S4/E5 Let’s Start Over

I now have good audio for my op. 1, no. 1 Big Waltz (below). It took so long because I was too busy writing my op. 94, a set of pieces for viola or ‘cello. It is traditional to write for one or the other instrument, and then transpose to spread the wealth in another version! I actually wrote two numbers for each instrument. (As I wrote to violist Scott Slapin, who already bestirred himself to release a video of it as the ink was drying on his music stand, “Everyone has to share.”)

It is indeed strange to be blogging now about the work I chose to present first to the greater world, rather than the one I just finished writing. There it is. But I wanted to get the retrospective essay I’ve been working on out there, and this is the perfect medium, to be sure. But I’m planning on relaxing the Series.x/Episode.y format with some of what I’ll call interludes, where I can interject notices about things that wouldn’t fit the current topic. In a sense, these two paragraphs provide a foretaste of what I’m talking about!

So, here goes. Meanwhile, before I was so rudely interrupted.

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August 2020

I feel as though the best way to afford an overview on my life’s output would be to use the individual sets of program notes I already have as a point of departure, and to annotate those as needed. I had a medical scare last year that leaves me concerned about the abundant loose ends that obtain amid my effects. Although I have largely recovered, I can no longer simply take longevity for granted and­ want to do well by my compositional charges. Quite a good number of my works have champions among today’s performers, more than I ever dreamed possible for most of my career. And yet, the fact remains that a sizable portion of my œuvre has yet to be performed or recorded at this writing.

Hopefully, this project will help me to get my bearings with regard to the time and energy still available to me. For I must strive to balance the demands my latest works make of me against the responsibilities I feel to find a better place in the world for so many older ones. Sometimes I feel as though I should take my composer’s shingle down entirely, and just become my younger self’s amanuensis. The stern muses I interact with would seem to have quite different plans, however!

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In the late 90s, as my confidence with and expertise in music processing evolved, I decided to “start over,” to go back to works in yellowing manuscripts from my college days and finally make this juvenilia available to share. Most of the works that began the series of opus numbers I am still using arose in response to specific academic assignments. But others I rather assigned to myself, either out of inspiration or from a desire to develop certain techniques for the toolbox that I continue to access on a daily basis. Once the computer engraving of opera 1 to 3 was complete, I wrote the following general introduction, which I planned to include with each opus in turn. Then I would complement it with notes specific to the given opus. Ultimately, however, I abandoned an enveloping format along such lines in favor of the three independent essays which appear further below. I feel that the rejected introductory précis does have a proper place here, though, yielding as it amply does both background information and foreground context. The italics are original. (Pardon the idealization of my decades of high school teaching wherewith it opens. Many would probably contend that it interfered with the arc of the artist’s career I might otherwise have enjoyed!)

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I was late in coming to music as an avocation, let alone as a calling in life. One could say that in my present teaching activities I am attempting to provide opportunities for youngsters to explore creative realms that were mostly closed to me in my own upbringing. I led a comfortable, middle-class existence as a child; it was simply that music did not figure significantly in the picture either at home or in school.

In college I finally learned the rudiments of musical art, and it was not long before I began to try my hand at composition. In the fall of 1976 I used some piano pieces I had written earlier that year as grist for the orchestration mill run by my teacher Al Reed. (There was a poorly kept secret that Professor Reed had so many band pieces in print that he had to resort to pseudonyms for all but his most signal achievements!) In the first meeting of our class he said that the instrumentator must enter into the creative shoes of the composer of the original music, and then, as Britten said, think through the instruments. I balked at the prospect of thus involving myself in the creative matrix of great composers (whose works Reed proposed to assign as exercises), and approached him about using my own piano works instead. He looked at these and consented. “Recompose” was Stravinsky’s term for this process, and it was a relatively easy matter for me to invoke again that compositional influx I had, in point of fact, left so very recently. (Whereas Stravinsky often waited decades to orchestrate his own piano works.)

The fruits of these efforts were three suites: op. 1 for full orchestra, op. 2 for concert band, and op. 3 for strings. I learned all too soon that no-one at the time was eager to put such less-than-groundbreaking works on public display. (And from the pen of a piano major at that! I should mention for the record that, along the now twenty years intervening, a few stalwart conductors have seen fit to indulge me so.) The pity was this: that I was no longer content to play any but a handful of these works on the piano for which they had originally been written. Most of them had come to seem impossibly dry and manqué absent the countermelodies and various special effects I devised for them later. Like most composers, I tend to put most of my energies into promoting my most recent work. (When six years later I finally met a conductor who took an active interest in my music, I composed a new orchestral suite for him, my op. 39. Through him I met a band director who was soon to ask for something too. However, instead of proffering the anodyne rag wherewith op. 2 opens, I wrote quite the newfangled one for him, my op. 49!) After years of experiencing a dream about rediscovering a lost piano piece, I finally got the recurrent message from my Dreamshaper that these early works needed to be acknowledged and made available, and so now I am at last… (finally) using the computer technology that has since evolved… (Finale) to prepare them for promulgation. The world can embrace these twelve numbers, as I now do, or reject them, but at least they are there for the sampling.

October 2020

Regarding that “handful” of piano originals I did not abandon: these were eventually subsumed, along with later works, into a set of piano Impromptus, my op. 14. (I will address said compendium once we get that far!) For the record, the only strain in all of opus 1 (full orchestra) that I continued to play on the piano was the bittersweet one from flute and obbligato clarinet, heard in the middle of the Big Waltz opener. The Galopade from op. 2 (concert band) is redoubtably souped-up from the modest piano original wherewith the op. 14 Impromptus open. Au contraire, the Valses nobles from op. 3 (string orchestra) track much more closely to the piano original Biscayne Bay Waltz heard in the op. 14 catch-all.

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An aside now, before the individual program notes I conjured for the three breakout opuses I had neglected so long. When works of mine get programmed, I am often asked to shorten the program notes I submit. In fact, these days I sometimes from the get-go add in, unprompted, an alternative shortened version! It seems then that I always took an archival approach to my various verbal jottings. Invariably would the question arise: who exactly is it you are addressing? I do recall making the distinction early on between what I might want to say to a prospective performer, whom I would expect to be delving deeply into the composition itself, as opposed to the average audience member speed reading (quick, before the lights go dim!) from the program someone handed to him. So, we get in effect comprehensive notes for the former; pruned ones for the latter. I will give both here when alternative versions obtain, between which the reader can choose.

Op. 1 is a Divertimento with four numbers, for double-woodwind orchestra. I would later write two more divertimenti (opp. 39 and 61) and, oddly enough, confine them to exactly the same orchestra as that I was assigned here to use, away back in my novice days!

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Divertimento I for orchestra, op. 1

Orchestrations (1976–77) of my own piano originals (1975–76). In response to college assignments, except for the opening Big Waltz, whose inclusion I thought would make for a satisfying set.

1. Big Waltz
I was always amused by the use of this term by teachers whom I was accompanying in ballet classes as these themes were emerging. Was it meant to convey the need to propel the dancers across the floor, in a highly rhythmic waltz counted in one or a fast three? Or was it simply a brusque translation of “Grande Valse,” brillante or otherwise? (Big, bright waltz?) Although the raw materials for this number were first improvised in eight-bar strains during ballet classes (like my later dance album for piano, op. 63), in the working out for the orchestra (or should I say, working up for the orchestra?) quite a bit of irregularity set in, in an introduction, interludes, developments, and finally a coda based on the intro (which had itself derived from the first, balletic strain).

2. Ländler
The next two numbers here were successive in the piano recueil in which they first appeared as well. It was my composer friend Charles Porter, dedicatee of the op. 3 Bagatelles for strings (of similarly academic provenance), who first pointed out to me that each begins with the same two upbeat notes, spelled differently because of their respective keys, but sounding identical to the listener (particularly given their common tactus). I decided, when doing the orchestration, to make great dramatic capital out of this simple coincidence, using a stock-in-trade diminished chord to pivot, first back to the opening key for the repeat of the Ländler, then forward to the key of the Lullaby as it approaches. A certain rustic ponderousness characterizes the Alpine Ländler generally, accounting for some rather thick orchestration in the present specimen, particularly from the hobnail-booted percussion. (I actually count twelve real voices at one point, amid reichlich doubling!)

3. Lullaby
Follows the preceding without a pause. The triplets in the violas provide momentum without mitigating the serenity of the completely diatonic melody passing between violins and solo brass. The use of just single winds at the end, and moreover the dropping out of that triplet counterrhythm, move us from serenity to somnolence itself.

4. Holiday Rag
After a short intro in the strings, the lower brass usher in each phrase of the principal strain with a dry, five-note scale. In keeping with Joplinesque tradition, the repeat of the rag’s second strain is more elaborate than the first time through. But solo flute breaks out of Joplin’s mould, interrupting said repeat with a show-off cadenza! We hear the indignant lower brass attempt to push things along. They sit poised to play their little scale figure to herald the recap of the opening strain, which tradition leads us to expect. After this strain is finally recapped, there’s time left for but one more strain (whereas Joplin, at this juncture, would typically feature two additional formal sections). When the first horn seeks now to develop material out of this concluding strain, it gets unceremoniously swept aside by the full orchestra, which clearly has lost patience with all such fussy goings-on!

I was actually not the first person to orchestrate a piano piece of mine. I got the idea from my friend Kenneth Uy, who had orchestrated a very early piece (since withdrawn, unfortunately) while we were still undergraduates at Columbia. (He was a music major, of course, but I was still racking up credits in chemistry at the time!) I had dedicated the original (piano) version of “Holiday Rag” to him, so it was only natural that the orchestral suite subsuming the number also get inscribed to this extraordinary musician and supportive friend.

Victor Frost
27 I 96
New York City

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[Condensed version of same follows.]

Divertimento I for orchestra, op. 1

1. Big Waltz
I was always amused by the use of this term by teachers whom I was accompanying in ballet classes as these themes were emerging. Was it meant to convey the need to propel the dancers across the floor, in a highly rhythmic waltz counted in one or a fast three? Or was it simply a brusque translation of “Grande Valse,” brillante or otherwise? (Big, bright waltz?)

2. Ländler
A rustic Alpine dance. The often heavy orchestration reflects the dancers being hobbled by their hobnail boots! The Lullaby upcoming, although unrelated in either key or time signature, begins with the same two upbeat notes as the Ländler; I chose to arrange the numbers into a dovetailed whole.

3. Lullaby
Follows without a pause. The triplets in the violas provide momentum without mitigating the serenity of the completely diatonic melody passing between violins and solo brass. The use of just single winds at the end, and moreover the dropping out of that triplet counterrhythm, move us from serenity to somnolence itself.

4. Holiday Rag
The repeat of the second strain of this rag is more elaborate than its initial statement, in keeping with Joplinesque tradition. Very un-Joplin-like, though, is the repeat’s interruption by the flute, which engages in a show-off cadenza. This considerably delays the recap of the rag’s opening strain tradition leads us to expect. Owing to the time lost, there follows but a single strain, another departure from tradition. When solo horn now attempts to develop this new material, it gets unceremoniously swept aside by the full orchestra, which has clearly lost patience with all such fussy goings-on!

My friend Kenneth Uy was actually the first person to orchestrate a piano piece of mine, while we were still undergraduates at Columbia. (He was a music major, of course, but I was still racking up credits in chemistry at the time!) My having dedicated the piano original of “Holiday Rag” to him, it was only natural that I inscribe this orchestral suite subsuming said number to him.

Victor Frost
28 I 96
New York City

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While others in my orchestration class were figuring out what the lowest note on the oboe was, Al Reed’s biggest complaint to me was that I was too intent on adding to, or even essentially rewriting my piano morceaux. The main tune to the piano original of Big Waltz was 32 measures that fit on a single page. As an exercise in self-restraint I was to pretend it was the work of another composer, one which I was not at all free to elaborate. All my other exercises got A’s or A+’s. This got a B. But that summer in a kind of, so to speak, creative slingshot effect, I produced the fulfillingly footloose, free-form version you can hear below. (It transmogrified, in fact, into by far the most elaborate of the twelve numbers in opp. 1 to 3.) I feel it now deserves at least a B+, perhaps even an A- if you’re in an indulgent frame of mind!

Big Waltz, op. 1, no. 1

S4/E4 With seconds to spare

I spoke below (or above, for some of you…) about the present rag’s idiosyncratic form, and similarly of the one for winds that had preceded it. Joplinesque tradition involves four strains, within the structure AABBACCDD. I only once managed that, in my opus 69 rag for brass quintet, which one can hear online. As to op. 1, no. 4, found below, in program notes that will eventually inform this exegesis I ascribe the rag’s structural unorthodoxy to quirks of personality in certain orchestral members, viz., flute and horn. The first interrupts the proceedings and indulges in a flamboyant (but non sequitur) cadenza; the latter decides abruptly to slow the work’s jaunty final strain down, and begins to tap into expressive depths which only he can descry!

But recall, this started out as a piano morceau. That flute cadenza is based squarely on the one occurring just before the final statement of the principal theme in Beethoven’s early Rondo in G. The horn solo just before my rag’s end mimics the closing passage to the same composer’s Les Adieux Sonata, where the energy slowly coils up, only to be spent suddenly in a virtuoso final sprint up the keyboard!

I was lucky that I chose Columbia for my undergraduate work. I planned to study chemistry, but switched over to music, something that would not have been possible at my second choice, MIT! Certain teachers and students disparaged this impertinent test tuber in music electives that I took before formally switching majors. Similarly, in graduate school–where I wrote and later orchestrated this Holiday Rag–the piano major was deemed unseemly as fellow traveler in composition or orchestration classes. But I get around, ever eschewing whatever station I was assigned on Henry Ford’s assembly line.

Best wishes for the new year to family, friends and followers here on this blog.

Holiday Rag, op. 1, no. 4

S4/E3 Under the wire

Back in May, I luxuriated in the time I had left in 2025 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my journeyman work on my opus 1 orchestral set. Now, though, it lacks but two days till the new year! Little did I know I’d be spending most of my energies this month of December in moving from one part of Norfolk to another (smaller quarters, but closer to the beach). Also, meanwhile my mafioso muses (he typed affectionately, in an inadvertent alliteration…) insist on pushing through a set of ‘cello solos (almost three, so far…) that no-one on this plane of existence ever asked for! There it is.

My original opus 1, from December of 1975, was a rag for piano called Holiday. This referred not to the seasonal festivities then obtaining, but rather to the bittersweet 30s comedy directed by George Cukor, my favorite movie of all. By the end of 1977 I would orchestrate it and three other piano originals to form my Divertimento I for orchestra. I changed the title to Holiday Rag whilst preserving its unorthodox form. It closed out the set, and is now referred to as op. 1, no. 4. I have dropped all other work, and am spiffing its NotePerformer file up for anyone curious to sample it. (For the record, the first composition for which I have a recording, studio or live, that’s sufficient in quality to be sharing is my opus 3 Bagatelles for strings, my earliest published work.)

In E1 and E2 I promise to invoke, here in E3, further excerpts from the retrospective career essay I have embarked upon. But that was under the assumption that the survey of op. 1 could be completed by this point. I’ll just kick that can down the road again, since the most I can hope to do by tomorrow (New Year’s Eve) is have an adequate audio sample of the Rag ready to share. The jabberwocky verbiage can wait until I’m addressing the opening number, next year. Thus will I have presented the numbers in this seminal suite in the quizzical order 2, 3, 4, 1! Life with Victor.

S4/E2 Moving right along

I was intent on getting E1 in during 2024, which is to say 50 years since I composed my earliest circulating work. Inasmuch as I was up to op. 84, though, before finally releasing it, it was assigned the misleading opus number 85! Back in 1975 I began work on what would be my op. 1, and now, 50 years removed from then, I’m about to plunge into those waters.

But two observations before I do; one looks back to text from 2024 I already used in E1, and the other expands on even earlier texts I plan to paste into E3. (Rather than revise what was in one, and will be in the other, I choose to reflect on the topics in greater depth here.) First, let me discuss the stamping I call for in op. 85. Back in my 20s, I tried playing the soprano, alto and tenor parts whilst stamping and had no trouble coordinating the two activities. But I am an organist, and thus used to independent rhythmic activity in my feet. Moreover, I have never owned a bass, but years later, when just holding one, I found it unwieldy indeed! This alone calls the whole concept of asking wind players to stamp as they played into question. And the idea of asking transverse players, with their delicate embouchure, to do so has now come to seem preposterous. My smarmy comment about the struggling flute players at the premiere embarrasses me now, when I am more inclined to say, “Bless them for trying”! At all events, I have now appended the following performance note to all op. 85 scores:

Performance note
Stop-time rags such as this are of course part of the piano rag tradition. The stamps appearing in all parts are optional (for the group or an individual player), and might be fun to try in rehearsal or informal performance. But to avoid any issues with regard to embouchure in formal settings, I recommend either ignoring the markings, or bringing in a separate percussionist (who could play any unpitched instrument).

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Now I am in the odd position of commenting on text which I wrote before (1996 program notes), but have not yet incorporated into this blog. (It will figure in E3, below. And in case that is not already clear, “below” for me represents text I have yet to write. Some of you approach the texts latest to earliest, others vice versa, which makes the matter relative!) It again involves belying a superficial comment. The middle numbers (of four) in op. 1 are joined at the hip and cannot be performed separately. I attributed this blandly to the “simple coincidence” that each begins with the same two notes. (Spelled as D-D# in the first number; D-Eb in the other.) But the dovetail only works because the two notes occur respectively right before the next barline, making the transitional iteration an utter surprise when it suddenly lands us in an “unrelated” key! What is more, the tactus remains the same between numbers, such that the two notes are identical in both pitch and tempo. I also noticed later that the two numbers are identical in structure. In their shared binary (AABB) form, each A is twice the length of the corresponding B. The rustic Ländler (op. 1, no. 2) moves from loud to soft; the dreamy Lullaby (op. 1, no. 3) continues the diminuendo, from soft to softest. I promise to address the bookending numbers that remain in E3, but for now you can listen to the concatenated middle pair I discussed here first.

“Lack of early training,” I write, or “juvenilia”? Perhaps, but in op. 1 I was clearly making up for lost time!

Ländler and Lullaby, op. 1, nos. 2 and 3

S4/E1 Earliest circulating composition

I’ve embarked on writing an essay I’m calling Retrospective on a Composer’s Career. I wanted to mark my 50th anniversary as a composer, which until recently I thought would be falling next year. But in the kind of wrinkle that characterizes my life generally, the timetable has moved itself up! I will be adapting the essay for use here, where I can organically interpolate musical examples or the occasional graphic with the least fuss. So, here goes.

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April 2024

This comprehensive survey actually started life with the August 2020 entry that has now been pushed below, where I was naturally expecting to begin things with my opus 1 Divertimento. This incorporates music I worked on between 1975 and 1977. But in my archives lay the hoary manuscript of a rag I had written for recorder quartet toward the end of 1974. When I reviewed it, later that year 2020, I determined that it was worthy of release if I could just touch it up a bit! Having done so, I gave the reupholstered rag my next available opus number (85), and also arranged it for flute quartet. (The analogies are strong between the two ensembles. They both have the family’s main instrument, viz., alto recorder and the standard flute, in second position, with the highest member an octave higher, and two more members extending the group’s composite range that much more below.)

I mention below that this sexagenarian (and now septuagenarian) retrospective will largely expound upon the program notes I already have for each composition. Here are the ones I finally wrote for the rag I so long suppressed.

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100% Rag for SATB recorders, op. 85

My development as a composer was slow, and followed a late start owing to lack of early training. It is thus that a piece like this from my college days counts as so much juvenilia. In December of 1975, I began sketching the earliest music from my op. 1 orchestral set, ultimately to be its finale. The present work had directly preceded it, the previous year. Thematic material from that time has meanwhile been available for tapping into later works, including one motive in a work as recent as my op. 70 cantata. But this rag was of such coherent structure (however unorthodox) that it resisted any disassembly. A few days ago, that is to say, more than 45 years since it was first written, I realized that I could release the work after a bit of polishing, which I have now done. But despite the new opus number, I emphasize that 100% Rag is 99.99% a product of 1974!

The title was more than a pun on the term used by stationers for certain high-end papers with maximal cotton fiber content. It was a protest of authenticity against some who averred that the first theme (after the four-bar intro) begins with a long upbeat rather than bona fide syncopation, while the leisurely final theme has but one syncopated measure before the rag unexpectedly concludes back in stop-time mode. Let me refer them now to the final strain of Joplin’s Chrysanthemum, which is completely unsyncopated, or to the second strain of my favorite rag of all, the master’s Wall Street Rag, which uses syncopation only just before its final cadence. Although rags conventionally have but one tempo marking stipulated at the outset, no-one ever plays them that way. I went formally with two contrasting tempi, slow for the intro and first strain, fast for the second strain. The first strain comes back again in accordance with tradition, but then its intro is presented in a fast variant to usher in a “stop-time” section. Players (or a newly employed percussionist) are free to stamp the main beat. But when the final strain slows down it is in precisely the tempo of the rag’s slower opening. (A nicety I just became aware of all these decades later!) A final cadence in stop time rounds off the work, restoring as I said the (literally) foot-tapping syncopation, whose prevalence proves the piece, for all its irregularities, to be indeed 100% rag.

I dedicate the work now to the instrumental polymath Peter Lim, cherishing the idea of inscribing 100% Rag to someone the same age that I was when I first sketched it. (He could, it goes without saying, take any of the parts in a proverbial Augenblick!)

Victor Frost
9 X 20
Baltimore

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I do not yet at this writing have a recording of the recorder version, but here is a scrolling video of the one for flutes. (There also exists a videotaping of the 46-year-delayed premiere, in a stunning Italian palazzo no less. It features, however, a lady distractingly fanning herself in an impressive 5 against the quartet’s 4! Seriously, the group’s flutes sounded gorgeous at this venue, but when it came to the novel foot stamping in the rag’s closing stop-time section, the players were, shall we say, inconsistent.) In the present video, during repeats, I interpolate pics from both the world premiere and the recording session that followed.

100% Rag, version for four flutes

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August 2020

I feel as though the best way to afford an overview on my life’s output would be to use the individual sets of program notes I already have as a point of departure, … (to be continued)

S3/E9 Facebook Gestalt (once more with feeling)

When writing the opera, I skipped the Prelude (which actually inhered in Jonathan Clift’s libretto) at first, and began my work instead with Act I, Scene 1. (I knew I would be quoting the Prelude in the opera’s finale, and wanted to be closer to that point when composing it.) Otherwise I followed dramatic order. But not so for the engraving process. Sometimes when I finished a scene, I already had ideas for the next one, so any engraving would have to wait. That meant that sharing any of my new music with followers on Facebook (or occasionally elsewhere) had to wait, since there was no time to prepare the materials for promulgation. (I emphasize again that these materials subsisted primarily to promote the opera with company personnel, or as learning aids for singers; sharings I did with the public on Facebook–or here–have, I admit, been shavings off the proverbial table.)

So a lot of interpolation (no, call it what it is: backtracking!) has been necessary in the exposition of this evening-long work I finished over a year ago now. Act I has a Prelude and four scenes, and Act II has four more scenes. By the time composition ended, I had engraved and shared abroad all of that except Act I, Scene 2. As I have mentioned, it is so long that I broke it up into three chunks. The first two of those chunks are the subject of E6 below. So, with just one more section of less than 10 minutes to go to achieve closure (Gestalt), I encountered the roadblock I chronicle in E7. (You can see why I became so frustradedly cross!) In E8 I exultantly report that the roadblock has finally been lifted, and so I can at last finish this guide with the subjoined video link.

Scrolling of this final section out of Act I, Scene 2 begins with the second system (bottom of the first page) of the video. Now then, finally, if you put that together with everything found below here in S3, as the old song says, “it spells M-O-T-H-E-R!”

Act I, Scene 2c

So, I apologize that this path toward completion of my survey has been so very desultory. I write not to call attention to my prowess as a composer, which is minimal, but to shine a light on my teachers and guides on the inner who somehow got this music through my thick skull and into manifestation. It was quite a ride, I’ll tell you!

If you just want to listen, or follow the odd scrolling video, and not revisit the vicissitudes I chronicled along the way, all the links you need can be found within this master link.

Akhtamar complete samples

S3/E8 WordPress comes through!

Update to E7. A techie at WordPress composed special code to fix the problem I mentioned in E7 about the public display of E6 I was upset about. At first I thought that this was a one-off workaround (something I could possibly have come up with myself, if that was all I coveted…), whereas I wanted a permanent solution. In other words, I didn’t want to have to embed this code every time I wanted to link to a Vimeo video. Also, I assumed that if they had a solution that did work universally, they would just make it part of the code for the entire platform, which would mean it would get fixed in my posting automatically, like any bug fix.

There’s some reason that I don’t quite get for why they can’t incorporate my code into the general one, but it’s still true that I personally don’t ever have to deal with this again: my future Vimeo links will all be as correct as S3/E6 (from last November!) is finally.

S3/E7 Sidetracked by WP’s overreach

The way that E6 below looks to you (at least at this date) is alas! different from what I see in this editor. The Vimeo links in E5 (and earlier) were the old-fashioned underlined, blue-highlighted, hyperlink texts of the type you’ve been clicking on for decades now. But when I went to paste in the links from my latest Vimeos into E6, I found that WordPress had instituted a new feature, which involved creating a thumbnail and title out of the Vimeo metadata. Fancy! Except I learned later that huge blocks of wasted space got interpolated in what WordPress calls the “live” version. So on my creator’s screen, everything looked impressively perfect, but to the user it was an unsightly mess.

I have given them the intervening months to get the bugs out of this new bell and whistle, but it hasn’t happened. Here is my workaround. No more Vimeo links, unless this is fixed someday. (I told them that at this point they should just abandon the new feature; clearly it’s not needed: what’s good enough for E5 would have been good enough for E6!) I will create a document with any links, including Vimeos, compile a pdf of same (for universality), upload to Dropbox and link thereto here.

Roundabout? Indeed, but neatness counts! This pdf has the audio and video links for the whole of Akhtamar. Please do sample at your leisure, at least until such time as the work is mounted.

Click to access opera-links.pdf

Akhtamar, audio and video links

S3/E6 Facebook Gestalt

In E3 I said that I planned to favor this forum over Facebook moving forward with discussion of my op. 91. Yet, when I finished engraving the first of three sections in the long Act I, Scene 2 (the very last one, as I have said, still in need of engraving), I posted the video I made therefrom with commentary there, but nothing here. And again, when I recently finished engraving the middle section, I posted the video I prepared from it only on Facebook. At some point I realized that I wanted to have the chronicle there be complete. And indeed, once I finish engraving the shortest, final section of this longest of the opera’s scenes, that will be it for the Facebook phase to my ongoing documentation!

Essentially then, my S3 entries up to now have served to smooth the transfer of the intermittent discussion there to here. I will still go about distilling the Facebook verbiage and hyperlinks into an independent WordPress experience. But right now I need to bring the latest materials to the fore.

I have established that scrolling videos were available for every scene but the second of Act I. The latter is so long that I divided its videography into the three study sections alluded to above. My first catch-up, then, is to paste in the Vimeo link to the video for the first section, and to quote my Facebook commentary.

Akhtamar, Act I, Scene 2a

“The opera’s longest scene is set in the marketplace of Ahlat, on Lake Van’s coast.”

And now, my latest finished work, the subsequent, middle section of the same scene. It begins with just the single, upbeat note in the second flute on the far right of the screen.

Akhtamar, Act I, Scene 2b

“In this pivotal section, Avedis and Tamara meet and fall in love.”

S3/E5 An updated old video

My librettist, who goes by the nom de plume Jonathan Clift, does not read music, and was frustrated by the audio samples I had been releasing on Facebook of music from our opera. Quite frankly, he wanted to see his words as he listened to my music! In my vocal works I repeat words less often than most composers. (In one song cycle I don’t do this at all.) I encouraged him to follow his libretto as he listened, where the rhythm of NotePerformer’s sung oohs would help him keep his place (most of the time, at least), but what he really wanted was a scrolling score video. I rolled up my sleeves and figured out just how to go about this, aware that such a resource would be of even greater utility to singers and staff than the audio I had been issuing up to this point.

The first of these to appear was for what was then the latest written music, Act I, Scene 4. I tidied the score up to the point that others besides myself could actually follow it; I would say that the percentage of the total engraving (which I finally finished a few days ago) was about 35. Many people told me they liked being able to see my libretto setting as well as read the stage directions scrolling by in the video. From then on that’s all I did, although the extra time it took to always do that 35% engraving and video prep meant that my Facebook entries became fewer and farther between. And of course, I also had to write the very music that was being so effectively spotlighted!

I just scrolled down to the original Facebook posting and replaced the old video with this brand new one, with its score now fully engraved and with improvements to the NotePerformer audio realization, utilizing a few tricks I have meanwhile tucked under my belt.

https://vimeo.com/852123842

When I was still limiting myself to audio samples, I had tried to make up for the lack of a visual element with what I called timed synopses. “At 02:32, a character slips on a banana peel, which accounts for the slide whistle followed by bump in bass drum in my score.” These had become supererogatory, although I obviously had great fun writing them up! Now on what Vimeo calls Chapters, I highlight instead certain turning points in the narrative, and one simply clicks straight to that moment in the video. It goes without saying, this will prove enormously useful for performers learning the music.

I am working intermittently on the Chapter index for the newly engraved Act I, Scene 4 as we speak. As you can guess, there are analogies between this and the timed synopsis I described above. Essentially I am paring down the latter so as to yield the former! But there are certain nuances in the unincorporated material I would miss if I couldn’t just preserve them here instead. Each synopsis was designed for real-time use during audio playback. I thus felt free to be that much more more elaborate when describing longer musical passages.

Following are two observations from the Act I, Scene 4 synopsis which alas! ended up on the cutting room floor (with respect to the current Chapter index), but which I feel merit our interest nonetheless.

The first refers back to an earlier synopsis found in “Entry VIII.” I used this method to keep track separately of the opera-related postings amid all the usual Facebook cat pictures or whatever. I confess not to know how many, if any, of the medieval musical developments in Europe ever made their way to Armenia, but I found myself invoking a few of them anyway as the music was emerging! “In my notes below for Entry VIII, I spoke of the medievalism of placing our tenor [Avedis] into a texture between clarinet and bassoon. There he had the melody, as the word tenor itself originally indicated. In later developments on the European continent, the melody passed instead up to the top voice or instrument. That happens now here, where Avedis and bassoon have countermelodies to the clarinet’s tune. (Another reason the music actually sounds somewhat medieval is its use of hemiola, wherein six beats, divided as 2×3, get regularly superimposed on 3×2.)” The foregoing relates to the present Chapter 15 on today’s video.

The other, having formed part of what is now Chapter 17 in the new index, involves a borderline-extreme vocal technique which I indulged in for dramatic effect. “Broken octaves are easy to play on certain instruments (like the piano) but are difficult on winds and all but treacherous for the human voice. Still I assign them to the lovers here, to express the overflow of passion that obtains between them.” Well, at least I made the most difficult octave pair optional! But I live in fear of protracted litigation, notwithstanding.