Willows, part 4

The second of my Wind in the Willows songs is "Mr. Badger." And that's what I'll be talking about today.

First, I'll introduce you. Here is the score: page 1, page 2, page 3.* The performance notes which I posted earlier should clarify any questions about the peculiarity of the score.

And, for those of you who can't read music, this is what it sounds like: (click).* Well, not really what it sounds like, but a rough approximation via my crappy pseudopiano. The higher part (which starts solo) is the "Instrument" part, the lower part is the Voice part (sorry, I can't sing). The Instrument serves primarily as a drone (which you can't hear in the recording -- pianos don't drone).

The songs are somewhat tonal. For non-musicians: "Common Practice Tonality" is a musical system or theory which is used by most Western music -- everything from Bach to Beethoven to the Beatles is tonal. These songs aren't tonal in that way (they don't have "chords" or "scales" etc.), but they have a tonal center, which means there's a pitch on which the melody will inevitably end, and it wouldn't sound finished if it ended on a different pitch. The Instrument reinforces that center (and, arguably, creates it) by droning it constantly over/under the Voice.

Now, how the melody constructed. There's a series of pitches which for convenience sake I'll call "the OPCS." (Short for "ordered pitch class series." Essentially, it's an ordered list of note names, separate from rhythms and register/contour and anything else musical.) It's stated in its entirety at the start of the song by the Instrument. Each song starts that way -- with a statement of its OPCS by the Instrument.

"Mr. Badger"'s OPCS: B, D#, C#, A, B, E, F#, B, E, F#, G#, C#, B

Everything in the song, except for the drone, is part of a statement of the OPCS. But usually notes are missing from it. For instance, the Voice starts with the notes B, F# (notes 1 and 7 of the series) immediately followed by B, C#, F# (notes 1, 3 and 7 of the series), which are then followed by B, C#, B, F# (notes 1, 3, 5 and 7). It keeps growing this way, adding a note or two every time, until the entire OPCS is stated. Then, for the second half of the song, it shrinks again, one or two notes at a time.

It's my intention that you can hear this process happening. The complete statement of the OPCS at the start lets you know what the partial statements are a part of. And at the start of each (partial) statement, the drone is reiterated. Hopefully you could hear it without my explaining it first; I think it's fairly clear. A lot of composers like to play games and make rules for themselves to follow, myself included. But unlike most, I have a strong inner Steve Reich. He wants processes to be transparent.

As for the rhythms and contours that I've given the melody, they're taken fairly literally from the text. If your voice drops on a word when you speak it, the corresponding pitch is contextually low. If a word has a strong emphasis, it'll be longer and fall on a downbeat. And so on. That sounds kind of obvious, but it's rarely done.

I like the sound of language. It has unique and interesting rhythms and melodies, and it's my inclination to use and respect those sounds. When I first wrote the OPCS, I started with the middle of the song, the complete statement by the Voice (measures 39-43 if you're reading the score). I had some restrictions as far as what I wanted the tone of the melody to sound like; I knew I wanted to emphasize the intervals of the major 2nd and the perfect 5th. And I wanted to keep the rhythm simple with a constant quarter-note pulse. Beyond that, I basically just followed the text: spoke it out loud and mimicked the sound as best as my restrictions would allow. And the result was what I find to be pretty darn beautiful.

I plan to play with the sound of language in this way (that is, following the sounds but simplifying the rhythm similarly) in the future. Specifically, as a piano solo based on the sounds of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. Interesting copyright issue there: are you reproducing part of a book if you don't actually reproduce any words?


* Oh, and it goes without saying (legally), but everything I post here is copyrighted, including (and especially) any music and media files I post. Don't keep anything on your computer, or print anything or anything like that. Copyright Gremlins will stab you in your sleep. If you want something, email me (comfypants@gmail.com) or comment, and I will get you a non-illegal copy.

Willows, part 3

Here are the words to these "Wind in the Willows" songs I've been posting about (excerpts from Kenneth Grahame's book (published 1908), edited and selected by me (2004)):

     1. The Riverbank
     "This is the real life for a gentleman! Talk about your old
     river!" "I don't talk about my river," replied the patient Rat.
     "You know I don't, Toad. But I think about it," he added
     pathetically, in a lower tone: "I think about it all the time!"
     The Mole reached out from under his blanket, felt for the Rat's
     paw in the darkness, and gave it a squeeze.

     2. Mr. Badger
     "Very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before
     ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there
     was a city - a city of people. They built to last, for they
     thought their city would last forever. People come - they stay
     for a while, they flourish, they build - and they go. It is
     their way. But we remain."

     3. Dulce Domum
     "I know it's a - shabby, dingy little place," he sobbed forth at
     last, brokenly: "but it was my own little home - and I was fond
     of it - and I went away and forgot all about it - and then I
     smelt it suddenly - on the road, when I called and you wouldn't
     listen, Rat - and everything came back to me with a rush - and I
     wanted it! - O dear, O dear - and when you wouldn't turn back,
     Ratty - and I had to leave it, though I was smelling it all the
     time - I thought my heart would break!" The Rat stared straight
     in front of him, saying nothing, only patting Mole gently on the
     shoulder.

     4. The Open Road
     When Toad's violent paroxysms possessed him he would arrange
     bedroom chairs in rude resemblance of a motorcar and would crouch
     on the foremost of them, bent forward and staring fixedly ahead,
     making uncouth and ghastly noises, till the climax was reached,
     when, turning a complete somersault, he would lie prostrate
     amidst the ruins of the chairs, apparently completely satisfied
     for the moment.

     5. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
     Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid
     run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up,
     and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on his comrade's
     cheecks, and bowed his head and understood.

     6. Wayfarers All
     Forgetting the Rat, they slid into passionate reminiscence, while
     he listened fascinated, and his heart burned within him. With
     closed eyes he dared to dream a moment, in full abandonment, and
     when he looked again the river seemed steely and chill, the green
     fields grey and lightless. Then his loyal heart seemed to cry
     out on his weaker self for its treachery. "Why do you ever come
     back, then, at all?" he demanded of the swallows jealously. "And
     do you think," said the first swallow, "that the other call is
     not for us too, in its due season? In due time, we shall be
     homesick once more for quiet waterlilies swaying on the surface
     of an English stream. But today all that seems pale and thin and
     very far away. Just now our blood dances to other music."

As you can tell, this is not anything resembling a dramatic story. If you haven't read the book, you'll have no idea what's going on, or who any of these characters are. Even if you have read the book, these little blurbs will take some unpacking to figure out. They're not meant to make sense narratively. They're like snapshots of particularly poignant moments.

This morning, while reflecting on what I was going to post today, I decided to change the title of this piece. I wasn't very happy with the title being the same as the book plus a subtitle, and now three years too late I'll give it a good title: "Illustrations for The Wind in the Willows: 6 songs for male voice and one or more instruments." Longer, but more appropriate. That's the idea - that they're musical illustrations.

I was planning on writing about why I picked each of these "moments," and why I edited them down the way I did. (A few of them are unedited apart from proper nouns replacing pronouns; others I've cut out a phrase here or there; others are combinations of bits that were originally several pages apart.) But it occurs to me that to do that, I'd have to explain the story and the characters and analyze the book and give everything context. And you'd be left with fragments of a story instead of the stand-alone prose-poem-type-things that I've tried to fashion. So I'll just leave them as they are and let them be.

Next time: I'll (probably) finally talk about the music.

Willows, part 2

Let's see if I can remember what I was going to talk about last week before I got sidetracked. Something about rhythm in "The Wind in the Willows."

Here's a bit of it now (the introduction to the 5th song):


For those of you who can't read music, this is what it sounds like: (clicky) (If the link doesn't work, right click, copy link location, and paste the URL in a different window/tab. Let me know if that still doesn't work.)

For the life of me, I can't remember what I was going to say about that. But I made the image and sound file, so there must have been something. There's one more image involved:


For those of you who can't read music, if you want to hear what that sounds like, click the previous link. Because it sounds exactly the same. So it would seem that what I really wanted to talk about wasn't rhythm, but notation of rhythm. We've got two ways of writing something, both of which sound the same.

Well, not really. They're actually very different. The biggest difference is that in the first one, each measure (arguably) has 1 beat. (Maybe the 4/4 measure has two beats; it's not clear from the score.) And in the second one, each measure has 4 beats. (Maybe. That's also not clear from the score, but to be fair, if I were actually using the second version I would go to the trouble to insert extra dotted barlines to clarify where the beat divisions are, and there would be four beats in each of those measures.)

Traditionally, having multiple beats in one measure tells you something about those beats. For instance, beat 1 is the strongest and beat 3 is the second strongest. So by notating this the way I did (the first example), I took away that information. So you might think, in keeping with the deliberate vagueness I talked about last time, that I notated the rhythm the way I did in order to deliberately remove information. But that's not so. That never even occurred to me until just now.

When most people write something with rhythms like this, they'll use the second example's style of writing it. Or they might use a hybrid: the shorter note values of the second, with one beat per measure. So why use the larger note values? All else being equal, there is no musical difference between a half note in a dotted-half-note-equals-48 tempo and a quarter note in a dotted-quarter-note-equals-48 tempo.

I think what it comes down to is this: If I see varying beat lengths with an eighth-note pulse (for any non-musicians still with me, that's what the second example is; "pulse" here means something like "the basic rhythmic unit"), it feels mathematical. (Sure, the composer said something in the performance notes about "no need for metric precision," but these are precise, complex rhythms, and I'm gonna get it right.) On the other hand, if I see a page filled with almost nothing but quarter notes and half notes, it just looks easy. That might sound demeaning to performers, to imply that they wouldn't realize that the two different versions are actually the same, but that's not what I mean. I mean that an eighth-note pulse and a quarter-note pulse are actually different, the way two words with identical dictionary definitions have different implications. Notating it in a way that looks superficially "easier" is a sort of subconscious way of saying, "play this as if it were easy."

I never actually thought about this before. I knew that I had made a choice to notate "The Wind in the Willows" (all of the songs have the same rhythmic "language") a little strangely, because it "felt right" that way, and that's about it. I think that's neat how talking about stuff I thought I already knew is fun and educational. Hopefully more of my posts here work that way. [Cue the "The More You Know" jingle.]

Okay, I promise next time I'll actually write about music and not just about notating it. ...Probably.

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.

Introduction

I'm Daniel. I'm a composer, and this is going to be my place for writing about music. I'll write about things I'm working on, things I've written, and whatever general thoughts I have about music that I feel like writing down.

I should say some things about me so that people who find this blog will know who I am. So here are some things about me:
1. I was born and raised in Wisconsin.
2. I have a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
3. My composition teachers there included Joel Naumann, Steve Dembski and Laura Schwendinger.
4. I live in Ellensburg, WA, with my partner Lynn.

Okay, that was the boring part. Now I'll tell you why I'm making this blog. I'm making this blog as a motivational tool. In my last year at school, I was just starting to really "find my voice," as they say. And I was proud of what I was writing, not just because I liked the stuff. (Of course I would like what I'm writing. Why else would I write it?) I also felt it had some real merit.

But at the same time I didn't want to go to school anymore. I felt I needed a break from academia. And I was finally coming to accept the fact that I didn't want to ever be a teacher, which is pretty much the only job you can get with an advanced degree in composition. So after I graduated, I stopped going to school. Unfortunately, I also stopped writing seriously. In the two years after school, I didn't finish a single piece of music.

That's where this blog comes in. You're my imaginary audience. Having an imaginary audience will give me a sense of purpose. At the very least, it will be a way to share what I do with my friends -- and maybe with some electric friends as well.

And finally: Why is this called "The Watermelon Works?" That's a reference to In Watermelon Sugar, a book by Richard Brautigan. It's a book with an aesthetic I aspire to. If you want to know about that, you should find a copy and read it.