Having decided that “False Waltz” (as it was still titled at the time) belonged at the end of the whole piece, i started working on the second movement “Chaconne”.  I quickly discovered that there was probably good reason why chaconnes weren’t written on timpani.

Since Dave and I had decided that the piece worked better with four timpani rather than five (which had been my original intent), it created a limitation in my head on what i could use as the structural chaconne material.  Most of the bass lines that i wanted to use for the chaconne would have necessitated the use of two timpani, and that left two timpani to be able to come up with the melodic variations that would make up the main material.  True, with careful planning i could maybe use the third timpani at times when it wasn’t being used for the bass line, but that felt impractical, an idiomatic nightmare to map out, particularly after having gone through such a trial with mapping out the gradually rising pitch-bend stuff of the last movement.  After wrestling with it for a week or so, i eventually decided to nix the idea and started brainstorming alternatives.

The effectiveness of the pitch bend section in the last movement was fresh in my head, and my brain started leaning towards that for ideas.  Eventually a new kind of pitch bending idea started to form in my head – one where a note on the timpani was struck once, and then the pedal wobbled back and forth on the resonant tail of that note’s decay.  I called Dave and asked him if he thought that something like that would work or if he thought that the movement and the decay would happen too quickly for it to be useful as a technique in the music.  Dave’s answer was basically “I’m not sure” – he told me that he’d get me an audio sample of the idea on his timpani and tell me what he thought about it.  The first sample he gave me was promising – moving the pitch back and forth definitely made the decay happen faster, but it still had a good amount of resonance to it that i thought i could shape the movement around it.  I gave Dave about eight different variations of the “pitch bend trill” to try – lowest drum in eighth notes, lowest drum in triplets.  highest drum in eighth notes, highest drum in triplets.  then i asked him to strike other notes while the trill was happening.

The audio samples he gave me of those variations helped a great deal in shaping the movement’s creation, which at the time i had titled “To and Fro”.  As i started to write both the A and B section – with constant drafts to Dave asking, “is this possible?  what does it sound like, do you think it works?” and sometimes making adjustments along the way – a part of me realized that in some weird way i had actually achieved the writing of the chaconne that i thought wasn’t possible with the trills/glisses being the chaconne part.  But at that point, my conception of the piece overall had already shifted – while the last movement could be conceived of a “False Waltz” and this movement could be a “chaconne”, the first movement “Rising, Falling” had no dance context to it whatsoever, and trying to find a way to cram some sort of dance concept when that wasn’t in its original intent felt like trying to push the circle peg in to the square hole.

I toyed around with alternate concepts, and eventually came across the idea that the “To and Fro” gliss idea functioned very similarly in my head to an aural pendulum, and coupled with the first movement’s title and conceptual musical idea of “Rising, Falling”, i could conceive of each movement of the piece having to do with different forces in physics.  Timpani Physics and The Physics of Timpani rolled around in my head, as well as a few other similar titles before i eventually landed on Timpani Forces, which is what then changed the final movement’s title from “False Waltz” to “Momentum”.

The final result of “Pendulum” felt pretty special even before i heard it in person – Dave had expressed that he had never used or heard of timpani pedals being used in this way before, and the way that i put it all together did a lot in convincing me that the five year break i had taken from composition and music altogether didn’t make me lose my skills or edge as a composer entirely.  I think that “Pendulum” is probably the strongest piece of music that i’ve ever written, and it remains my favorite movement in the entire piece.

As i was finishing the final draft of “Pendulum”, i started to run into another issue – the tempo of “Rising, Falling” and “Pendulum” were both very slow, and the second section of “Rising, Falling” was too similar to “Pendulum” in that the left hand was basically providing an ostinato in which the right hand was doing something melodic.  I started thinking that i needed to insert a fast movement in between the two to help break it up, but i was hesitant to do that because the piece was starting to become pretty long – with the three movements i had written, we were talking 16ish minutes already.  Dave and i had a few discussions about it and eventually decided that a quick middle movement was a good idea.  To help with that, i ended up trimming some of the first movement and the third movement and decided that the second movement should be 2’00”-2’30” tops.

Now that i had retitled and reconceived of the piece as having to do with forces of physics, i tried to start writing the second movement with a physics concept in mind first that would then inform the musical material.  The first version of this was a movement called “Impact”, something that i had about 60 measures plus the ending written.  The concept behind it was fast crescendo rolls of one note that would land on another note – the fast rolls represented an object in fast motion that would then “impact” the resolving note.  In my head i think i had pictured the idea of meteors hitting the earth, fast baseballs landing in baseball mitts.  harmonically the pitches went an eight-measure phrase that repeated, with each repeat adding some new element to it – an expanded roll or the introduction of a fast syncopated rhythm instead of the roll that would add more depth to the harmonies or adding some octaves.

The material was a struggle – i had problems trying to pace the material properly and figuring out how to get it to develop in a way that would make sense when it reached the end that i had already written.  But more than that, i just didn’t like the way that it sounded and the direction it was going.  It wasn’t turning into something that i was looking for nor what i thought the listener would be looking for to break up the slow movements around it.  For a while i tried to overcome those difficulties but as i kept trying, i became less and less convinced about it.  it wasn’t making as strong of an impact (haha get it?) as i wanted, and eventually i came to the conclusion that i had to scrap it altogether and start over.

The next idea that i had was based around an exercise i had written in my undergraduate years.  During a composition seminar, we had just listened to Charles ives’s quarter tone piano pieces, and Larry Nelson, the comp professor of that seminar, had gotten one of the practice rooms with two pianos tuned a semi-tone apart so we could experiment and write some quarter-tone pieces ourselves.  One of the pieces i wrote for that was called “Slow Explosion” which essentially started with middle C and expanded slowly outward in quarter tones – starting first with the quarter tone above C, then the quarter tone below C, then C#, then B, then the quarter tone above C#, then the quarter tone below B, and so on.

I decided to take that idea and use it in this timpani movement with half steps – have a sixteenth note “tremor” in the middle that provided the rhythmic basis for pitches on the top and bottom end to slowly expand outward to extreme ends of the timpani.  The end result was a quick and dirty movement that didn’t take me that long to write that i christened “Explosion”.  I don’t think that there’s anything particularly extraordinary about this movement, but it serves a particular purpose, functions as a flashy interlude that sets the stage for “Pendulum”.  To me, it’s also the relaxing “fun” movement – one where all you need to do is take a deep breath, relax, and say “go!” with your legs spread awkwardly apart on the drum 1 and 4 pedals which do most of the changes.

I remember very clearly the sense of relief I got when i finished writing the piece – a monster of a work that had taken me about a year and a half to two years to write.  There were a few revisions i made towards the end – the most significant one was to add a pitch-bendy thing to the first movement as a foreshadow to the fourth movement, and to make some minor adjustments to pacing of sections, some of which moved too fast and others of which moved too slow.

I also remember very clearly that although I was pretty happy with the sort of work and thought that I put into the piece’s composition, I wasn’t sure if the piece was actually any good.  It definitely felt bold, and I was pretty confident about what i had done with the third movement and the very ending, but I didn’t have a good idea of how this goliath of a piece would be received by my peers or by the community as a whole.

to be concluded.

(As an aside, the melody in the B section of Pendulum is inspired and loosely based on the song “Gwely Mernans” by Aphex Twin.)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

To celebrate its publication and its promotion at PASIC this coming weekend, i thought i’d write a series of entries about the journey of the piece from conception to publication.  This will be in three separate entries – the first being about the piece’s origins and the creative and collaborative process as the piece first started to take shape with the first two movements that i had written, which were movements I and IV.  The second will be about what led the decision to make the piece into four movements from its originally intended three and specifics about the last two movements i had written, which were movements II and III.  The last will be about the aftermath – the performances (and how that led to nienteForte), the feedback i received, and how it established my relationship with tapspace.

It was 2009 when Dave Constantine asked me to write him a piece of music. Dave was one of my former students when i was TA’ing at the University of Oregon and we ended up striking a friendship and an informal working relationship when i hired him to help me teach drums every now and again with the high school marching band i was contracting for.

Years after we both had graduated from that program, Dave, who had a secured a job as the Assistant Principal Percussionist of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, had just come from a timpani competition in france where the panel loved how he played, but they thought that everything in his repertoire was too “drummy”. Dave, unsatisfied with any timpani repertoire that he knew about which tried to explore melodic ideas, called me out of the blue and asked me to write him a solo timpani piece that emphasized melody and harmony more than rhythmic virtuosity.

I was still pretty fresh in my new life in New Orleans – I moved in 2008 to become the drumline instructor of the Tulane University Marching Band after doing corporate work for a few years after getting my master’s degree. When my life went corporate, music ended up getting cut out of the picture – my job occupied a lot of my time, especially during quarter-end periods, and i started to devote my free time to dance games and poker, not feeling that music writing was going to take me anywhere i needed to be financially.

As a result, the last real piece of serious music i had written prior to Dave’s request was about five years prior in 2004. I felt honored that Dave approached me, and I was pretty excited to write for the idiom and get my feet wet in composing again now that i was at least somewhat back in the music scene – i had a lot of creative energy to burn.  It felt like a good way to start too – although solo timpani music can be challenging, it seemed like something that would come naturally to me given my background in percussion and particularly as a marching tenor player.

Early on, i had put some thought into accessorizing the timpani with gongs or crotales to help me make the piece more melodic, in addition to giving me the ability to use that stuff for extended sound effects in a George Crumb or Schwantner-esque kind of style.  I nixed that idea fairly quickly for practical reasons – it was the sort of thing that Dave would have to spend extra money on, and theoretically the same would hold true for anyone else who would be interested in it who didn’t have access to academic resources.  Even before i wrote the first note on the page, i knew i wanted the piece to have market potential, and that made me conclude that the piece should be just about the timpani.

The first movement, “Rising, Falling” was written pretty much on pure instinct.  I started writing it with the idea that i wanted it to be about big open fifth chords – something i’m very fond of from my love for Debussy, having played a lot of his piano works growing up – and about the gradual movement of those open fifths from one position to another.  the first half of the movement is devoted to the eventual arrival of the low timpani’s D in that context, and then the second half of the movement is devoted to the eventual arrival of the low timapni’s C.

When writing towards those arrivals, i employed the principle of not landing on those pitches until absolutely necessary – a technique that stems from a composition lesson i remember very clearly during my undergrad years from Larry Nelson – there was a piece i was writing at the time that was building towards a climax in C minor, and at one point before that climax, i had the piano hit a very low C at a cadence point with the rest of the instruments – a clear C minor foreshadow that didn’t stay there for long, but was obvious nonetheless.  Larry strongly encouraged me to change that low C in the piano to a C#, arguing that the implication of C minor in the upper voices with the clear C# dissonance in the bass would aid in the tension that led to the C minor arrival point and that saving that strong C minor seniority for the climax would make it that more meaningful.

I made the change very reluctantly.  I was trusting that Larry knew better than I did, but when i made the change, i really disliked it, and fought in my head about it for a couple of weeks.  I told myself that if i still disliked it after a month or so, i would change it back.

About a month later, i loved it.  Changing that note made it into one of the most significant moments in that piece of music.

That lesson and its result made a strong impression on me – more than a handful of the works i’ve written use that principle in varying degrees. The entire structure of my recent work beauty…beholder is contingent on this principle, creating a listener expectation that the piece is clearly in Bb but never actually arriving at Bb until the very end of the piece.

After the first movement was complete, I started writing the second movement – which eventually became the fourth movement.  At some point after going through a few drafts of the first movement, a movement that was built around space and slow tempos, Dave commented that even though the main premise of the piece was about lyricism and melodicism, i could still make some of the piece flashy and more percussive.  I started the second movement with that premise, wanting it to be fast, loud, and bombastic in stark contrast to the first movement.  The original title for the movement was “False Waltz” under the initial idea that i was going to be calling the entire piece Timapni Dances, and that the piece was going to be three movements – slow/fast/slow – and that the last movement was going to be some sort of chaconne, because i really liked chaconnes and because it seemed like an interesting and neat challenge to try to write one for timpani.

The initial melodic/harmonic idea for the movement that would eventually be called “Momentum” was similar to the first movement -  a gradual transformation of open fifth chords.  At the time i had the idea that this would be the glue that bridged all of the movements together somehow, to take that concept and just find different ways to treat it in the context of different dance forms.  It was a deliberate choice that i started with the same pitches as the first movement and ended the first section with the same sense of arrival on the same low D that i ended the first section of movement I.

I remember that once i got to the end of that first section, i had no idea what i wanted to do next.  I felt like i was burning out on how i had approached the whole “gradually evolving open fifth” idea between the first movement and the first part of this movement, and I also felt like i needed to change the energy that i had built thus far in the movement which was all very loud and percussive.

The arrival at the low D in this movement was different than i had done anywhere else because i used pitch bend – i had fast running notes of (from high to low) B-E-A#, and i gradually pitch shifted the lower A# to A to create open fifths that would then “cadence” to the D.  I liked the effect of the pitch bend had on the sense of tonality and the sense of resolution once it got there, and this idea started to spurn in my head – what if i did that in reverse, and gradually moved myself from the bottom-most possible four-note open fifth relationship to the top-most possible four-note open fifth relationship?

I remember taking a piece of paper and writing down the ranges of the four timpani i was using and then building a roadmap of multiple gradual pitch shifts that i thought would make sense idiomatically.  I then pitched the concept to Dave and asked him what he thought about it.  His response was very positive, so i started sketching out the actual notes on paper.

Dave and I went back and forth on this music for a few weeks – the music for this section was probably rewritten about 15-20 times as i tried to get the pacing right as well as the pedal logistics right based on his feedback and rough recordings that he would give me.  It felt kind of like i was trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle for a picture that i was drawing at the same time – it was very challenging, but also very invigorating.  As the revision process kept moving forward and the section started to solidify, i started to hear the section in a peculiar way, associating it with a record player that would start at a slow rotation that would gradually get faster and higher in pitch as the record itself started to spin faster and faster.

Somewhere towards the end of this revision period, i took a step back from what i had done with the piece so far and realized that because of the excitement of the material and the explosiveness i was building towards, this movement clearly felt like a final movement of the piece rather than the second movement.  I simply had no idea how anything else i wrote could possibly top what i was currently writing, and that made it a no-brainer that this movement belonged at the end.  When the final draft of that was finished, i assigned it movement III and started working on what i thought was going to be the last movement i would write for the piece – the chaconne.

to be continued.