I love to cook. My favorite part is chopping vegetables and inhaling their aroma as they sauté on the stove. When I was younger, and when I want to try something new, I would follow recipes. Often, though, I simply mix together and season what I have on hand. I can do this because I’ve […]
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Have You Ever Had “Right Note” Syndrome?
As composers, we all know that ideas, technique, and process are inseparable:Ideas are the specific musical gestures we imagine.Technique is what we have internalized—physically, aurally, and theoretically—about music in general.Process is how we use that technique to bring our ideas to life.When these three align, composing is a joy.When they’re not, it sucks. And, stuck, […]
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Why Should Anyone Care about Tonality?
Tonality is a musicological debate about style disguised as a theoretical debate about pitch organization. Whether it’s Schenker’s arrogant, narrow nationalism or Tymoczko’s generous, imaginative catholicism, the debate around what defines “tonality” is, at its core, a question of repertoire. No one would argue that the music of Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms is not tonal. […]
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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 […]
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Some Thoughts on the Fourth Movement of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto—or, How a Composer Analyzes Music, and Why
An analysis of the fourth movement of Ligeti’s chamber concerto, which could lead to an academic article but was initially intended for creative purposes.
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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 […]
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Inherent Vice — in Music
“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 […]
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Those times composers wrote a low F for violin
Every orchestration textbook will tell you that the lower limit of the violin (scordatura aside), is a G3 (G below middle C). But even with a normally tuned violin, composers don’t always obey that limit. Here are two examples (plus a bonus one in viola) that show why a composer might write beyond that written […]
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A Few Observations on Suspensions
Classical dissonance begins with a consonant preparation, continues to the dissonance in question, and finishes with a consonant resolution. Wikipedia says as much. But as I was falling asleep I started wondering about the topology of suspensions — which suspensions work in which situation. There are three basic suspensions: 9-8, 7-6, and 4-3. In the […]
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The Elegance of Holst’s “Jupiter”: The First Two Bars
I love the opening swirl of violins in “Jupiter” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Who doesn’t? Take a moment and listen to it: It’s thrilling! But what really gets me going as a composer are the details of its composition. This passage is extraordinarily elegant. Here’s the excerpt from the score: What makes this passage so […]
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