Author: victorfrostcomposer

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!

I got to a certain point in my work on 83 yesterday and knew it was time to stop. This sense of what Rorem calls “knowing when to stop” is better developed now than heretofore, but is not entirely reliable. Sometimes I go on much too long, or consider it perfectly appropriate to be hacking out notes on my laptop on a noisy, hurtling Greyhound bus! I thought I might mark the occasion in real time on my Facebook page, but as I gathered my thoughts I realized that they would have strained that particular medium. I set myself up in this one instead, which process took much longer than I had anticipated, so that by the time I was actually documenting my first compositional steps I was too much spent to present any more than yesterday’s minimal entry. I wake up this morning inclined to give voice to more of the ideas that have been tumbling about.

Clairaudience as I awaken, usually in the morning although sometimes even from the odd nap, has become the main source of the ideas I inscribe. If the motive is enough pithy and self-contained, it can be housed comfortably in my file marked Sketches. If one thing starts leading to another (countermelodies, imitation, specific instrumentation and, obviously, the prospect of inclusion in an ongoing project) then I enter a different mode, where the idea bounces playfully between my left and right brains. The latter, to give it freedom to develop itself, to let the woop and wharf spin themselves out. The former, to catch the evanescent experience within the confines of standard notation that can be shared abroad.

But yesterday was an exception because I balked querulously at my inspiration! Opus 82 was a set of songs for baritone and guitar on poems by the great German caricaturist Wilhelm Busch, my first vocal work in that language. To emphasize the Teutonic inflections, all four songs were throughout in 3/4 time, with characteristic Ländler oom-pah-pah. Now, six months later, so was my new idea. Couldn’t I unravel its melos and twist it back into something in 4?

In my early years, I made a good living playing ballet classes. This is very instructive work, instilling a deep sense of metrical flexibility. If I had something on the piano rack in 2/4 and the teacher needed something right away in 3, I learned to adapt what was in front of me on the spot into what the lesson required in the moment, to avoid taking the time to ferret something suitable out of my briefcase.

(Another solution was to improvise music appropriate to the combination being peremptorily thrown out. When I began teaching, I collected a good many of these ideas into a set of piano Preludes (1986), such as this one (in 3!), played by the late Romanian pianist Kristian Banatzianou.)

Yes. I was successful in effecting a version of yesterday morning’s 3/4 tune, that unprompted aubade as it were, in 4/4 time instead. But was it really “instead”? I found the original was staying with me! What was going on I didn’t at first get. I worked out the 4/4 theme, pretty much in three parts. (A trio it seems, but for what instruments? I don’t know yet, but to be sure I’m getting some ideas!) Suddenly the key changed, the time signature changed, and the original 3/4 aubade insisted itself. It sounds to the world like a very deliberate variation on the 4/4 melody, but I’m admitting here they came to me in reverse order!

So, a set of variations is on the way, apparently for three instruments. That’s all I can tell you!

I have decided to chronicle my newest compositional assay at length. I have so many compositions whose circumstances of creation are lost in the mists that I thought it might be amusing and perhaps instructive to pin this one down good and tight. I am not writing a piece anyone asked for, and it might never be performed. Indeed, I can’t even guarantee that I will actually finish it, particularly given the lack of a commission. 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! So, let me invoke the opus number 83 for the work I began with some confidence this morning. 

“Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.” 
— Modest Mussorgsky††††††††