Willows, part 1

I'll start things off here by talking about my favorite piece that I've written so far, the lengthily titled "The Wind in the Willows for male voice and one or more instruments."

It's a set of six songs using texts taken from Kenneth Grahame's novel (which very conveniently went into the public domain right around the time I started working on this), written in the Fall of 2004. I probably have a lot to say about choosing the texts, so I'll save that for another post. Right now I want to talk about rhythm.

First, a little bit about what the piece is. I guess the easiest way to describe certain things about it is to copy the notes that accompany the score verbatim. I apologize that they'll are a little boring to read, but they summarize a lot fairly well, and they're necessary to accurately read any bits of the score I might post:

"* The Voice part can be performed by any male voice. The piece (as a whole) should be transposed to fit the singer's most comfortable range.
"** The Instrument part can be performed by any combination of one or more instruments, provided that at least one of them is capable of sustaining a pitch for the indicated durations. The register at which the Instrument part is notated is arbitrary; it should be transposed by octaves to fit each instrument's most comfortable range. This transposition does not need to be consistent from one song to the next.
"Performance notes:
"- Breath marks in the Instrument part indicate a separating silence, slightly shortening the preceding note.
"- Breath marks in the Voice part indicate a slight hesitation, except in "Dulce Domom," [the 3rd song] where they indicate an audible breath without pause.
"- Articulations are left to the performers' discretion.
"- The use of vibrato is left to the performers' discresion, but it should be consistent throughout.
"- Tempo indications are suggestions. There is no need for metric precision; the pulse should be organic and flud.
"- Unless specified otherwise, [quarter note] = [quarter note] at time signature changes."

I guess the gist of that is that a lot of this piece is deliberately left unwritten, and what is written is vague, to put it bluntly. That point is much more obvious when you look at the score itself. What's on the page is pitches, rhythms, lyrics, and some suggestions to help make sense of them (such as a few tempo and dynamic indications). I felt (and still feel) that to write more -- that is, to dictate how to the songs should be interpreted and performed -- was unnecessary. You can think of it as an exercise in trust -- trusting that performers are capable of thinking for themselves. But more importantly than that is the issue that any given person will naturally interpret music differently. A performer creating his/her own interpretation will almost certainly be a better performance than a performer trying to recreate someone else's interpretation.

Of course there's good reason that most music isn't written this way. Typically, the composer's interpretation is an inseperable aspect the music. In this case, that simply wasn't so.

There's always going to be more in a performance than there is on paper. A performance contains infinite variables. There's a customary place for what's on paper to stop, and the performer takes over from there. I think the location of that boundary warrants some questioning. Usually you'll find it's there for a reason. But a composer shouldn't just accept it and write down everything he hears in his head simply because that's the way he hears it. Do you hear that melody played by a violin because it's written for a violin, or just because it works on one?

Oh, crap, this post is pretty long already. I guess I'll save that rhythm stuff I intended on posting about for next time.