Bit of a scrapbook entry this one, so bear with me while I rattle off a few updates.
The bottom line is that it's deadlines all the way down at the moment. Next Wednesday, the 25th, is the deadline for this semester's composition portfolio; the week after (the 31st) is showtime for our "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration (this semester's Research Training for Practitioners focus); and the week following that is the final recital of the semester. Oh, and on top of that... I'm delighted to report that my Elizabeth Barrett Browning settings have made it to the final of the Joyce Dixey competition, which is gratifying, but of course means yet another deadline: June 6th. Let's go through some of these projects, then.
My composition portfolio certainly looks like it's going to be a mixed bag. The EBB songs will go in of course, but I'm working on two other pieces, too. "Doom Scrolling" is a sort of post-metal piece based loosely on Joseph Shillinger's approach to rhythm, especially his thinking on "resultants", and some harmonic and melodic concepts taken from both Bartók and Messiaen. Putting the piece together has been an interesting exercise, and somewhat the inverse of how I would previously have written something like this. I scored the whole thing in Sibelius before so much as touching the guitar, although I did occasionally export the midi into a metal-ish template I'd knocked up in Ableton, just to check things were headed in the right direction sonically speaking (Sibelius users will know exactly what I mean):
Bar a bit of snagging, the score is finished and I'm now assembling the piece - again from an exported Sibelius file - this time in Logic. Logic 9, to be precise, as I have a whole suite of sounds in there used in previous metal-ish projects such as this. It's all a bit nerve-racking as the old iMac runing L9 is, well, creaky. Save every 2 minutes, Simon, every two minutes! Anyway, I'm now ready to replace the midi guitar parts with real ones, at which point I'll see if I can play electric guitar anymore.
The third piece - "On the Empty Pianos, Puppeteer Spiders" - is different again, a piece for string quartet, electric guitar and tape/atmos, inspired by a lecture Tom gave on Lutosławski's chain" compositions. In the end, the piece only bears superfical resemblance to Lutosławski (how could it not?!), but I'm running with the idea of individual musical incidents linked into a larger whole. I've had a few runs at this, trying to figure out the best approach. The one I've settled on is quite different to what I've employed on "Doom Scrolling". I chose a set of pitch class sets that complement each other (although often in unsettling ways) and then improvised with them until coming up with a motif or gesture that seems to work. I'm then notating each of these individually for use in the score, which is more akin, perhaps, to a large diagrammatic outline of the piece. The string quartet parts are all played in Spitfire Audio's String Quartet sample set, which is quite lovely, and the final assembly is coming together in Logic:
Only a week out from the deadline, and there's a lot of work to do on both pieces (and a commentary to write, of course). You may not see me posting here for a few days. Oh, before I move on to other projects, here's a Spotifly playlist I've put together of music I've been listening to (and in many cases reading): over five hours of listening pleasure, from Britten to Meshuggah. Don't say you weren't warned.
On the "Butterfly Lovers" front, we were due to get together to rehearse on campus yesterday, but it turns out everyone is deadlined out (the others have to turn in a 3000 word essay on Mahler, apparently, which made me feel better). But we did get a late afternoon zoom session in to discuss progress.
We'll be getting together towards the end of next week for something of a dress rehearsal, but in the meantime we've all got tasks to be getting on with. Yi has taken it upon herself to write a piece of music for the outro, in a traditional Chinese folk style, Jeongyi has got a narration to write, and Chaoran's got a lot of piano parts to learn!
We also had a brief discussion about whether Yi and Chaoran should play a brief piano duet. I mentioned in my last post that in feeding back on our last session, Tom brought up Lev Vygotsky's notion of of the "zone of proximal development", but I didn't really get into why. It was all about this particular piano duet: Tom felt that Yi was moving somewhere beyond "proximal" and that perhaps we should drop the duet. On the call yesterday it was clear that Yi and Chaoran had decided, indeed, to drop the duet, not because they thought it was the right thing to do, but precisely because Tom had suggested it. Which I think rather misses the point! In any case, I'm pushing back a bit, partly because I like the dramaturgy of the duet, and, well, because I'm quite high in the disagreeablness trait. But I suspect it's an idea headed towards the cutting room floor.
If nothing else, it's a good example of the iterative approach at work. In his essay "Constraint, Collaboration and Creativity in Popular Songwriting Teams" (Routledge, 2012), songwriter-turned-academic Joe Bennett establishes this useful "stimulus evaluation" model:
Bennett is discussing collaboration in songwriting teams in particular, but I think as a model it definitely applies to how we're been working over the last few weeks. Personally, I'd like to have seen a little bit more of the "negotiation" at work, especially around my attempts to subvert the Broadway tendencies at work. As it stands, it's been mostly "adaptation" or "approval" - but I can live with that. So... two weeks and counting. Gulp.
Finally, and a little to one side, I particularly enjoyed an essay by guitarist and educator Andy Jurik in the latest issue of Soundboard (the journal of the Guitar Foundation of America). "Embracing Organised Chaos" traces the history of improvisation in Western classical music generally and in classical guitar music more specifically. Jurik looks at improvisation's decline from the mid 19th Century onwards, and then at its revival in recent decades in the work of some cutting edge classical guitarists, including Leo Brouwer, Ralph Towner (who's arguably a jazz guitarist who happens to play solo nylon-strung guitar), Dušan Bogdanovic, and the late, great Roland Dyens, who was renowned for the improvisations that opened his concerts.
I bring it up here because I was already beginning to think about classical guitar-based improvisation as the basis of my next stage of study, whatever form that takes. I've spent most of my musical adulthood working in some kind of improvising context. It was only by taking up classical guitar that I really started to perform fully written work. To date, however, improvisation and classical guitar have been non-overlapping magisteria for me. I wonder if I can start to bridge the gap in my own playing?
I'll leave you, then, with one of Dyens' masterful improvisations. In the meantime, I've got some deadlines to which I must attend...
Really enjoyed the Dyens! I think my brining up Vygotsky was in relation to the fact that Yi was using the piano to expand her ZPD whereas I was trying to encourage her to use her voice and expand that by embracing, e.g. singing unaccompanied, not necessarily singing through whole songs. Looking at my notes I see I wrote that both Yi and Chaoran should push themselves within their own practices.
Very good to get that Bennett in there that is very useful for models and I think your interpretation of what you have done via him is right. It is a pity that you haven't been able to drawn Yi, Chaoran and Jingyi out further but it was not for want of trying. The reasons why (perhaps trying to move beyond cultural although that is likely to be important) would be worth reflecting on at some point.
Posted by: Tom Armstrong | May 28, 2022 at 06:21 PM