Objects

After a bit of a break from composing, I'm back to it again.

I mentioned briefly in the last post that I wanted to write a piano solo based on "Objects," the first part of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. The basic idea is to have a melody which mimics the speech sounds of reading the poems out loud, and harmony which mimics the overtones of vowel-production. Every sound is made up of many overtones - that is, many different pitches stacked on top of each other. The differences in the space between these pitches is what makes one sound sound different from another. In music, it's how you can tell what instrument you're hearing. In speech, it's how you can tell what vowel sound you're hearing. Basically (and this is over-simplifying a lot), the pitch of the second formant (the 2nd-lowest pitch in the sound) relative to the first formant (the lowest pitch in the sound) defines a vowel sound. So in a sense, vowels and harmony are the same thing.

The piece has two voices (a melody and a counter-melody). The lower voice is written by listening to myself read the poem, and mimicking the pitches and rhythms. The upper voice harmonizes with the lower voice at intervals roughly corresponding to the intervals which produce the appropriate vowels. Simple enough, right?

Last week I finally got around to trying it out, and it sounded like crap. Even though I picked poetry which has a distinctly musical sound, the sounds of speech translated to piano music do not sound musical anymore. The aspects of speech which contribute to that "musical" sound in the poetry are just a small part of all of the (technically musical) sounds that are actually going on. You don't expect speech to sound "musical," so I think your brain can isolate the aspects which do and just appreciate those. But when you take it out of the context of speech and play it on a piano, it works the other way around; your brain isolates the aspects which don't sound musical.

I tried to fix it today by simplifying everything. It was already over-simplified to start with relative to actual speech, of course, but now I'm really cranking up the simplification levels -- rounding off all the awkward edges and leaving something much easier to listen to. Also, I'm slowing down the tempo a lot; the harmonies here don't work like a normal harmonic language, but I think if it's going slow enough to really hear everything, you can hear that there is something going on that works on its own terms. I've done the first poem (about 40 words) that way. I think it works, but I'll hold off judgment until I listen to it fresh tomorrow. Honestly, I'll be surprised if it works well enough to make it worthwhile to keep at it.