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!
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