor/conducting cues
• DO think about interesting textures/pairings/groupings/sounds

SOUNDS YOU WANT TO EXPLORE

• lush horn melodies!
• mellow clarinet trills
• flutter tongue on brass instruments – can be aggressive
• muted trumpets
• pitch bends, specifically trombone
• high piercing clarinet
• triple tonguing in brass
• massive tutti crescendos

Witold Lutosławski – Chain 3

• the approach to structure by using grouping of instruments and overlapping the entries/exits to make everything smoothly transition
• conducting cues!
• precise notation
• transitions between fixed time signatures and free-time are smooth because of this overlapping effect/textural accompaniment

Alan Hovhaness – Lousadzak (Concerto for Piano and Strings)

• use of repeated figures in cells to create an underlying texture for the piano solo to be performed more freely
• indications of what sound quality/effect these textures should have are on the score

Whilst scouring YouTube for some inspiration and resources, I stumbled upon this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xabYn35ngaY. It’s about 7 minutes long and is a very quick overview of aleotoric music and some notations/techniques. It also shows how prevalent it is in video games, which I hadn’t really considered, and made me realise that the music for my game module this semester was aleatoric – I didn’t even realise! This video, along with this realisation, gave me a quick boost of confidence and also really helped me approach my composition in a more familiar way by looking at fragmenting parts and aiming to create an atmosphere.

A Final Reflection

After my last piece I wanted to stray away from writing straight into Cubase because I felt that personally it was limiting me and the way I think about composition. I wanted to explore interesting textures, so I sketched out a structure on paper, jotted down some things I was interested in and then opened Cubase, but just to use as a piano sound at first for pitches. I scribbled ideas on paper (revolutionary – I know) for the opening section and went back to Cubase to start experimenting with the more melodic/note-dependant sections. I think using both paper and a DAW really helped for this piece and I don’t think I could have really (easily) created the opening in DAW. The written element made me think more critically about both the sounds and timbres I was using, and how it could work in a live setting. Using Cubase for the later section was incredibly helpful because it meant I could quickly test out little snippets and see how they could interact with each other without a restricted timeline.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the progress I’ve made in my instrumental writing and I’m glad that I’ve tried to push myself and write for instruments that I would typically avoid notating. It’s provided me with more confidence to write for not only these instruments, but new instruments in general. I’m really grateful for the opportunities we had with both the Plus-Minus Ensemble and the SCO. Their comments and feedback were incredibly helpful and insightful during the composition process and again made me think of how important it is to think of the players you’re writing for.