Author: victorfrostcomposer

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!

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††††††††