I think I mentioned that a few years back I decided to "de-digitize" my life, partially anyway. To that end I started a hand-written journal (with fountain pens, no less). I also started sketching in charcoal and pencil though that didn't last too long--I do create an illuminated capital each day in my journal, though. And I determined to go back to sketching in pencil when composing. This latter is really paying off.
I'm working on a new guitar piece and I have found composing for guitar to be particularly tricky. I'm handling that by starting on the instrument, exploring chords and motifs on the instrument so I will end up with something truly idiomatic. This is what I really like about the music of Angelo Gilardino and Leo Brouwer--it is always very guitaristic.
And in designing the form and structure of the piece, it is the pencil sketches that are really productive. I had fallen into the lazy practice of going directly to the music software (I use Finale, and have for a long time). The problem with this is that it forces you into the final stage, which really cripples the creative process. I find that sitting, messing around on the guitar, followed by staring hard at the blank staff paper, pencil in hand, is the best way to work. It gets everything in the right balance: idiomatic ideas from the instrument, loosely sketched out formal ideas, a few motifs, some chords and an overall plan. All this comes from a pencil on paper. And, as Schoenberg said, the eraser end of the pencil is more important than the lead end!
Here is an interesting early piece by Leo Brouwer that you rarely hear. I think my favorite idea is the lowering of the sixth string to E flat for the last section:
Always curious to know, how do you use the playback feature in Finale when composing?
ReplyDeleteI think I like middle Brouwer most of all. Was relistening to Espira Eterna recently and it really impressed me -- such imagination. A lot of his later works feel insipid by comparison.
My piano skills are rudimentary so I found the ability of Finale to playback any score you can input with reasonable instrumental fidelity to be very seductive! You can write something for orchestra and hear, roughly, what it will sound like. Mind you, as the piece I am working on right now for guitar will use tamboura, pizzicato, harmonics and other devices, Finale is pretty useless for that. But it can give you a reasonable facsimile of, say, a string quartet, or winds, or piano. And it reproduces the dynamics and you can use ritardando and so on. I tried out Sibelius once and I was horrified at how bad the sampled instruments sounded. But perhaps I was doing something wrong...
ReplyDeleteYes, you are quite right, pieces like Canticum, Elogio de la Danza, Espiral Eterna, Parabola and a couple of others are really "middle-period." His late period dates from El Decameron Negro when he returned to tonality. And I agree about his later works--they often seem like empty virtuosity.
Huh, Sibelius Sounds are usually okay -- similar to how you describe Finale. (The guitar sound is rubbish though -- for some reason they put in loud string squeaks everywhere!) For me, I use Sibelius to help work out time. My inner ear is getting better is terms of harmony, and I can always test things out on the guitar or piano, but my sense of time remains strangely inaccurate when composing. The playback gives a quick and useful approximation.
ReplyDeleteHow interesting! Yes, I'm sure Sibelius could not possibly be as bad as I experienced. I must have been missing something.
ReplyDeleteFinale has an excellent sample library, but the oboe, for example, sounds much better than the violin. It is also weirdly unpredictable sometimes: it won't acknowledge a pizzicato or a grace note, for example. When I consulted tech support once I got a solution that was so lengthy and peculiar that I never implemented it. However, I have been using Finale since the mid-90s so I know how to do pretty well anything! Music notation software is so incredibly complicated!
I think some composers, Gubaidulina comes to mind, do a lot of mathematical pre-composition to work on things like structural proportions. I'm about to do some of that myself. And additionally, I am going to work out a bunch of phrase durations.
I hadn't thought of working out timings precompositionally, that could be interesting!
ReplyDeleteI had a theory professor that described analysis as "composition in retrograde." But it really doesn't work that way.
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