The Watermelon Works

unrelated fiddling

2009-01-22T16:47:00.000-08:00

(Unrelated to anything in the previous post) I wrote a little piano piece. Very little -- about a minute of repetitive music. It roughly follows pop-song form (AABA) and uses a sort of modal scale (F-G-A-B-C#-D-E) that I've used before and like to fiddle with. This is nothing special, but I suppose there is something to occasionally writing little songs that don't try too hard.

Anyway, picking up from last time, I mentioned that I wanted to do something modular. For whatever reason I started thinking about a hypothetical modular piece as monophonic. (I seem to naturally gravitate to monody, which might seem strange, but whatever.) I was going to write a long melody which I would then divide into segments which I could move about into new contexts; the first part of the piece would be the melody, the second (presumably much longer) part would be the playing around with it. Then I thought, as long as I insist on emulating Medieval music, I might as well go all the way and write my melody as an elaborate counterpoint to a chunk of plainchant. I quite like juxtaposing that ancient, organic approach with the modern, modular approach. Also, it would give the "segments" a context out of which to be taken without muddling with modern harmonic ideas (that would be irrelevant to the piece).

Meanwhile, I have given no further thought to the problem posed in the last post. The drive to create randomly-generated music comes and goes inexplicably, and I guess it's backed off for now.

fiddling

2009-01-15T09:09:00.001-08:00

I've been fiddling around with randomly-generated music for the past week or so. Some interesting stuff has come out of it, but it's not accomplishing what I want it to.

Problem: Create music which satisfies both of the following.
1. randomly generated with the appearance of order
2. has a transparent process

Thinking Songs solved that problem quite well, but in that case only the pitch material was randomly generated. Every other aspect of the piece was designed specifically to meet the second criterion above. Also, it's monophonic; as soon as you introduce harmony to the music, the complexity increases exponentially and the transparency is buried.

Meeting the first criterion on its own is much easier than you might expect, which is primarily why I'm so interested in aleatoric music in the first place. It often happens on its own. I'm convinced that John Cage had to go to great lengths of "cheating" to get his Music of Changes to sound as chaotic as it does. And if you throw something like repetition into the algorithm, the appearance of order is unavoidable.

So I've been writing a lot of randomly generated music this past week which sounds composed -- and even sounds good. But there's just not much point if the process isn't transparent. Why go to the trouble of randomly generating things if the end result just sounds like a normal (if somewhat mediocre) piece? As of now I have no idea how to solve the problem without taking the amount of control I did with Thinking Songs.

Also, inexplicably, I've had a strong urge to write modular music, which has done a good deal to complicate the above (as it is a particularly ill-suited approach to the problem). I should just write something to get it out of my system.

wrap up

2008-11-18T14:26:00.000-08:00

I've been reasonably productive for the last month or so.

- wrote a couple Thinking Songs
- wrote a more-or-less randomly generated string quartet
- finished Objects

I expected to have more to say, but I guess not. Everything's kind of wrapped up at the moment, and I don't get much out of talking about stuff that's already done. I'll try to make a point of posting once I start on something new.

Objects again

2008-10-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

Shortly after my last post (about four months ago), I wrote two more movements for Objects. I wasn't happy at the time with the way it was turning out. Then I was distracted for a few months. Today I went back and listened to what I had, and was surprised to find that I liked it. So, I think Objects works.

Here's the first page of the second poem, if you'd like to see a bit of what this looks like.

However, I don't think I'm going to keep working on it. The process of writing it is too methodical to be creatively satisfying, and too creative to work on when I don't feel like thinking. I'll probably change my mind some day and go back to it, but for now I'll regard the three poems as done. It's already about 6½ minutes of music as it is, so it might be for the best to leave it be. Although I have to admit there really should be at least a few more movements; it wasn't meant to be complete at this point, and it doesn't feel complete.

But for now I feel much more like doing something John Cage-ish. Maybe I'll write a few Thinking Songs to get back into the swing of it.

Objects

2008-06-09T14:24:00.000-07:00

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.

gradual process

2008-03-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

Finished the Canons piece last week. Decided to omit the titles as they didn't contribute anything, and just designate the piece 3.2008.

I'm not sure how I feel about writing it out by hand rather than using the computer. It did save time, but it's somehow less satisfying. It doesn't feel finished that way. Maybe next time I'll compromise by using the computer but relaxing my formatting standards.

Sorting through my files (both electric and physical), I found a lot of stuff I had forgotten about, or that I like better than I remember. BUT, none of it demands my attention. If anything's unfinished, it's something that I don't feel strongly enough about to finish. Everything is done! Now I can start writing new music, and that's pretty sweet. I'm starting with a piano piece that's been an idea waiting patiently in my head for a year or two, based on Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. More on that later.

One thing I came across in my sorting is a clarinet solo I wrote for a music theory seminar in college, and I particularly like it. Another piece with no cause for a title, so I'll be consistent and label it 2.2005. The project it was written for was to present a "theory" to the class, along with an original piece of music using that theory. I picked Steve Reich's "Music as a Gradual Process." Go read the article. It's short and clear and important (to me personally for a number of reasons, but also to the development of music for several decades following its writing), and explains 2.2005 better than I could. Except I will say that one challenge I put to myself writing it was to make the piece sound like "me," not like Reich.

Here it is: Page 1, page 2

Canons again

2008-02-27T15:29:00.000-08:00

To solve the instrumentation problem from last time: rather than use an ensemble that can re-group itself for each movement, I re-wrote the piece so that it only calls for 1 grouping. The new instrumentation is 2 flutes, clarinet, piano, 2 violas and cello.

And so I did that, and that took an hour or three, and then I set about actually writing the sucker out. Six hours later, I've got the first movement. This is why I get bored before finishing anything. Using Finale (the desktop music publishing program), putting down 8 pages of simple, straight-forward music [at least as far as notation goes] and making it look the way I want it, with all of the thinking done before-hand, took 6 hours. While the actual creative portion of three times as much music took half that.

And finally this afternoon it dawned on me. I don't have any reason to be doing that. These pretty, professional-looking scores that I'm printing are just going into a file box anyway. I could totally just write these out sloppy-wise on paper and save the formatting/data entry of computer-produced scores for when I have a reason to print it up nice-looking.

Sometimes I'm a genius.

recursive canons

2008-02-20T14:02:00.000-08:00

My "Canons" (formerly "Orchestral Canons" -- they don't have new a name yet) are a 4-movement piece I had originally started a very long time ago -- probably the start of my Junior year (2003), but I'm not sure. They're a ridiculously simple idea, which probably accounts for why they're very effective.

The only work I had left on them was orchestrating the final movement, and it looks from my notes like I had a good start on that. But in this case I'm actually glad I didn't finish. In reflection, with the benefit of a much clearer philosophy, I can see that I was screwing them up.

Here's what it sound(s/ed) like:

The orchestral reading sessions were (I assume still are) one of the highlights of UW-Madison's School of Music. Anyone who wants to (granted he knows what he's doing and can commit to the massive amount of work involved) can sign up to have something sight-read (and, time allowing, rehearsed for a few minutes) by one of the school's two orchestras.

Here's the second movement ("Gag"*): UW-Madison Chamber Orchestra -- Reading Session (Bear in mind that this is sight-read.)

It sounds kind of cool and pretty in that Ligeti sort of way, and I was pretty damn pleased at the time. It doesn't sound at all like me, but that's not something I really care that much about -- either it's worth writing or isn't. But the problem is you can't tell what's going on.

Here's what's going on:

Each movement has a very simple theme, or germ or kernel are better words. In the case of "Gag," the kernel is only four notes in two voices:

The shape of the kernel dictates the shape of the piece as a whole. Each note will represent a statement of the theme (or vice versa). First there will be a statement of the kernel at a given transposition and augmentation. (For non music people: transposition is pitch level (how high or low it is), and augmentation is something like duration (how long the notes are).) The second note (in the second voice) begins halfway though the first note, so the second statement will begin halfway though the first statement. The second note is a 4th lower than the first note, so the second statement will be a 4th lower than the first statement. The second note is 3/4 the length of the first note, so all of the notes in the second statement will be 3/4 the length of their counterparts in the first statement. And so on.

You could call this recursive or, at a stretch, fractal. There is such a thing as fractal music, typically rendered by synthesizers and written by computer programs, and this is certainly not that. I've pointed out before the importance of clarity to me. The audience should be able to hear exactly what's happening, and everything that's happening.

In that regard, these pieces are complete failures as I've orchestrated them.

The problem is that I used an orchestra. Blending is something an orchestra, especially the strings, does automatically. It's one of its major strengths. For these to work, every statement needs to be clearly distinct from everything else that's going on. If there are four simultaneous statements of a two-voice kernel (and there are), it should sound like four distinct things happening, not an 8-note chord.

My next step is to figure out what instruments I'll use. The trick here is that most of the movements call for three groups of three instruments, while the second movement calls for four groups of two instruments.

Ideal for 3x3 would be something like 3 woodwinds (flute, clarinet & bassoon), 3 brass (maybe trumpet, horn, tuba), and either piano or 3 strings (maybe violin, viola, cello). Piano has the advantage of not blending as easily as strings, while strings have the advantage of being able to sustain a note for ridiculously long periods of time (important for the piece).

Ideal for 2x4 is harder to pin down - probably 3 pairs of identical instruments plus piano. I keep coming back to piano because of its advantage in being able to be both a 2-voice or 3-voice (or 4-voice) group.

So, how could I make a 2x4 instrumentation out of the suggested 3x3 instrumentation (or something similar to it)? I'm thinking as I type, here. I could use woodwinds, strings and piano for the 3x3, then use (1) high winds, (2) high strings, (3) low wind and low string and (4) piano for 2x4. No, strings blend too clearly - if I use them at all, they have to stay together. I could have a player from each group of 3 sit out for the second movement, and have the piano cover 4 voices. I don't like that, though -- the second movement builds up, and having two players sit out would counter that effect. This is clearly going to take more thinking than I have room for in an already long post.

*The other movements are "Tic," "Sneeze" and, probably, "Song." At the time, I liked to name things after I was done with them. I haven't decided weather or not to keep the titles; they're cute, but don't really add anything.

Fingerpaint again again again

2008-02-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

Fingerpaint is finished, last Friday. I don't really have anything else to say about it. For all my posting about it, I realize I've actually said next to nothing about Fingerpaint. I'm very happy with the way it turned out, but I'm also kind of sick of it after dragging out its "writing" for so long. If you really want to know what's up with it and can read music, I'd be happy to send out the score. But it will be a few months at least before I'm willing to talk about it intelligently. So I'm just going to immediately go on to posting about the next thing I'm working on.

Fingerpaint again again

2008-02-01T10:20:00.000-08:00

Okay, it's been over two weeks since I've done any writing. There have been a lot of other things going on, and I could easily use that as an excuse. But the truth is, I've had plenty of time to work, and I just haven't been. This piece could have been finished almost over night, but instead it's been dragged out for almost two months. Enough of this.

New rule for Daniel: Until Fingerpaint is finished, I won't listen to any new Glenn Gould CDs (I've been working my way through the wonderful box set of his complete studio recordings), and I won't rent any CDs from the library.

Also, so I don't lose any momentum after Fingerpaint is done: From now on*, I won't open Winamp, play a video game or read a book unless I've already spent at least an hour writing.

This seems childish, I know, but it's what I need.

*during the day, on weekdays, assuming I'm not away from home

Are we there yet?

2008-01-15T14:12:00.000-08:00

I'm considering abandoning "Fingerpaint." When I came back to it after being away for several weeks for the holidays, I found that it wasn't quite working. Now, that's not a big deal. I could easily figure out what wasn't working, why, and how to fix it, and I did, and it's back on track. The problem is that it got that way in the first place without my noticing.

Writing it at this point is a chore, but one that I considered worthwhile because (1) I like the piece and (2) if I don't force myself to finish things, I won't ever finish anything. But "Fingerpaint" is supposed to be light and simple. The time and effort I find myself having to put into it is completely disproportionate to the results. Not that there's anything wrong with the results -- it's turning out how I wanted it to. But since I'm bored with it, I'm writing excruciatingly slowly, and a light, simple piece is a disappointing result to all that time.

If I walk away from it at this point, I'll probably never come back to it. Maybe I should use this thing I've heard about called "will power," and just write the thing and be done with it.

Thinking Songs

2007-12-18T11:36:00.000-08:00

I left off saying something about pulling order out of chaos. That's one of the major ideas behind "Thinking Songs," a set of pieces for solo piano "written" in the spring of 2005. I put "written" in scare quotes because they're randomly-generated pieces. What I wrote in 2005 was a sort of algorithm used to create the Thinking Songs, and I've made a few since then and consider it to be a perpetually growing collection.

What these are is hard to explain. I'll start with the "program note" from the score: "These songs are thinking. Each song is the brief life of a mind consisting of melody. It remembers its own thoughts and manipulates them. Occasionally it hears something it didn't already know; those are the loud bits. Whether it remembers or listens, what it remembers or hears, and how it remembers are determined by a simple algorithm and coin flips."

Here's a sample of what the written music looks like. And the performance notes you need to make sense of that score: "Rhythms are left for the most part to the performer's discretion. Each note should have roughly equivalent weight, so that there is no sense of meter-imposed structure. Breath marks represent silences."

So you've essentially got a series of short monophonic (monophonic = one-note-at-a-time) phrases, usually between 1-5 notes long but potentially much longer. Each of these phrases is either stimulus or memory. The stimuli are single, completely random notes, played fortissimo (very loud). The memories are repetitions or modified repetitions of things that have already happened in the piece, played piano (soft) or quieter with the memory being one dynamic (volume) level below the section it's remembering.

The memories can be transposed (played higher or lower) by an interval already present in the song, or they can be inverted (flipped upside down), or both. These are simple operations, easy for the audience to hear what's going on and where things are coming from. But at the same time they give the song the potential to make anything out of a small amount of material, given enough time to fool around with it. The result is that you can listen along as a pseudo-mind combines and manipulates and recombines ideas to create new, original ideas.

The reason rhythms are left out is for clarity. In early drafts I included rhythms (and just about everything else) in the randomly generated content. In that incarnation, I could see the song's thought process as I was making it, and I found it terribly fascinating. But listening to it it just sounded like chaos. So I tweeked and fiddled and adjusted the algorithm until I got something where the audience could have as much fun hearing the thought process as I had writing it down. That is, if you have fun with that sort of thing. It sounds like a cross between Gregorian chant and Simon (both of which I enjoy). But it also sounds like it's thinking.

It's been a week since my last post, so I'd better put something up here.

2007-12-12T15:05:00.000-08:00

Fingerpaint is coming along little by little. I'm not terribly excited about how it's turning out. It's working, and it's turning out as intended -- I'm just not excited about it. Possibly because it's from 3 years ago. My personality is the sort that wants to be thinking about something new; if I've already worked out how it will work, and know it will work, I lose interest. A frustratingly persuasive part of my brain doesn't see the point of writing down something it already knows (or in cleaning a bathroom that was already clean last week). So I force myself to work on it a little each day, but mostly I want to work on other projects.

One thing that I always seem to have going in one form or another is some sort of randomly-generated crap. Now, there are good, serious pieces that I've written using randomly-generated content, but those are not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about pointless John Cage's Music of Changes rip-offs. I don't really understand why, but every few months I feel compelled to make something like that. I think it's just the act of doing something that results in making something, but without using any mental effort. Kind of like what I imagine knitting to be. So I've spent several hours flipping coins this last week. I've never actually finished one of these "pieces" because, like I said, they're pointless. It's the act of doing it that I enjoy, of watching "music" materialize in front of me. There's no reason to finish, because it loses its worth when it's an object on paper taken out of that happening-on-its-own context.

But also, it occasionally creates something beautiful, a tendency which I find strange and intriguing. The more I play with it, the more I think of "order" as being only a matter of perception. I've found some fun ways of playing with that notion, but getting into that would be a long post so I'll save it for later.

Fingerpaint again

2007-12-05T15:00:00.000-08:00

As I work on Fingerpaint, I'm realizing a potential problem with the piece as it's currently forming. Hopefully blogging about it will help me sort out possible solutions.

I've mentioned before that I have a strong Inner Steve Reich. By which I mean I want any processes in my music to be transparent and clear to the audience as they're listening. Now, as far as strictly musical processes go, this isn't a problem with Fingerpaint. "Theme" material is stated, then it's pushed around and wiggled with -- couldn't be more straightforward. But, like I said last time, Fingerpaint is extremely programmatic. And it's not really clear what's "going on" without knowing which portions of music correspond to which descriptive headings.

Possible solution number 1: Ignore it. This is what I did two years ago when I started writing it. I didn't consider it a problem then. My philsophy hasn't changed, so what has changed? Maybe my perspective on what's important to the piece. That tells me that I should spend more time refamiliarizing myself with it before I resume writing. Hum.

Possible solution number 2: Each section is repeated exactly. I considered this after finding that solution number 3 doesn't work. But some of the sections are too short for this to work. And I don't like exact repetition as a rule. Because it's repetitious. :P

Possible solution number 3: Textural elements of each section are repeated. Instinctively anticipating my dislike of solution number 2, I skipped right ahead on to this. The "variation" sections use pitch material from the "theme," repeating pitch content (nearly) verbatim but changing just about everything else. And each section so far uses only a portion of the "theme" material. So I figured I could repeat the section using a different portion of "theme" pitch material, keeping the Everything Else that defines that section. I didn't feel the result was clear enough to warrant the extra length it necessitates. And a big problem with solutions 2 and 3 is that they force a classical-esque symmetry on the piece. Part of the fun of Fingerpaint is that it's extremely asymmetrical.

Possible solution number 4: Each section uses the entire pitch material. Typing out solution 3 brought this to mind as another obvious answer. The biggest problem with this is it wouldn't allow the piece to jump around unpredictably. It's methodical, and that's very much not Fingerpaint.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that ignoring the problem is the way to go. Being able to follow along with the program notes just isn't anywhere near as important as maintaining the pacing (or lack thereof). I can't insert reference points; it's just not meant to be organized. And if you're "following along," you'd end up reducing the piece to some corny Mickey Mousing.

I've convinced myself that not only do you not need to follow the program, but it's best if you can't follow the program. (Hey, this blogging thing really works; I finish the post and I have my answer.) Now I need to decide if I leave the headings in at all. Yeah, I do; you might not need to know what's "going on," but I'd like you to at least know which "themes" are which colors.

Fingerpaint mystery

2007-12-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to decipher the notes I've made for a piece called "Fingerpaint" which I started in late 2004 or early 2005. At the time I had basically had the piece written in my head; I just needed to work out the details and write it down. That's a fairly labor-intensive process, and I was distracted by a number of other things, so I put it off. Eventually it got to the point where I didn't remember anything that I didn't have down in my notes. And there it sat for two years. Now I'm trying to figure it out so I can finally write the damn thing.

I have 4 things:
1. The finished first movement (I'm very lucky I have this, as I can compare it to the corresponding notes to see what most of my shorthand meant, not to mention see how the piece was going to work.)
2. Four brief passages of music, titled "Blue," "Green," "Yellow" and "Red." These are a sort of set of "themes" - the material off of which all the material in the piece is based.
3. A list of subheadings (the piece is extremely programmatic, and every few measures there is a descriptive note in the score). I'm extremely lucky once again that the piece works that way, as I can use this list to reconstruct almost the entire piece (except for the items which I don't remember/understand, which I'll simply have to re-write fresh.)
4. My memory. Anyone who knows me can guess that this is fairly worthless. What I've written above is most of everything I remember.

Here's the aforementioned list of subheadings:
- blue [this is in a double box - don't really know why]
- b. lines (3-4) ["blue lines" in the score. The numbers in parentheses correspond to the number of measures that section lasts]
- b. print (1) ["blue thumb print" in the score]
- clean f. ["clean fingers" in the score. And that ends movement 1]
- green [in a double box]
- slow, curvy line
- heavy, short line
- mix blue + green [this is in a box]
- blue-green [boxed]
- clean f.
- yellow [double-boxed]
- 3-finger print (?) [I assume the "?" means I didn't know how many measures it would be, but that doesn't make a lot of sense since most sections don't have a parenthetical number.]
- quick line (1-2)
- mix yellow + green [boxed]
- yellow-green [boxed]
- mix yellow-green w/ blue-green [boxed]
- (mixture)
- clean f.
- dab of yellow
- dab of blue
- mix yellow + blue [boxed]
- yellow-blue (not green) [boxed]
- clean f.
- red [double-boxed]
- dab of blue
- mix red and blue [boxed]
- purple [boxed. Presumably the red-blue mixture.]
- clean f.
- a color on each finger
- led to mess [bracketed. I have no idea what this means, whatsoever, but it seems to be crucial.]
- something on the wall
- bit of low w/ pauses [presumably not an actual heading, just a note to self (?)]
- paint the walls

I really like this piece (obviously - otherwise I wouldn't be going to this trouble). It's sort of like a 4-themed "Theme & Variations," except the variations are ridiculously simple, almost the sort of things you could get by remixing a recording of the theme(s). The movement that was written down pushes the "blue" music around the way fingers push fingerpaint around. As I recall, I played with actual finger paint to research this.

[update:] Notably absent from that list of things I have is an original pen-on-paper copy of the finished movement. I write at the piano, on paper, and probably wouldn't throw that paper away at least until I was completely done with the piece. But the only music I have is a finished, printed copy. This leads me to believe that I wasn't exaggerating much when I said I had the piece written in my head. Very unusual for me.

Willows, part 4

2007-11-28T14:00:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-26T12:24:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-20T14:57:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-16T11:26:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-14T10:34:00.000-08:00

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.