Author: victorfrostcomposer

In my last blog I discussed the necessity to forge program notes for the new opus, at which point I would be done creatively with the work. Today, I prepared such notes to my satisfaction.

All that remains now is for me to finish churning out the three parts, for then I will be in a position to share the work with any interested group. (A few, knowing I had works for one, two, and four guitars, had made inquiries. These will obviously be the ones I share the new trio with first!)

I have finished engraving the reference score of my new trio. No-one will ever perform from it (each of the three players would have an individual part), and probably very few will ever make “reference” to it as such, but it is vitally important nonetheless. One good thing is that, in the age of music processing, files for the parts are generated from the full score, like the one I completed today. So, much of the work that went into making it look good will carry over into those performing parts.

I am in an unprecedented position owing to this real-time blog. At this point I would usually prepare some program notes for any new composition, while the experience was still fresh. And yet, most or possibly all of what I would want to say about the music and its genesis is likely to be found in the entries below. So I will review them from the beginning and distill what I read into some formal notes. That involves not just concision, but adopting the right tone for readers unfamiliar with me or the better part of my output.

Here is a link to the opus’s public folder. Its name will not change over time, but its contents will (such as the addition of parts). Right now, the score, for those of you who read such, and the promotional audio sample.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/lrppoxrqmq8h5q1/AADkqVFHUI38FuV5aR-FgSNca?dl=0

When I retired to Baltimore, there were some neighborhoods I knew better than others. I played it safe, and chose the one I knew best, the cultural district. That encompasses roughly the northern end of Mt Vernon (no one uses concluding periods here; I live on Hunter St) and most of Midtown-Belvedere. (I don’t know whether the splendid art deco hotel gets it name from or gave its name to the area; I only know I am still wowed by it every time I walk by.)

I found a place halfway between Meyerhoff Hall (where the Symphony plays) and Peabody Institute (where, among other luminaries, the leonine guitar master Manuel Barrueco holds court). A townhouse that was originally a carriage house, which means that it came with a huge garage that I didn’t need. Indeed, I specifically chose this neighborhood from among the ones in Baltimore where a car wouldn’t be needed!

But it meant that I could extend a hand of hospitality in a way that was never possible in all those decades I had lived in New York City. The secure garage and a well-appointed extra bedroom with ensuite bath have made my place something of a pit stop for those driving (up and down Interstate 95) or flying (connecting to and from Europe internationally, or Eastern Seaboard destinations locally) through.

One person driving through recently, who wanted to break up his trip south to visit family, was guitarist Peter Fletcher. My op. 57 Ten Miniatures (solo guitar) are dedicated to him, a gesture of thanks for his championing my music, including this performance of my guitar concerto. (I don’t capitalize there so I can ignore the official title with which I fear I am stuck after all these decades: Concertino!)

As it happened, this was the same day last week I finished my trio! Fortunately, I did bring the work to completion before he actually arrived at my door, but I was, how you say?, burned to a crisp, folks. If I was less than coherent in my interactions with him, my old friend did not seem to mind! (Or in his Southern gentility was too polite to betray having noticed.) As he was preparing to shove off the next morning, he thanked me for my hospitality, but I immediately thanked him in turn “for bringing me back to earth!”

Meanwhile, I of course mentioned to him the day’s breakthrough in my life. So that, in the midst of the de rigueur tour, when we got to my office I played back the newly minted scrolling score on my computer from the Finale program. That means that he heard the same representation of the music as I appended to the bottom of yesterday’s blog, but could also see the score as it scrolled by. That makes him the only guitarist to have laid eyes on it yet.

He expressed great enthusiasm, remarking how beautiful some passage was as the scroll inched by. He offered to record it then and there. Of course he meant, that he would lend his services if I could scare up two supplementary players. In my embarrassment, though, I pretended not to understand that, and protested, “but Peter, you can only play one guitar at a time!”

I include this anecdote so as to justify my optimism regarding Variations and Fugue’s future. Things are clearly off to a good start.

The young and supernally promising American guitarist Evan Taucher is part of a generation that has generally been more responsive to my music than the preponderance of coevals with whom I made the erstwhile choice to incarnate. He has graciously accepted the dedication of my op. 83 sight unseen, although he is understandably eager to attain such sight. But engraving it properly for distribution is work I would want to be doing on my iMac, whose keyboard will have to be replaced. A new one is on the way, but I am consigned meanwhile to this laptop, where audio work comes more comfortably than any visually centered enterprise.

I took advantage of this interregnum yesterday, and made sample files for inclusion here to illustrate the music I had described so far in earlier blogs. Since I have not really talked in depth about anything since Variation 3, it will behoove me to provide more backstory from here on out. Nonetheless, today is Evan’s birthday, and I aim to finish providing annotated audio samples through to my new opus’s last measure. Ironic that Evan will get to hear this preview of the music to the end before he actually sees it, but there it is!

My Contrasts for woodwind quintet (op. 34) contains its own set of variations. My lineage is half Italian and half Irish, reflected as that number’s dour siciliano is followed by an extrovert bagpipe tune straight out of the British Isles. (I know that it has lately become politically incorrect to subsume Ireland within that designation, but since my Frost forebears hailed from County Clare, I feel safe enough!) In the blog E3 below I pride myself on never repeating myself, but I went on to do just that when I got to Variation 4! More drone, more exultant wailing (here from Guitar 1) on top. The key is C major (relative major to A minor, the key of the dolorous Variation 3 we have just left). At the end here of Variation 4, a transitional passage is bringing us back home to the key wherewith everything started, namely F major.

The literature is filled with references to creative people saying that such-and-such work got, exceptionally, out of their hands. In my case, this has been true for virtually everything I ever composed! Case in point. I knew from the get-go that I wanted to cap my variations with a fugue, and ideas for such were brewing all along as I was working out the less rigorously contrapuntal variations you have heard thus far. When I was still using my iMac, I prepared a proper engraving of just the first page to my score and shared it with Evan, so that he could see the dedication up on top. Although the fugue was, at the time, still but a twinkle in my eye (Happy Fathers Day, by the way, should that apply to you today…), I peremptorily included it in the work’s title, right under the dedication.

All I had to do was wait until I had made my way back ’round to the opening key, and that is where I now found myself at last! But the fugue I was so eager to write had to wait, it seemed, for one more, altogether unanticipated, variation! My op. 79 is a set for two guitars, some of which has been performed and even recorded, but not yet the crisp finale, which I called Minstrel Show. (Nigerian guitarist Taiwo Adegoke has asked permission to do so, so I have something to look forward to. It would be the first performance of my music I would be aware of on the continent, outside of South Africa.) In op. 79’s concluding duo, the top guitar part lies quite high, in imitation of its five-stringed cousin, the banjo. The composer who so abhors repeating himself, yes, did so again here, and this time with a work from just last year! Sigh. So, crowding out the impatient fugue, here is my minstrel variation, no. 5! (Guitar 3 has the throwback melody throughout, balancing as it were the doleful aria it intoned in the third variation.)

Guitar 2, which alone presented the perky tune I woke up hearing now ten mornings ago, also ushers in the fugue. Followed by Guitar 1. The fact that Guitar 3 then comes in last ends up being of structural importance later. The exposition.

A lot of composers have written variations topped off with thematic fugues, but they usually use only the head material from the theme being treated, and let things just spin off from there. I chose, rather, to stick completely with my theme’s four-part structure, as outlined in yesterday’s blog, q.v. This is the reason that I allowed in E5 that the fugue could be doing double duty as a final, sixth variation. The exposition you just heard, then, would be A. I cannot reasonably separate B from B' in the next excerpt, but, short as it is, they are both there. In a good use of the trio of instruments, I begin with Guitar 1 imitated closely by 2 (B). When 3 takes over without pause, 2 carries on its imitative role (B').

In yesterday’s hairsplitting analysis I point out how, in each variation, the concluding A' can be heard to finish off in a way noticeably different from the opening A. This departure is taken to the hilt in this final panel to the concluding fugue. We have again the entrance of the guitars in order 2, 1, 3, but the last holds on to the reins, developing established materials into a climax in which the turns from its sombre third variation express, somehow, an impassioned optimism instead.

Guitar 1, though, gets the last word as is usual, in an augmentation of the tune’s first six notes, followed by a six-string cry of joy from all three instruments!

I would love to end here, but I predict that my inbox would get filled with complaints that I hadn’t presented the work entire. Here is where the misgivings I bespoke in the opening paragraphs of yesterday’s blog are felt most keenly, and I wished I could have the first public presentation of op. 83 be a real and not synthetic performance. But I yield to circumstance in the interest of seeing this series, the S that is to say in the (S1/E8), to its close. S2 will involve the composition’s public facing, to whatever extent it gets one in an admittedly crowded field. (I really do understand, and that is why I maintain such sincere friendships with musicians who do not choose, for whatever reasons they might have, to program my music.)

And so, it is ironic on this Fathers Day that I say of these fragments, quoting the old song, “Put them all together, they spell M-O-T-H-E-R.” But I’ll say finally, with optimism, here’s to having lots to say in that S2 waiting there in the wings!

If E6 had been given a subtitle, it would have been something like Glorious Inconsistencies. This one, more like Into the Weeds! I have decided to try illustrating my earlier text with musical examples. I have overcome some hesitation with regard to this matter. I am an old-school composer, and do not own DAW equipment, even though I could comfortably afford it. (What I couldn’t afford would be the bottomless rabbit hole it would involve in mastering some of those dauntingly arcane modern editing techniques!) I do not play guitar and do not, as it happens, have three players standing by to record the fragments that I have in mind!

All I do have is the capacity of my music processor (Finale) to play back the already notated music. This is enormously useful to me in two ways: as a proofreading tool, and in that it enables me to generate sample mp3 files to share with prospective performers. (My op. 80 is a set of ten studies for solo guitar. One of them involves 3 against 4 in a beat, and it was catching one performer up short. All she had to do was hear the audio file I had made and she was able to execute it flawlessly. The computer on which she played back my sample did the… computing for her!)

So the quality of the sound is not as sophisticated as we are accustomed to hearing even in synthetic recordings these days. Given that as caveat, here goes. (I will limit myself today to illustrating the text in E4, which you might want to review before going on. That is to say, the theme and first three variations.)

Here is the initial theme, as played by Guitar 2. I mentioned that it consists of four two-bar phrases, all in the same rhythm.

I can go further into the weeds. If A is the first phrase, and B is the second, the third could be called B-prime (B'), in that it is a variant on B. It begins the same, although an octave lower, but ends differently. Then the fourth and last phrase could be called A'. It again begins the same as A, even within the same octave, but ends differently in an exuberant final clinch.

Here is A.

And here is B.

Followed by B', which begins an octave below the preceding.

Finally we have A'. Its ending dovetails with the beginning of the first variation.

Variation 1. The theme is played an octave higher by Guitar 1, accompanied homorhythmically by 3.

Variation 2. A waltz played finally by all three instruments. At the end it spills over into a transition to the parallel minor, the key of Variation 3.

Variation 3 is dominated by turns in the melodic Guitar 3. Let me define that for non-musicians. Four notes. The main note is preceded by the note just above it; then, the one just below it, followed by the main note itself. Guitar 1 is limited almost exclusively to gestures in imitation of these turns. In its final one, it provides a link to the highly contrasting ebullience of the hornpipe over drones that is Variation 4. To be continued.

I’m back here sooner than I would have thought. I’m typing on my laptop now, because the keyboard I use on my big iMac suddenly stopped working! I ordered a new one, but until it arrives I will lack access to the desktop’s 27-in. screen. I really do need that to properly do the collating of my piece for strings (which I discuss in E5, and where I embedded a live performance should one care to listen) with the galleys the publisher sent me. Apologizing to him for my delay, I blamed it on the white-heat work I did on my spanking new guitar trio, which clearly did in the poor keyboard!

High among the perquisites to bloggery (as opposed to formal publishing) are the alibis inhering in the time/date stamp. You could have such temporal references in a book or magazine article, but someone would still be expected to take an overarching approach to the project and smooth out any inconsistencies in voice or facts among the various entries. On the contrary, no-one expects anyone to go back and tidy up a blog because it might contradict on Thursday what you typed on Tuesday! Each episode is self-contained and spontaneous and in this informal realm nobody keeps score!

I was rereading E4 when I realized that one could easily misread the first paragraph unless a comma was placed after the word “intervene.” Putting it in place after the blog date felt like cheating in a way. I am supposed to be chronicling in the moment, even if it be removed in time from what I am describing; these are supposed to be my thoughts at just that moment I find in which to type. If my desktop keyboard hadn’t chosen today to go south, the present moment whose memory I am pressing would not have been available! Such an arbitrary process, but arbitrary can have its appeals.

In E2 I imply that all-nighters are a thing of the past. Let me quote that most professional of composers, Britten.

“The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.”
— Benjamin Britten††††††

But in E5 I admit to an all-nighter after all. (I retired at about 3 A.M., but that was after getting up the previous day at 5 A.M.!) It wasn’t so much about an idea’s being terrific as my being terrified of going to sleep without working out a compositional snag that was simply refusing to be resolved. Needless to say, I finally collapsed into sleep willy-nilly, and was able satisfactorily to handle the intricate creative task the next day when I was fresh! Sigh.

Here’s another inconsistency my internal editor noticed, but which again I am allowing to stand in the interest of authenticity. (Or laziness….) In E3 I aver that composing is never easy, but in point of fact it does often seem that way when the flow is having its way with you and you do not resist. If asked to give a percentage of time that sense obtains, I’d say about 30. Anyway, then in the very next blog, E4, I say that for me writing waltzes is “as easy as falling off a log,” which would be, I guess, a fringe benefit of playing all those ballet classes.

Shostakovich said that you have to write something every day. (But I have of course written nothing since finishing op. 83 three days ago, and I mentioned that that project was my first composition in six months.) Verdi coyly averred that divine inspiration met him at his writing desk each day at 8 A.M.! Tchaikovsky insisted that inspiration is a fickle visitor who will not linger long with the lazy. Mendelssohn, my favorite composer, also provides my favorite quote. If you write something intimate, they will rue the absence of large-scale gestures, but write something grand and they’ll miss the small-scale ones. So you should just write what you want.

In my short, opening blog below, I gave voice to my initial sense of nervousness at the prospect of making the right decisions about all these thousands of new notes swirling in front of me. “But then, this lack of faith beset the start of some 82 other works at this writing, large and small, all of which I eventually saw to completion!” In other words, the successes informing my previous experiences allowed me to lack faith in my lack of faith! How far behind me has that visceral doubt been relegated when the powers I have been blessed with asserted themselves with full force, and I brought my op. 83 to a rapturous conclusion just yesterday!

I did indeed adhere to the model in Beethoven’s op. 34 piano Variations in that the last of my five variations did come full circle back to the original key for the first time. But I stayed in that key and appended a fugue, which could conceivably be described as a very elaborate, sixth variation! That is to say, I turned to a different model: Beethoven’s op. 35 piano Variations (the ones on the same theme he treated in the finale to his Eroica Symphony). (It used to be true that spell-checkers would invariably change that to “Erotica,” but how things have evolved!)

I will be saying much about the music new since my last blog, but there is one point I wanted to emphasize today, when time is pressing. It’s a structural element I was aware of when I last posted (at which point there were only three variations), but which I hesitated to point out because I couldn’t be sure it would obtain until the end. But it did, and this is it; my Variations and Fugue, op. 83, utilize the following time signatures: 4/4, 5/4, 3/8, 3/2 (four times as slow as the preceding, I mention for the non-musician reader), 4/2, and 6/8. But throughout, the tactus or counting pulse remains the same. The opening metronome marking of quarter = 84, in other words, obtains for the entire seven-minute composition, for all its hills and dales!

Pressing? All the matters I let go when embroiled for six days (and one benighted wee-hours night, saints preserve us!). Top of the list is the publisher who will be putting out an early (just subtract 80 opus numbers from 83!) set for strings. He sent me proofs that I have neglected and must finish reviewing before returning here.

Here is a live performance of this essay from those promising, antediluvian student days.

I envisioned that this blog would document a process in medias res, but it really is manifesting as more of a series of reflections. I want to take care to make sure not to let too much time intervene, in the interest of keeping the reflection as true as possible. There was no way for me to interrupt the surge of activity over the past two days to be posting here. But now, with three variations secure under my belt, I feel a natural sense of repose prior to moving on in the adventure.

The three matched instruments in a guitar trio can obviously all play all up and down the instrument’s range. But it is natural when writing for it to favor high notes for the first guitar, medium notes on Guitar 2, and assign most of the low notes to number 3. The range of my theme is slightly more than two octaves and I chose the middle guitar of the trio to make the initial statement, unaccompanied. As it is approaching the melody’s final cadence, it is joined by Guitar 3. Guitar 2 drops out, and Guitar 1, joining 3, plays the tune an octave higher. Although the theme is otherwise unaltered, I consider this the first variation because of the accompaniment that 3 is now providing. The two instruments play tune and accompaniment homorhythmically (identical rhythms), a technique I have invoked only seldom in my career, but it seemed appropriate here somehow. Again, at the tune’s final cadence, the texture is enriched by the addition now of the waiting Guitar 2. So, all three instruments are featured in the succeeding waltz which, you recall, actually occurred to me first. (I conjured the initial tune then, from this second variation, rather than the other way about!) Guitar 1 continues on melody in this waltz, but back down in the octave Guitar 2 had started things with.

Writing waltzes is as easy as falling off a log for me, but I had to gird myself for the slow variation I finished yesterday. The opening tune subsisted in a series of two-measure phrases all in the same rhythm; only a single grace-note breaks up the established pattern! This level of regularity is uncommon in my output, particularly in more recent works. I even considered tweaking the theme but thought better of it. One of my inner-plane teachers probably suggested something along the lines, “That’s what the variations will be for!” The waltz variation is similarly strict in rhythm, although I do allow myself a few more of those grace notes!

I did not choose Guitar 3 to lead the third variation because it was the only player not to get one yet. Rather, because the tune was lying so low. I seem to be following the model of Beethoven’s op. 34 piano Variations, where he cycles through various keys to end up in the one he started with only in his final variation. My initial tune (like Beethoven’s) is in F; my waltz variation is in A. This latest, slow variation is in A minor. Although the tune is still quite recognizable, it has lost all its perkiness and its metrical regularity to allow for this spontaneous expression of what I can only call grief.

That in itself took a lot out of me, but I also limited Guitar 2 to simple gestures in support of the implied harmony, and Guitar 1 to intermittent imitations of Guitar 3’s opening four-note turn. I look forward to putting this stark and desolate terrain behind me, in some music I feel bubbling up in me in 6/8 time.

I have always considered creation to be primarily the imposition of order upon chaos. Sometimes ideas occur to me fully clothed, and I have no doubt about the forces involved, the overarching structure, and sometimes even minute details like articulations (staccato, tenuto and the like) or the specific bowing patterns that stringed instruments (which I do not personally play) will employ.

When that happens I figure that I must have done a good part of the compositional heavy lifting already subconsciously, or on some other plane of existence. Usually, however, my conscious everyday personality is intricately involved in both the macrocosm of formal structures and the microcosm of acutely painstaking details. It behooves me to roll up my sleeves and wrest with the chaos. The early stages are the most… chaotic and involve the most crestfallen doubts. One fears that the path might at any point become errant.

That is why any firm, unequivocal decision represents a major victory in the struggle to create. Once one element is firmly set, others will fall into place around it naturally. It’s much easier to detect that something isn’t going to work if it is found to undermine an element that has become structurally essential. An arbitrary dissonance in a consonant context seems out of place, but the reverse is just as true! Every work makes its own rules, or you risk repeating yourself.

One way I have avoided that is to follow Barber’s example and write in as many different genres with as many different instrumental and vocal combinations as subsist. In our cases, this meant tapping into the field of ensembles that are already established. Stravinsky took it further and made up his own curious combinations (I listened to his Mass yesterday), but then we can’t all be a Stravinsky!

I am exulting in the many victories that obtained for me yesterday (and a few from this morning), which convey a sense of being… well on my way. Composing is never easy, but I happily report that I have gotten to the part where it’s not quite so terrifying! The main thing is that I have decided that the ideas lately bubbling have done so toward a specific brew: an instrumental trio for three guitars.

I have written works for one, two and four guitars before; this will be my first essay to reckon with three at a time. Yes, it’s always good to know for sure what your lowest note is!