Just finished this last weekend and I've been tidying up some details. There may be more pieces to go with this one. The illustrations are sketches I have been doing during the same time I was composing the music, but I claim no connection between them.
THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
Both the pictures and the music are simple but fresh sounding. I was a bit unsure of what happened at the end. The displayed score ends very early after a minute so I couldn't see the notes you wrote.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Maury. That was rather what I was aiming for. This was a commission from our local chamber music society and I wanted to write something accessible as they don't hear a lot of contemporary music.
ReplyDeleteVery nice, Bryan. I always enjoy your handling of harmony. The clustered chords are very evocative, not muddy. The repeat at the beginning is so beautifully voiced it can hardly be detected. I would only opine that as a listener, I'm uncertain of the relationship between the chordal sections and the Allegro. It's a marked contrast for sure. At the Allegro, the sense that there is an underlying chord progression falls away. And so the listener turns his concentration to the rhythmic interest, which you have written in a way which seems resistant to patterning. There is a sense of dislocation/alienation there, which seems enforced by the remainder of the piece. I love how it goes all quiet in the middle. The counterpoint in the second half is stronger. The form is quite legible, the satisfying final return to the opening chords, with sections in between whose character is memorably differentiated. I'm curious to see how other installments might comment on the stark contrasts you have laid out here.
ReplyDeletecool pictures too :)
ReplyDeleteJives, thanks so much for the very considered comment! I will be mulling it over for a few days, I am sure.
ReplyDeleteI understand what Jives is saying but the contrasting allegro is so simple that it seems like a yin and yang contrast. Agree about the spaced harmonies of the slow arpeggios, nicely done. Perhaps some minor editing can introduce a clearer melodic or harmonic interrelation between the two but I think care is needed. If it becomes too complicated the charm is lost.
ReplyDeleteThanks to you Maury as well for your comments. It is so interesting to me to hear your reactions to a piece I have written. We are not getting performances these days, so this is the only way I can judge audience reaction.
ReplyDeleteBryan,
ReplyDeleteIn our discussions about the present dire situation for classical music, I have advocated reluctantly that classical composers need to find a new (effective) way of writing simpler music (or, in extremis, better "popular" music). This is not my preference to be sure, as I tend to prefer more complex music even in popular music. But I give Glass, Reich, Budd and others credit to at least take a stab in that direction. The problem is that I don't think they have solved the balance of repetition and variety needed to extend works in a compelling way for larger audiences. This doesn't need to be harmonically driven either as the Indian ragas musicians have techniques to extend melodically organized material and rhythms.
Previously you posted a series on Sofia Gubaidilina and in her early work she had a couple of compositions along these lines (Serenada and Chaconne). Unfortunately to me she later went in a more artsy static mode I assume because of music establishment pressures; but to my ear much less effective than these earlier pieces which she didn't stick with and develop AFAIK.
I don't know if this was what Jives was getting at but what may be the issue is how would you extend to extend to 20 minutes what you have done effectively for 5 minutes. I use Haydn's piano sonatas as a marker. They use fairly simple material but Haydn keeps it going and when it ends you look at the watch and 20 minutes have passed. . Without having the whole score it is not easy to see what is happening over the course of the piece for me as I am more score dependent. To my ears the Allegro sections seem a bit more varied than the arpeggio sections. But I like it as a 5 minute work at least.
Thanks for these further thoughts, Maury. If you share with me your email address I would happily send you a pdf of the whole score. If you recall, my previous piece, Dark Dream for violin and guitar, extended to 14 minutes and I think it worked, structurally.
ReplyDeleteI think if you are influenced at all by traditional compositional methods, the extension of musical ideas to larger forms is certainly achievable. My concept for this present work is to have two more pieces with all three alluding to time and memory.
What do you think of Messiaen, who wrote a tremendous number of very long pieces, though divided into numerous sections?
I was referring more to a single movement extended to 15-20 minutes more than several different movements put together.
ReplyDeleteThis was another discussion we had on number of separate movements in a work which I can't search for here unfortunately and have to repeat. But summarized I think I would say 1 movement is fine; two captures a yin yang, three if there is any da capo quality to the 3rd movement is trite, if not then 3 and more moves over to the suite. Of course pop listeners are quite comfortable with the suite or collection of songs. But it would be good to have a more viable way to produce a 15 minute movement that wouldn't frost the upper quartile of pop listeners. The suite in classical music does have a lesser status for obvious reasons. This is a hard topic to discuss briefly.
The Netherlanders solved the multi movement work through the cantus firmus. Later composers particularly with Beethoven going forward really did not. In the 20th C of course there was the tone row but it was a rather fitful unifying device in longer works. There was also an attempt at unifying motives across movements in non serial music but again rather fitful in practice.
Messiaen is a difficult composer to talk about succinctly but in something like Turangalila or Trois Petites Liturgies there is a lot of repetition. I like Turangalila but call it quits after the first 5 movements as I have heard it all at that point. But Turangalila overall also has a yin yang contrast playing against the suite of 10 movements.
Again I want to be clear that I am speaking on behalf of the pop music listener who may like a few classical works but doesn't really listen to much classical. Somehow these listeners have to be reached.
In terms of communicating sending scores are you familiar with wetransfer.com This allows people to download larger files without you having to deal with multiple addresses yourself. You just upload the file once and you are done.
I can't leave an email address in a public forum so do you have a contact link somewhere? Thanks
What ties together longer movements and works? As you say, the use of a cantus firmus unified any number of works based on Catholic liturgy. The tone row, as used by Schoenberg in his Violin Concerto, seemed to work pretty well. But a lot of what made it work was simply creative variation. The 19th century saw the expansion of all formal ideas into longer movements. I think you have to accept that Bruckner, for example, found ways of structuring longer movements.
ReplyDeleteRe Messiaen, I was thinking more of the piano music like Catalogue d'oiseux. You can certainly call the work as a whole a suite, but there are some quite long individual movements united by birdsong motifs varied against a background of landscape representation.
But what I find interesting in your comment is the suggestion that we need a method or technique that is going to appeal to pop music listeners. I think that means we are talking about the rhythmic aspect most importantly. But I tend to chafe against the rhythmic rigidity of pop music.
You know, there are no temporal limits to any of the classical forms, except perhaps those based on dance. A Bach fugue has no obvious boundaries. As long as there is creative invention available, you can just keep going. This applies to all the contrapuntal forms of Renaissance music as well. You can keep having new points of imitation followed by episodes indefinitely. Until your creativity is exhausted. Same with the classical forms. What a successful longer form depends on is not some kind of structural trick, but on creative invention. In my view!
And then there is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
my email is bryantown@gmail.com
Bryan,
ReplyDeleteThanks.
My point unclearly expressed is that we probably needed some at least slightly different way of organizing a movement of say 15-20 minutes. If we do exactly what was done before it is hard to escape the comparisons. Also what has been tried in the 20th C doesn't work well enough for ears saturated constantly with pop music. Again I want to emphasize I am talking not about myself but about the top quartile of pop listeners who are receptive to some classical already or at least are not dead set against it. 19th C music is still intelligible enough even to these pop listeners as is Baroque but that doesn't help classical music stay out of the museum for most listeners and as importantly for funding agencies. Perhaps since Satie serious composers have once in awhile experimented along these lines and your piece here caught my ear similarly. But the question of formal structure remains, assuming we are not John Cage.
While top 40 style pop music often has pronounced percussion support, that is not true of all pop music. Many soft rock artists are popular and even some guitar strummers. Didn't Ed Sheeran occasionally go around to concerts with his acoustic guitar? Of course rhythm can be maintained instrumentally as Sibelius does. So I don't think it necessary to have someone pounding a drumkit to reach potentially receptive pop listeners. All of this depends also on whether someone thinks that we are in a genuine crisis for classical music right now or just a slight pause in the cycle before it becomes robust again as it was 100 years ago. if the latter then it doesn't matter much if we add new listeners from receptive pop listeners.
To return to the starting point I was just asking since I heard a kind of yin yang contrast in your work how that might be extended from 5 minutes into a 15-20 minute movement? Do we need to resort to past styles (or endless rondo as with pop music) or is there some other nuanced way to do that without getting into deep complexity? It is rather embarrassing at least to me that the medieval composers were more sophisticated about audible formal structure, with isorhythm and cantus firmus,than almost anytime since.
I sent the score on.
ReplyDeleteThanks for explaining. These are complex matters and I am understanding more what you are getting at -- I think! In fact, I think I agree very much with what you are saying. I look in a lot of different places for structural concepts and I think I am pretty much trying to figure out how to write music that might appeal to contemporary listeners, who are, as you point out, largely people who listen mostly to pop music.
Out of curiosity I was watching the movie Twilight and was surprised that at an important moment of bonding between the two lead characters, they achieve a mutual empathy over Claire de lune by Debussy. If he can be that evocative in a very popular movie for young people, then I see real potential.
It’s a very memorable piece, catchy even. The quiet mid section is beautiful, especially the way the opening theme returns. It has a yearning feel. And in fact when it returns again at the 4:30 mark, it’s a powerful moment. I like the flow of the music. The ending would be quite magical in a performance, I imagine. Had to listen twice.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Steven! High praise from a fellow composer is much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteI took a look at the score finally. Sorry for the delay. OK I see what you did at the end now. You snuck in sort of a broken Bb 9 chord as a pianissimo answer to the A Locrian which would be a semi conventional final chord for an indicated Bb major key. That broken chord occurs elsewhere of course but mostly functions as the Locrian II. In m14 though it does seem to be used much as at the end.
ReplyDeleteAm I hallucinating or is that on track?