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Why, no, I cannot write today! I have no time, no motivation, no . . .

If you’re like me, your number one love is writing music—but your number one skill is avoiding writing music. Every day, we find some “good” reason to avoid writing:

  • I don’t have enough time
  • I don’t have the emotional energy for it
  • I don’t feel inspired
  • I don’t know how to write what comes next
  • I don’t know what comes next
  • I don’t have the performers or the commission

These excuses reveal what Steven Pressfield calls your “Resistance”—the shadow part of yourself that keeps you from working.

Why would your Resistance do this to you? Why would it keep you away from the thing you love? Because it’s trying to keep you safe.

Safe from what? Ironically, your own impossible expectations.

The Weight of Impossible Expectations

You see, any day you can speak is a day you can create music.

  • If you write down the first melody that comes to your head, you have composed.
  • If you spend 15 minutes tweaking 4 bars of music, you have composed
  • If you sit down with your instrument and improvise for 2 minutes, you have composed.
  • If you sing your musical imaginings to yourself in the shower or while driving, you have composed.

And though it’s true that some days we do need to step away from creating music, most days are not those days. Most days, you actually do have the time, energy, and even the desire to create in some small way.

But, too often, “some small way” is not how we imagine composing. Instead, we place impossible demands on it:

  • “I have to complete this all at once.”
  • “I have to do it right the first time.”
  • “My unpolished improvisations do not count as composing.”
  • “I need to map out the finished piece from the beginning and not deviate from my plan.”
  • “What I write has to capture my initial inspiration.”
  • “What I write has to live up to my artistic hopes.”
  • “What I write has to become popular, financially successful, critically acclaimed, or connoisseur-approved.”
  • “What I write has to be wholly original, ground-breaking, and boundary-pushing.”

Any one of these demands is a heavy burden—and they rarely come alone. Collectively, they are soul-crushing.

How Your Impossible Expectations Gaslight You

None of these Atlas-like expectations are good, healthy, or true. Yet they gaslight us into believing that we are the problem.

They make us believe that we must carry their burdens on our shoulders.

That unless we fulfill their demands, we are not real composers or good composers or successful composers.

That until we fulfill their demands, we are not yet good enough, not yet talented enough, not yet original enough, not yet disciplined enough, not yet famous enough, not yet respected enough, not yet anything enough to write music. 

Is it any wonder, then, that part of you is trying to keep you safe from these feelings?

Ironically, that drive to keep you safe from those expectations only reinforces their outcome: you avoid writing music.

Atlas holding the world

You and your impossible expectations (a selfie)

Truths to Hold On To

The first step, then, to composing today is accepting some uncomfortable truths—“uncomfortable” because the emotional abuse to which you’ve submitted under these expectations frightens you away from leaving them.

The foremost of these truths is as simple as it is powerful: 

Your music matters because you matter.

And the second is just as profound:

You may not yet be as good of a composer as you hope to be, but, chances are, you are probably already a better composer than you need to be.

From these mantras come a whole host of counter-expectations:

  • “I can complete this a little at a time—no effort is too small to count.”
  • “It only needs to be right at the end. Until then, I can revel in all the wrong roads and all the paths not taken.”
  • “My unpolished improvisations are like ungut gems—they are the source of my polished compositions and a step I cannot skip.”
  • “My understanding of the piece’s form and its extramusical associations will evolve as I write the piece.”
  • “My initial inspiration, by definition, cannot be my goal. I can honor it, even as my work inevitably develops that idea in different directions.”
  • “No single piece must or even can fulfill my artistic hopes.”

But how do you enact these expectations in real life? That is the subject of next week’s post.

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Getting Started with Dorico

So you just got Dorico or you have the trial, and now you want to know how to use it.

Here are a collection of resources and ideas I found helpful in my process:

How to Get Started

Recently, I retypeset and revised my 2010 orchestral piece Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars, making special use of the condensing feature.

The fastest way to learn Dorico is NOT to learn about the interface theoretically. Instead, copy something.

If you need ideas, here are a few:

Copying scores like this will surface a bunch of questions you otherwise wouldn’t think to ask (see “Tutorials” and “Getting Help” below).

References to Keep at Hand

Like learning an instrument, it’ll take a few months to get fluid at entering notes, symbols, and text. Until these commands enter your muscle memory, you’re going to want to have these references handy:

I still refer to these sheets on occasion.

Tutorials

Steinberg’s team has put together loads of excellent tutorials on their YouTube channel. Here are some highlights:

Dan Kreider also has a great beginner’s guide to Dorico on his website.

Getting Help

Wherever you go online, the Dorico team is super helpful and will typically get back to you within a day, if not hours of you asking your question. The larger community often will answer questions even faster.

I’m also happy to answer any questions you may have. Feel free to reach out via email (joseph@josephsowa.com) or any of my socials (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).

Lessons

If you want further instruction on how to use Dorico (or any professional notation program), I’m here to help. I’m happy to offer you private tutorials specialized to your specific musical goals. Email me for more details at joseph@josephsowa.com.

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How Dorico Makes Creating Score-Following Videos a Breeze

Among self-published composers, a common task is making making score-following videos, in which the sheet music follows along with the recording. Preparing your score for these videos is potentially super time-consuming. The hardest part — and the easiest to mess up — is cutting the score into screen-sized segments.

Using Dorico, however, making score follower images is a breeze. It took me less than 5 minutes today to create the images I needed for a video of my string orchestra piece Space Invaders!

Let me show you how I put it together.

1. Create a new score layout and change its page size

First up, in “Setup” mode, I created a new score layout and renamed it “Score follower sized.” (Obviously, you can name it whatever you want.)

Next, in the program preferences (command+, on Mac), I changed the “preferred unit of measurement” to points.

Change units of measurement

“Why do that?” you may ask.

To help make changing the page size easier.

Given that high-res video is 1920 × 1080 pixels, by setting the page size to that exact proportion, whatever we export will automatically be the correct size.

So, next, with my new layout selected in the layouts panel, I clicked the little widget at the bottom to pull up the layout options.

Here I changed the page orientation to “Landscape” and the page size to 960 × 540 points, which keeps the 1.78:1 proportion. Using points, rather than inches, meant I could use easy, whole numbers.

(Note: Dorico here thinks we’re specifying a physical page size, not the dimension in pixels, so as long as you keep the proportion correct, you can use whatever size best suits your content.)

2. Create and tweak your master pages

So with my score the correct size, I then tweaked the master pages in “Engrave” mode to make sure I had everything I wanted on each page.

For more on using master pages, check out this video.

3. Prepare it for export

With everything set, I switched over to “Print” mode. Here, I told Dorico to export my file as png graphics. I also made sure to set the resolution to 300 dpi, so that the images would be nice and crisp for the video.

Set resolution

Lastly, to make organizing these files simple, I went into the “Filename Options” and made sure that each file was numbered by page.

And with that, after pressing export, I had all the images I needed, all the right size:

4. Making the Video

From there, I imported the images into Final Cut Pro and aligned them with the audio. Using Final Cut (or iMovie, etc.) is beyond the scope of this post, but I do need to make one important note: Dorico exports images with a transparent background.

This transparent background is no problem, though. In Final Cut, I simply created a white background on which to layer my score images. (It’s also easy in iMovie.)

Conclusion

And there you have it: in less than 5 minutes, you too can use Dorico to create all the images you need for your next score follower video.

Now, could you do a similar thing in Finale or Sibelius? Sure, but you’d have to create a separate file — which opens up all of the version-control issues that go along with doing that.

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man in black t shirt and blue denim jeans jumping

Why You Should Be “a Composer AND…”

Unless you managed to have your composition career well underway by the time you graduated, you, like me, will need to get an additional job.

The nature of that job is up to you—but it is something you must anticipate and plan for.

These comments are not meant to discourage you from becoming a composer. Just understand that, no matter how successful you are, you will likely always be a “composer AND.”

Reason 1: Career Development Takes Time

This is all the more the case depending on the music you intend to write.

If you are happy writing music for school bands/orchestras/choirs or for film/TV/games/media, then it is possible — after 5–10 years of networking, getting performances, and building your reputation — to work full-time in the field.

If you strictly want to write chamber, dramatic, experimental, or orchestral music, then you MUST plan on having a trust fund or bill-paying spouse/partner, having an outside job, or living (very) frugally for decades.

Reason 2: Other Experts Also Give This Counsel

For almost a decade, podcaster Dr. Garrett Hope has been interviewing successful composers from diverse genres to talk about career development.

Initially, he named his podcast “Composer on Fire.” However, after years of interviews, Garrett renamed the podcast “The Portfolio Composer” to spotlight this crucial idea: successful composers assemble their careers from a portfolio of activities.

Likewise, notable music critic Ted Gioia has also written about this topic on his Substack: “My advice to students interested in the arts is . . . that they should pursue their craft but also develop at least one money-earning skill before they reach the age of 30.”

Reason 3: History Affirms It As Fact

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, et al. were performers and teachers. Philip Glass did a number of odd jobs. Your professors are all professors (and most of them had other, non-professorial jobs before they landed a university job).

Take these further examples:

  • John Williams: composer and conductor
  • Augusta Read Thomas: composer and professor
  • Julia Wolfe: composer, presenter, and professor
  • Mark O’Connor: violinist, composer, and educator
  • etc.

Again, I defy you to find someone who makes their living strictly, 100% as a composer. That person will be in the vast minority, even among the most lauded and successful.

Therefore, What Should You Be Doing Now?

Start considering what you want your “and” to be. Your mix will be personal to you:

  1. Do you also love performing and conducting? Really master your instrument and learn what it takes to put together a performing career.
  2. Do you love teaching? Begin now to put together a private studio.
  3. Do you love recording and music technology? Become an assistant at a recording studio or for live music productions.
  4. Do you (or can you) have other non-musical skills or interests, particularly in in-demand fields? Minor or double major in those.

You get the idea: as a composer, you can and should branch out. That’s not only okay; it’s near universal.

And it will empower you for music to be your endgame will far less stress and anxiety than were you to put all your eggs in one basket.

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Some Preliminary Notes on John Adams’s Phrygian Gates

Last week, I posted some notes about the fourth movement of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto. As I thought further about what I wanted to do musically in my Hub New Music piece, I thought of John Adams’s Phrygian Gates. What I hear common to both pieces is a harmonic wash—that is, both pieces saturate entire spans of a register using collections of seconds.

Adams’s piece interests me because his harmonic wash is modal rather than chromatic. Further, it (often) has a discernible pulse and is constructed from repeating, distinct melodic cells. (In contrast, Ligeti’s piece generally features rhythms that are presto possible and  pitch sequences that are deliberately patternless, within each passage’s given constraints.)

So before I go further, here is Adams’s piece, for your listening pleasure:

General Observations

Because my analytical purpose is to gather ideas for my own composition, I will not examine the entire piece in depth. These, however, are some parameters worth noting:

  1. Most of piece consists of steady eighth- and 16th-note surface rhythms that often create a sense of pulse but never of beat. Some passages feature a quarter-note pulse (e.g., m. 554 ff.). Adams also composes the central section, “A Series of Weights and Measures” (m. 640-808), using tied whole notes of notably uneven durations.
  2. On a local level, Adams creates consistency be establishing “interference patterns” between the right and left hand. For instance, in bar 8, he juxtaposes a 3-note cell against a 2-note one. (The periodic unisons these particular cells create is not a bug; it creates a shimmer whose cause is just beyond the reach of most careful listeners.)
    Phrygian Gates ex 1 interference patterns.png
  3. These cells tend to be little upward gestures. Or least, they begin with an upward gesture before a downward one (cf. bar 201 ff.). Thus, the contrast at bar 255 ff., with its clear downward microgestures, is notable (cf. bars 518 ff. and 954 ff.).
  4. These cells often consist of one note per hand, but regularly contain as many as four. Generally, these chords remain static for the duration of the phrase, though there is at least one passage (bar 159 ff.) in which the pianist must undulate between dyads.
  5. Adams beams each pattern separately, making it easy to divide the piece into separate phrases. In each phrase, Adams varies the length and pitch content of its constituent cells. Because individuals phrases often maintain a cell from their preceding phrase, because large sections of the piece maintain a steady pulse, and because Adams further instructs the performer that “no single pattern [should] ever dominate[ ] another,” it can be difficult to tell when one phrase ends and another begins. Thus, this separation into “phrases” by beaming is often more a courtesy to the performer than a distinction Adams intends the listener to hear.
  6. Sometimes Adams introduces both cells at the start of the phrase (see observation no. 1 above). Other times, he elides the start of one cell with the ending of a previous cell, for instance, in bar 19:
    Phrygian Gates ex 1b interference patterns.png
  7. From the start, Adams adds disruptive elements to most phrases. For instance, in the phrase that begins in bar 9, Adams disrupts the right hand’s 3-note cells with 2-note interjections (bracketed in red).Phrygian Gates ex 2 interruptions.png
    Sometimes Adams inserts these interjections between cells, as in the example above. Other times, they replace notes in existing cells. For instance, in bar 37, Adams sets up a new pattern, but in bar 37, he replaces the last note of the right hand’s cell with a foreign pitch (bracketed):
    Phrygian Gates ex 3 replacement.png
  8. These interruptions and replacements have several effects:
    • By changing the alignment of a phrase’s cells, they change the resulting  interference pattern.
    • They create notable landmarks, (1) because they occur only a handful of times, (2) because they happen at unpredictable intervals, and (3) because they consist of pitches that don’t belong to the prevailing pattern.
  9. Adams, like Ligeti, uses voice leading to shape individual phrases into larger trajectories. For instance, the most formally significant melodic motion in bars 1-57 is the slow, stepwise descent of E4 to A3.
  10. Like Ligeti, Adams, also sometimes uses gestures to create trajectories. For instance, in bars 85-113, Adams gradually adds pitches above the interrupting E5, creating an “expanding-density gesture.” After B5 comes in bar 96, the addition of a pitch in the subsequent phrase’s interrupting element is expected, though not necessarily the specific pitch and timing (E6 in bar 104).

A Lengthy Digression on Adams’s Use of Modes

In his program notes, Adams explains that “‘Gates,’ a term borrowed from electronics, are the moments when the modes abruptly and without warning shift.” On a local level, “mode” in Phrygian Gates, however, often means something more akin to “diatonic collection” than it does to “scale.” “Scale” describes well Vaughan Williams’s use of modes to create clear pitch hierarchies. In Debussy, too, though these hierarchies can be more ambiguous, they consistently operate on both local and formal levels. In contrast, because Adams composes his phrases out of static cells, voice leading only functions on a formal level in Phrygian Gates. In consequence to both its static cellular construction and its formal-only voice leading, the piece only weakly, if at all, creates the sense of pitch centricity necessary to cast its modal pitches into hierarchal relationships with one another.

Indeed, the opening 113 bars of the piece seem to deliberate obfuscate the pitch A as the “root” or “center” of the four-sharp diatonic collection. In fact, the piece sounds E-centric when it opens and C#-centric in bar 44. When the long-range voice leading finally arrives at A3 in 56, Adams creates further confusion by interjecting the extra-modal Bb.

Now, I wrote that “‘mode’ in Phrygian Gates . . . often means something more akin to ‘diatonic collection’” because there are some exceptions. The E phrygian section that begins in bar 236 does sound like E-phrygian, not simply the white-key diatonic collection, because Adams thoroughly grounds it on E1 and E2 in the bass (cf. the C# in bars 640-808). Contrast this with the B-lydian music that follows it (bar 266): as with the opening “A lydian” music, B does not project itself as the center of a pitch hierarchy. Instead, whatever pitch is in the bass generally sounds most important. Thus, B gains its pre-eminence only in bar 311.

In short, Phrygian Gates generally lacks pitch hierarchies. Its pitches generally attain prominence for registral and timing reasons rather than voice-leading ones. Perhaps surprisingly given their radically different harmonic colors, Phrygian Gates and the fourth movement of Ligeti’s concerto both share this harmonic feature. However, whereas Ligeti achieves this lack of pitch hierarchy by using the symmetrical chromatic scale, Adams achieves it by constructing his piece using repeating, static melodic cells.

Lastly, I should note in passing the formal design of Adams’s modal usage. Adams mentions in the program note that the piece is “a 22-minute tour of half of the cycle of keys” that switches between the Lydian and Phrygian modes in each key change. Other scholars have diagrammed this progression (e.g., p. 14 here, cf. p. 135 here) and even debated each section’s modal identities. These details don’t really matter to me. The big picture affirms this general compositional wisdom: pitch-centric compositions longer than 3-5 minutes generally require shifts in collection and centricity to keep the listener’s attention.

Takeaways

As with analyzing Ligeti’s piece, my purpose in analyzing Adams’s is to help me identify some potential composition exercises to better capture the sound I was imagining. So here are the ideas that I have:

  • I don’t think I want to compose my piece out of short, static cells. However, I could try composing it out of short, static phrases—like Michael Torke’s Yellow Pages (that’s a whole other analysis project). Like Adams, I can experiment with placing these phrases in counterpoint with each other. So, to begin with, here’s my task:
    • Write a variety of short, static phrases
    • These phrases should vary in
      • length
      • rhythm (unlike Adams’s which are at a steady rhythm)
      • overall pulse (e.g., is this phrase mostly a 16th-note gesture or an 8th-note one?)
      • pitch content — more specifically
        • mode/collection
        • subsets of that mode/collection
        • stepwise vs. arpeggiated motion
      • density — they can consist of up to 3 pitches (though probably in closed voicing to start)
    • Identify: Do single/simple-contour phrases work better than ones that seem like little melodies?
  • Having written these phrases, I will then experiment in combining them
    • Which ones sound good with each other? At which transpositions?
    • What different orderings can I create?
  • Next, how can I disrupt these phrases? What is the effect of different lengths of disruptions?

Again, by the time you read this, I’ll likely have already conducted these experiments.

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Some Thoughts on the Fourth Movement of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto—or, How a Composer Analyzes Music, and Why

This is not so much an analysis as it is the sketch or the start of one. Its goal is understand the compositional possibilities this movement suggests to me on a particular Tuesday afternoon.

While composing my latest piece for Hub New Music (with generous funding by the Barlow Endowment), I began to think of a recent experience I had, and this memory triggered a strong emotional and musical response. After composing out a sketch of this idea, I noticed that what I wrote and was imagining reminded me of the fourth movement of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto. I don’t want blatantly to copy the movement, but I thought it prudent and useful to see what Ligeti does in it.

Here, for your listening pleasure, is that movement:

General Observations

First, some general observations:

  1. A very fast surface rhythm prevails throughout, but because it’s not perfectly stable (having both linear and contrapuntal variations), the music does not sound metronomic.
  2. Most of the piece is very quiet. Ligeti uses loud dynamics for formal purposes: to build to and from the climax* and to punctuate the coda. (On this idea of climax, see the heading entitled “Form” below.)
  3. Though it sounds really busy, much of the counterpoint in this piece actually consists only of 2-4 voices.
  4. Chromatic clusters feature prominently in the harmony—but when I say “harmony,” I don’t refer only to “vertical simultaneities.” For instance, I hear the opening clarinet duo more as an “arpeggiated” chromatic pentad (filling in and including all the chromatic notes of a P4) that gradually shifts upward from D3-G3 to E3-A3.
  5. No one will claim that this movement is easy to play. However, for three reasons, Ligeti’s voice-leading choices do make it more gracious than not to play:
    1. Though statistically the instruments are “arpeggiating” chromatic clusters of various sizes, Ligeti tends to avoid chromatic intervals unless he’s writing a fragment of the chromatic scale (3+ notes).’
    2. In turn, much of this “arpeggiation” takes place within the span of a fifth or even smaller. Further, within this span, two-thirds of the voice-leading consists of stepwise motion. The remaining voice-leading consists mostly of thirds, with only the occasional fourth or fifth. In other words, though these lines are fast, they require little physical motion.
    3. In situations when the arpeggiation spans wider than a fifth, Ligeti writes idiomatically for the instruments. For instance, the string writing in bar 43 ff. is accomplished by simple string crossing (of adjacent strings); fingering the exact pitches is otherwise just as economical as if Ligeti had written it all within the span of a fourth.
  6. Ligeti uses chromatic clusters prominently but not exclusively. For instance, near the end of the piece, the chromatic lines begin to be voice-led (roughly) by perfect fifths (see note in bar 49). Likewise, the run in bar 7 starts as a chromatic cluster but widens into a Major 7th chord, and then a polytonal one in bar 8. The tonal reference of these sonorities is very weak, but the difference in harmonic content and voicing is clearly audible.
  7. This is a good place to note that the distinction between “Pitch set” and “Pitch-class set” is very useful in this piece. “Pitch-class set” describes “all the pitches sounding irrespective of their octave.” In contrast, “pitch set” refers to the actual registers in which those pitches reside. The collection of pitches in bar 8 may all belong to the chromatic hexatonic pitch-class set (m2-m3-m2-m3-m2), but the pitch set of this collection is audibly arranged as a polychord (B-flat minor over D major). Now, in common-practice music, triads can be voiced, inverted, and doubled in myriad ways but still retain a clear relationship to their root-position chord. Not so in chromatic music: very few (if any) people will hear the Dmaj-Bbmin polychord as a revoicing of chromatic hexatonic collection.

Form

I hear the piece in four major sections. The closure of three of these (1st, 2nd, 4th) is defined a harmonic coalescence around a dyad or triad. The third major section comes to repose by reaching the registral extreme of the piano.

  • I
    • bar 1: two clarinets fill in a D3-G3 that gradually shifts up to E3-A3 and then thins out . . .
    • bar 5: coalescing on the E3-A3 dyad and ending in an upward run (bar 7) to
    • bar 8: coalesce on D major/B-flat minor polychord spanning D5-F6. The registral band narrows to . . .
    • bar 14: the E6-F6 trill, which voice-leads up to . . .
  • II
    • bar 15: F#, inaugurating a unison (+ 4 octaves) line between the piccolo and bass clarinet. This line is re-orchestrated/doubled in various chromatic pitch-class sets. It’s taken over by the piano as P5 (+ 4 octaves) at the end of bar 23.
    • bar 24: The horn (which entered on a sustain note in bar 22) leads off a melodic line (doubled by strings then winds). The surface rhythm of this line gradually accelerates as its register also increases. Meanwhile the piano (sempre fortissimo) also increases in density and register until . . .
  • III
    • bar 31: It is cut off by the double bass solo (with a subtle trombone sustain) that chromatically spans E1-A1. This band remains ≈P4/A4, changes color slightly (other instruments with these same pitches and rhythms that align on but not within notated beats) slowly transposes up . . .
    • bar 40: . . . to coalesce on C#2-G2 dyad with bass clarinet and cello
  • IV
    • bar 42: The violins, viola, and cello begin to arpeggiate chromatic lines roughly a fifth apart (and span roughly 2.5 octaves) that are moving upward at an unstable, unequal rate. In bar 45, the winds enter, sustaining pitches from the strings. In bar 46, the strings exchange similar for contrary motion until . . .
    • bar 49: the strings ultimately (albeit for only half a bar) arpeggiate a 6-octave span of fifths from Bb1 to F#6. They then move by contrary motion inward. Meanwhile, high winds resume their chattering over a span of about an octave that rises over two bars from the bass register into the soprano/alto one, then only above the treble staff (roughly mid bar 51).
    • bar 52: Meanwhile, the strings’ contrary motion leads to the cello and bass sustaining A3 and the violins and viola trilling A4/Bb4.
    • bar 53: The high wind chatter narrows around and then leaves only the oboe’s  loooong forte D#6 (against the strings’ A/Bb).
  • Coda: Ligeti finishes by arpeggiating 3-4 chromatic clusters (depending on how you want to count them) in the winds and keyboards: two loud gestures followed by a few quiet ones.

To sum up, here is my simplified, not-at-all-to-scale, graphical-sketch-on-a-post-it-note (the relative height of the lines represents pitch):

Post-it note sketch of Ligeti Chamber Concerto mvt IV.jpeg
A quick post-it note sketch of the form of the fourth movement of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto.

I asterisked the word climax when I mentioned it in the previous heading. I’m not definitively prepared to say that the loud part at the end of section II is the movement’s climax. It is definitely “the loudest part in the middle of the piece,” so in that sense, it is climactic. However, section IV leads also somewhere just as rich (the widest and fullest texture of the whole piece) and noteworthy (the loooong, loud oboe note).

Lacking the time to examine the particulars closely enough to build a solid case one way or the other, I will point out that the build to fortissimo in section II does create a reference point to which the end of section IV/start of the coda responds. In other words, just as the formal parallelisms between the four sections help demarcate them as sections, the parallels between the ending of sections II and IV are formally significant. That is, what happens at the end of section II helps the end of the piece sound like the end of the piece.

Takeaways I Will Use Immediately

Though some of these general and formal observations will be useful for me in writing my piece for Hub New Music, my most immediate takeaways have to do with deliberate use of register and density. Here are some compositional exercises and experiments I’m going to try as a result of studying this piece:

  • Identify narrow registral bands (less than, say, 1.5 octaves). Sketch some ideas specific to that register and its associated tone colors. (Karalyn Schubring has a cool piano piece that does this.)
  • Imagine these passages:
    • using different collections
    • in different registers
    • at different dynamics
    • with different doublings/parallel motion
  • What different gestures can I create, more than static bands?
    • Upward/downward runs?
    • Expanding and contracting collections?
    • Different “interference patterns” (polyrhythms or distinct rhythmic layers)?
    • These, in combination with increasing/decreasing voices? Changing doublings?
  • How long must one of these gestures be so that it doesn’t sound like a melody but as something larger? (I imagine the answer exists in relation to (1) the size of the collection I’m trying to express, (2) the number of voices expressing that collection, and (3) the rate at which the whole collection can be presented.)
  • Of what different idioms can I take advantage for the various instruments that will make my music easier for them to play?

Developing these initial experiments and having some clear reference points for them was my purpose for analyzing that movement by Ligeti. By the time you read this blog post, I will have already conducted many of these experiments.

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One Way Writing for Harp is Different Than Writing for Piano

At the start of the year, I began working in earnest on the flute and harp piece I wrote for Luke Blackburn’s EcoMusic concert. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer happening this week, but that postponement does allow for a special opportunity! See below for more details.

During the idea-gathering phase, besides reading all about butterflies and toying with some musical metaphors about them, I also perused the flute and harp literature for ideas.

After surveying a bunch of harp music, something just clicked. I realized something I hadn’t noticed before about writing for harp: Unlike in piano writing, harp parts rarely feature fleshed out inner voices.

In fact, of the two dozen or so pieces I looked at today, I saw barely any inner voice writing that went beyond voice leading between chords. Take Britten’s Suite for Harp. Or Saariaho’s Tocar. Or Pierné’s Impromptu-Caprice. Or Tüür’s Prints. Stylistically, these pieces are all over the map. But they all lack any substantive inner-voice writing. Colin Matthew’s Little Suite has maybe a dozen bars of an independent middle voice, but also mostly aligns with this trend.

The harp: not an inner voice instrument.

Looking now over nkoda’s “Essential Harp” collection of scores:

  • The Scarlatti sonatas have some — but mostly not
  • Ditto the Handel B-flat concerto
  • Glinka’s Mozart Variations are entirely devoid of it
  • Ginastera’s Harp Concerto has some mildly independent inner voice writing — but only in the second movement
  • Jolivet’s Prelude again only has some mildly independent writing

. . .  and so it goes. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of harp players out there who can point me to their secret stash of pieces with rich inner voices. But from what I can tell, such writing is just not idiomatic for the harp.

What seems to be most common is textures of 1 or 2 layers. In fact, some of the most common textures seem to be (1) 2 notes in one hand and one note in the other, (2) one note per hand, or even (3) one note at a time.

These textures may be embellished (unsurprisingly) with all manner of arpeggiation, figuration, and doubling/planing. They may sometimes even feature block chords with smooth voice leading — but this still counts as doing one thing.

So I wrote my flute and harp piece accordingly. Here’s a draft of the first movement:

Learn more about the piece here.

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Behind the Scenes on “Motion Lines,” from the PRISM Quartet’s latest album

As you may have heard, the PRISM Quartet’s latest album, Surfaces and Essences, came out this past week. I’m thrilled that my piece “Motion Lines” was on it—along with a bunch of other great music by Christopher Biggs, Victoria Cheah, Viet Cuong, and Emily Koh.

First things first, if you haven’t listened to the album yet, go do that!

Then, be sure to purchase it from Apple Music or Amazon and support the PRISM Quartet.

You can also find the sheet music here.

Now, Join Me Behind the Scenes

That’s the shiny professional part. I wanted to take you behind the scenes, though, to give you a peek at what the composing process was like. Ever since 2004, I’ve kept a steady journal. Every week I write something. Most weeks I write a lot more. So I dug into my journal to pull out some scenes from the process of writing for and collaborating with the PRISM Quartet . . .

From the Project Notes: (Undated)

For every composition I write, I keep a text file of musical ideas, revision notes, possible titles, etc. Here is the original outline I wrote for the piece:

And here’s me talking more about these notes on YouTube:

While Composing: December 6, 2016

I didn’t end up writing a lot about the composing process itself, but hands down (pardon my pun, as you’ll soon see), this was the most eventful thing that happened during it: my first time ever getting stitches.

“I got stitches today after proving how sharp Cutco knives are while cutting an apple. Oops. The cut didn’t seem bad, but it soon became clear that the band-aid was no match for it. So on went a gauze pad over the band-aid and over I went to the urgent care center. $20 and an hour later, I had my stitches. . . .

“After coming home, I ate some, and eventually took a nap. I couldn’t focus. When I woke up, I eventually composed some until I went to the movie (Dr. Strange) with some friends.”

In addition to keeping a journal, I also save backups of my work every day. So I can show you, here, after getting stitches, is what the piece looked like by the end of December 6:

At the Rehearsal: January 27, 2017

Most rehearsals of new music sound like a partially carved statue looks. With the PRISM Quartet, the experience was different:

“The rehearsal went well. I was delighted that ‘Motion Lines’ is sounding as I had hoped it would. It’s fun to hear it first shaping into something musical. It’s funny, too, how there’s totally a sax player personality, and they all have it, refracted through the lenses of their individual personalities.”

I only wish I were cool enough to have the sax player personality.

After the Concert: January 29, 2017

In addition to how much I loved the PRISM Quartet’s performance of my piece, something else that stood out was how different the pieces were that we Brandeis students wrote for them. Despite this diversity of styles, PRISM knocked all the performances out of the park.

“The concert was fantastic. My piece got a great performance, and I received some really positive feedback from Eric and Davy as well as from my peers, including Richard, Talia, and Jeremy. Davy’s piece ‘Compass,’ which followed mine and concluded the concert, was easily the most like mine. Jeremy’s was the next closest, having a linear narrative, but its surface was way more sound- (rather than harmony-) focused, like the other five pieces. I liked them all a lot. As I was telling Talia and Alex after the concert, I find my peers really inspiring because they all do such different things at such a high level. That and they’re friendly, articulate, and supportive.”

PRISM Quartet at Brandeis. Image courtesy of Emily Koh

Afterword

After the concert, I assumed that was that. I had a great time working with the PRISM Quartet, and they made a great recording of my piece. But ten months later, Matt Levy emailed me asking if they could include “Motion Lines” on a forthcoming album. Of course, I said yes.

Although the album started in 2017, most of my contributions to it—preparing an initial mix, putting together program notes, and so on—didn’t happen until the second half of 2019. Almost all of that correspondence happened through email, and, well, now you can see and hear the result.

If you haven’t yet listened to the album, go check it out at all the usual places: Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, PRISM’s website. Then, if you want the the sheet music, it’s available here.

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“What Gets Measured Gets Managed”

“What gets measured gets managed” is the quote attributed to Peter Drucker. For all that can be criticized about this idea, it’s useful to consider in composing.

So let’s consider them! Here are some ways you can measure (or not) your work:

1: By how you feel about it

This is the worst way to measure your work. A favorite fable of mine explains why (you may have heard this before):

Once upon a time, a farmer asked his son to plow a field.

“Son,” he said. “Always make sure that you choose a point on the horizon to steer by. That way your lines will be straight and true.”

His son nodded at this advice comprehendingly, so the farmer went away to work on other chores.

But when he came back, the field was mess. Lines criss-crossed

“Son, what happened?” he asked. “Why is the field a mess?”

Measuring your work by how you feel about it is like following the rabbit. It does not give you a firm point on the horizon by which to steer.

Every artist knows this: Some days we feel like working. Other days we don’t. Some days we believe our work to be fabulous. Other days we consider ourselves failures. Thus, if you try to measure your progress by how you feel, you will never get an accurate read on the state of your project.

2: By measures written

Number of bars written often seems like a natural metric, but it’s not always useful.

On the surface, “measures written per day” seems like it could be a more useful metric. For film and TV music, it might well be: once you set your tempo and your hit points, you know exactly how many measures you must finish to complete the cue and send it to your orchestrator.

In my experience writing concert music, however, it’s a far more slippery metric. I find myself revising “completed” bars constantly. So then do I measure the number of bars written and the number revised? I’ve tried this, and it’s not helpful because neither gives me a good gauge on the progress of a composition.

Although measuring “bars written per day” has been less helpful for me in tracking a projects overall progress, I resonate with this secondhand advice I got from Tarik O’Regan (via Matt Nielsen): “Write at least one measure per day.”

The power of this metric is that it gets you started: this is a judgment-free bar of music. Its purpose is simply to express a musical thought — any musical thought. Just speak what’s on your mind musically. That’s what you do verbally with your friends and you don’t judge yourself, so why would you judge yourself for writing what’s on your mind?

And it turns out, it’s really hard to write just one bar of music. You’ll probably end up writing 4 or even 8. And once you do, you’ll start fussing over it. Before you know it, you’ll have at least a semi-interesting musical idea. Sometimes, this process will yield good ideas, and even occasionally great ones.

3: By time spent

I have the BYU composition seminar to thank for this metric. During one of my undergrad years, Neil Thornock had us track the number of hours we spent each week composing. The idea was that if violinists had to practice for 20 hours per week and pianists had to practice for 20 zillion hours per week (conservatively estimated), we composers should be logging at least 10 hours weekly.

So I dutifully kept track of my composing hours that semester and discovered that, as it turned out, it took me about 10 billable hours to complete a minute of finished music. Per “billable hours,” I was strict about logging this time: bathroom breaks, email, etc. all stopped the clock. 

In tracking my hours since then, I’ve discovered that 10 hours seems to be a good ballpark measure for me to estimate how long a project will take. Complicated projects take longer (Glimmer, Glisten, Glow required about 12 hours per finished minute). Simpler ones go by faster (Aspen Song required less than 5 hours per finished minute). But 10 hours per minute is, overall, a good estimate.

Armed with this knowledge, I can reasonably map out a project timeline. For instance, my Barlow commission for Hub New Music has a proposed duration of 8-10 minutes. Given that will take me around 100 hours to complete, and a sustainable work week entails 15 composing hours, I estimate I’ll be able to complete it in about 6 weeks — which is great, because it’s due in about 9 weeks.

4: By milestones

The downside with even hours, though, is that even though they give me a rough idea of when the piece as a whole will be done, they still don’t create any internal benchmarks. Having milestones makes it a LOT easier to compose a piece of music. By breaking the project down into chunks, you can know when you’ve completed work for the day. You can avoid overwhelmed feelings from the project seeming too big and unknowable in scope.

Writers (and composers) often hear the advice that they should write a lot of drafts. What do those drafts look like? Honestly, artists being the creative people they are, they can take a variety of forms.

Here’s what they look like for me:

  • chaos stage: developing material and artistic meaning
  • outline draft: material and its ordering identified for each section
  • continuity draft: every bar has something in it from start to finish
  • good draft: each bar has a complete texture from start to finish
  • completed draft: the whole has been polished, but not proofread
  • final draft: proofread, not yet performed
  • final version: rehearsing and performance issues incorporated

These milestones are useful for me, because they each represent a distinct stage of progress.

The hardest part of the process for me is the “chaos stage,” because I’ve struggled to figure out how to measure progress in that area. Which makes sense — how do you measure what is fundamentally play?

As I write my piece for Hub New Music, I’ll experiment with the “bars written” metric for this stage — the point being not to revise these bars but to come up with as many ideas and as many variations on these ideas as it takes for me to find and capture the artistic vision.

Takeaways

Having given you some insights into my process, I’m curious to know:

  • What have you found works for you?
  • What methods from above are you interested in trying?
  • What suggestions do you have for me for how I can better handle the “chaos stage”?

Happy composing!

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Inherent Vice — in Music

The ink erosion in this chant manuscript is an example of inherent vice.

“Inherent vice,” says Wikipedia, “is the tendency in physical objects to deteriorate because of the fundamental instability of the components of which they are made, as opposed to deterioration caused by external forces.”

As a property of physical objects, this is why certain papers and films last longer than others. It also is why materials deteriorate the way they do.

But what interests me about inherent vice are its potential musical analogies. Here a few examples of how inherent vice can be recreated in music.

Fred Rzewski: Les Moutons de Panurge

Rzewski makes it easy for performers to get lost, and in the score, he explicitly directs the performers that “if you get lost, stay lost. Do not try to find your way back into the fold.” The analogy to inherent vice is pretty clear: the piece will fall apart. What’s fascinating though is how Rzewski repurposes this as a virtue. Thus, the title feels to me like a humorous reference to Isaiah 53:6: “All we like sheep have gone astray.” (To my ears, there is no obvious reference to Handel’s setting in Rzewski’s piece, other than a general, wandering melodic contour.)

Alvin Lucier: I Am Sitting in a Room

As with Rzewski’s piece, the inherent vice of Lucier’s musical-acoustic scenario is the desired outcome. Here, the vice comes not from confusing the musicians, but from harnessing the result of rerecording the same speech, repeatedly, which gradually washes out the speakers voice and reveals the acoustic resonance of the room in which it is performed. The overall process and result feels like a metaphor for merging with the universe and reminds me of the Buddhist doctrine of anattā.

Michael Gordon: Gotham, Part III

The third part of Michael Gordon’s Gotham undergoes a similar process, albeit composed out and for orchestra. I find fascinating the different textures that he teases out of having the violins initial line unravel. Inasmuch as the process is composed out, rather than a result of the score’s execution, I wouldn’t consider the vice here to be as “inherent” as Rzewski’s or Lucier’s pieces. It’s more like “predestinated vice”: the composer decided the piece would gradually fall apart, so he ensured that it happens.

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