I started playing through the B section i had already written in Finale and then in my head to try to monitor the pacing of it and figure out how to get out of it, and then sometime a half hour later when i was taking a break (i might have been at the grocery), the ending sixteen measures of the piece instantly appeared in my head.

Occasionally that happens, where the right thing for the piece just pops in my head out of nowhere, as if to say, “duh, mendel.  what else could it be?”

When i got home I wrote down a description of what happened in text, confident that i’d remember what it sounded like, and writing the words was incredibly gratifying.  The ending of this piece is something i had been struggling with – the A’ material was strong, but wasn’t leading anywhere yet, and i didn’t know where i wanted to take it.  To have a definite idea of how i was going to get there felt like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel – all i needed to do was fill in the details and the piece that i had struggled so much with and fell so behind on was finally going to hit that hump of completion.

Between craziness at work and catching up on some much needed socializing, i ended up shelving the piece for a few days.  When i came back to it, i was revisiting the B to A’ transition, struggling because the method i was currently exploring felt stale – the way it was leading was a gradually increasing density of parts that would abruptly turn into unison hits – i initially started that way to give it a unifying element since it was a variant of how the A section led to the B section, but since i also used that technique multiple times in the B section itself, to do it a fourth or fifth time in the piece and end it the same way started to feel less like a unifying element and more like a tired overbearing repetition.

Tonight i started to go a different direction with the material leading to the recap, something that sparked in my head a few days ago.  The new direction feels right for the piece – but it bridges the transition to the A’ material so differently that that A’ section i wrote about a month ago might get thrown out, which means that those perfect sixteen measures which are pretty still well etched into my memory might not actually make it into the piece – sure it’ll end in a similar way, but it won’t be the same.

But ultimately that’s what composition and art is about – malleability and the exploration of multiple possible scenarios that lead to their own individual outcomes.  The strength of the material the way i have it written right now is enough that i don’t want to stray from it, and the fact that it’s completely changing the ending material is disappointing in some ways but is ultimately a better choice for the piece.  Even seemingly perfect endings can change drastically enough that a different ending that wasn’t even on the radar pops up out of nowhere, and that new ending becomes the perfect ending in a way that the previous one could no longer ever be.

Life is kind of like that too, i think.

For those interested, here’s the tail end of the development of the B section.  I’m plunging ahead with how it’s written with a clear level of acceptance that it might have to change because it’s not really playable.  We’ll see.

What’s clear about this B section that’s under development is that what i’m trying to create is pretty heavily influenced by Ligeti’s 6th piano etude.

the aural reaction i always have when i listen to this is something akin to “multiple lines at varying speeds in a constant downward spiral”, and that’s pretty much exactly what i’m doing with the B section of Moon of Eris.  My approach is much more straightforward than Ligeti – a process i define as “iterative” that involves each player in downward movement at a consistent rate for each individual part, although each part is moving in completely different rhythmic structure:

the climax of the phrase is the culmination of all of these three parts at its lowest metal “pitch” with accents that almost come together in loud form that get bridged by a bowed crotale note by the first player.

I’m blogging about this for two reasons: the second is merely to track my headspace on the piece and explore where the first section of the piece comes from because i have no idea where it comes from at all.  I blame part of this on how long ago i came up with the material – i was likely influenced by something i heard at the time or maybe was learning – it could have been, for example, the gamelan ensemble that i was in at the time and being in that world of five pitches being used in long cycles.  But i don’t know that for sure, and before i started developing this blog entry, the gamelan influence wouldn’t have occurred to me.

But the first and primary reason i’m blogging about this is to “talk it out” to help with the writing.

Generally with a piece like this i conceive of it as “less is more” when it comes to development materials.  As i had stated in a previous blog entry, the piece itself doesn’t feel minimalist to me in the same sense that i’d get out of Terry Riley or Phil Glass, but it has a particular sort of focus to it that has minimalist influences, the idea of capturing a particular moment or phrase and drawing it out and exploring it and having that drive the entire piece.  Yet i’m finding that after a couple of iterations and variations of the above material, i’m wanting more as a listener and as a composer, and i’m trying to justify introducing a drastically different variation element to this material in its third iteration before i go all recap of the A section material because there’s a part of me that’s loathe to introduce that if it in itself isn’t going to develop of its own accord.

Ultimately, i think that that problem may solve itself if i either conceptually conceive of it as still being close enough to the original material that it’s still just an extension of that material rather than something unique enough that it deserves its own material.  It also may solve itself in that i may start to flesh it out and figure out how to develop it in a way that doesn’t detract from the momentum of the piece overall.

We’ll see what happens.  I already skipped a bit to the ending material of the section so i knew where i was heading – that helps give the section focus, but i just need to keep in mind that the ending material shouldn’t be laid out in stone, that if the section starts to meander in a different place that i should follow where it wants to go as opposed to pigeonhole it into something that i happen to think it should go.  That’s always the toughest thing about composing anything, i suppose, the ability to experiment with something like that or run with a large concept and then freely abandon it completely if that’s not where the music is going.  beauty…beholder started out very differently in my head than how it turned out, and i’ve been taught and learned for myself that the most important thing to do is to trust my instincts when it comes to that sort of thing.

I’ve been doing some heavy work on Moon of Eris, my piece for the Portland Percussion Group, and i reached a point where i was doing MIDI playback a lot to revise and fine tune the pacing.  The first third of the piece involves each player playing on four tones of non-pitched percussion instruments (temple blocks, wood blocks, &c.) that I’ve notated on the FACE pitches of the treble clef.  As per normal, i have each instrument set on piano for MIDI playback, so when i use playback, i hear a lot of F, A, C, and E running in canon across all four instruments.

Usually when i’m deep in a musical project, the piece pops in my head at random times.  I’ll be walking around or driving and i’ll hear the piece in my head.  In the case of Moon of Eris, what i’ve been hearing in my head lately has been what the MIDI playback sounds like – piano FACE – and rather randomly, my brain has also started to associate harmonic movement with those “false” pitches of the piece.

Which is pretty interesting.  The nature of the first third of the piece is such that I think it would actually work pretty well as a pitched piece with harmony behind it (fairly canonic, very minimalist), so now i’ve got this thought to create another piece that uses a variation of this material but for pitched instruments.  I know that there’s a level of cheating involved with that, but knowing how much Bach, Beethoven, and Steve Reich (as easy examples) constantly rip off their own work, i’ve got no major issues with it.

The percussion quartet that i’m writing has transformed a great deal from its original concept as Cascadia – i could probably still call it that and create loose associations with that Cascadia concept, but it feels like fitting the square peg into the circle hole.  So i’m trying to shift my conception about the piece, find a way to capture what i’m trying to say with a proper title.

The piece is very specific in its intent – it’s a lot about space, timbre, and texture, and a pseudo-but-not-really-gradual-minimalist transformation and evolution of material both within a single part and across all of the players.  Rhythmically the first section has a very metronomic characteristic – clear beats, clear divisions, clockwork.  The second section contrasts this in being much more polyrhythmic with the intent of being chaotic.  The third section is going to mesh those two together somehow (in a way i haven’t quite figured out yet).

Yesterday when i was trying to think about titles, I started to think about the piece in three possible ways.  The first idea was that the early notes in the first section each represented a different photo capture of raindrops all from the same storm.  Time-Lapse Rain was the original ‘stupid’ thought that was supposed to lead to a version of that that didn’t sound stupid, and i failed to come up with anything.  I was strongly averse to simplifying the concept to “rain” or “storm” ideas because that feels amazingly cliché.  I started to try to think about the piece as being about the building of clouds, but that also felt too cliché.

The second idea was something like Ritual Dance.  I had a picture in my head of Balinese shadow puppet theater and African tribal sort of things.  I’m still toying with that idea, but it’s problematic because it creates a particular sort of association of order that i don’t want associated with the second section of the piece.  I don’t want someone to try to make sense of the second section in that way – it’s meant to be chaotic and unsettling, and having an implication that the whole piece is a dance will give that section an idea to latch on to that doesn’t fit – another circle peg in the square hole.

The idea that feels strongest to me is that of a rock slide – a cliff or a mountain that goes through a subtle seismic tremor that causes pebbles to fall that unexpectedly turns into a full on destructive rock slide.  But Rock Slide or Pebbles feels wrong because it’s too concrete – the piece has a high level of abstraction to it – that’s why there’s so much flexibility in its titling.  To assign it a title and a concept that has a strict physical idea such as a bunch of falling rocks takes away from that abstraction and some of the potential depth of the piece.

But there might be ways to use that concept but find a more abstract way to address it.  I’m going to think about it for a while today and hopefully come up with something i like so i can be done with the whole thing.  I need the title to help inform the piece, not roadblock it.

So the question became: what do i do instead?

During my master’s degree at the University of Oregon i had a pretty close relationship with the percussion department, both the students (three of which are in this group) and the professor at the time (Charles Dowd who passed away a few years ago). Charles pulled me in for a couple of gigs with the percussion ensemble, mainly as a sound effects guy – one piece required the sound of a helicopter, another piece involved wind sound effects and other things like that. At some point during my involvement of all of that, Charles gave me an open invite to write a piece of music for his ensemble. One year i started sketching a piece, but it never made it past early stages – i knew it was a sextet, i knew how i wanted the first three minutes to go, i had put that on paper, but it never made it to a computer, never got refined.

The conception of the piece is still very strong in my head – what the first third is about, how that comes back in the last third, and what it’s trying to say, at least abstractly. It’s a strong piece that should get written, so i decided to apply that to this quartet.

I’m writing about it because of the creative process of it, which involves me having to print out the sketch and form of the first third of the piece on to paper and lay it out so i can “hear” the big picture form in my head. With some pieces, i don’t need to do that, i can grab the concept well enough via MIDI playback or just by looking at it page by page on the screen, but there’s something, well, bigger about this one, something that requires me to lay it out all old school so that i can truly refine and hone it, make it feel truly right. It’s about slow pacing and timbre and texture and not writing within the barlines right away, depicting the abstract and concreteness of it in a combination of strict and non-strict notation that well inform me about how to do the right thing with it later on.

And that feels good to do that, to have the fuel to do it this way and the current drive for it makes it incredibly intimate and personal, something that I like to think translates well to the listener.

The working title for the piece is Construct/Deconstruct, but that’s not what it’s going to end up being. That’s just a bookmark, a frame of reference to help me inform the musical shape and its philosophy. We’ll see if i can find a better way to title that later on.