Parts of Ten

On a roll from my last piece, I decided I liked working with a more orchestral palate and went browsing through my files for an old idea to play with.  I found a piece I had originally started in Logic 9 (so it had to be at least four years old) and spent the next month building on its stem to create this short piece for chamber ensemble.



The original bit was nominally for ten pianos, but that was simply out of the happenstance of messing about with grand piano samples and having come up with ten short loops that all fit together.  I had really liked the motifs and how they summed together, but at the time didn't really know where to go with them, thus mothballing the project for a future date.  Upon review, the collection seemed ripe for orchestration, so I went through each voice and assigned instrument samples according to what I auralized each one to be.  The resulting ensemble was comprised of flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, marimba, piano, violin, viola, and 'cello.

The main challenge, though, was to figure out where to go with the basic loops.  The piece was written in a syncopated 9/8 and, after much experimentation, I decided to build sections out of subsequently reduced time signatures:  8/8, 7/8, and finally 5/8.  I skipped 6/8 mostly because I couldn't come up with any interesting syncopations; everything ended up being some version of either 2x3 or 3x2.  Next, because all my original motifs were confined to the octave and below middle C, I widened the original pitch range of the piece to take advantage of the highs and lows of the expanded ensemble.  There's a longer story here, but the short version is that this basic rule of orchestration ended up resolving a problem I've had for a long time:  why much of what I write sounds muddy.  It was embarrassing that I had not remembered this principle from my years of music theory and being a symphonic musician, but, well, there it is.  The rest of the composition process involved creating variations of the original loops in shorter meters and experimenting with how these new versions fit together.

The piece has almost no intentional vertical structure.  Although it is "in" two sharps and phrases and motifs tend to come down on D, E, or G, it has no key center as such.  Although I studied and understand verticality in music (chords, harmony, tonality, etc.), it has never been intuitive for me; put it down to being a violist rather than a pianist or guitarist.  Something I came to appreciate while writing this, however, is that that doesn't really matter, at least for the purpose of creating music.  Nearly all contemporary Western music -- whether it's jazz, pop, folk, or what we think of as "classical" art music -- is fundamentally based on vertical structure and highly vertically organized, so I've had this sense all my adult life that I "should" make my music that way.  But I never have.  It's always been linear, always about where a given part is going rather than the harmonic context it creates.  Of course, once you have more than one line, harmony is a necessary consequence, but, for me, trying to write lines based on how they stack up has always felt labored and I end up making very stiff and uninteresting music.  In this piece, I found myself able to surrender to a horizontal orientation and discovered that the happy vertical accidents that arose from that were far more interesting than anything I could make on purpose.  I plan on continuing in that vein (sic) in the future.

I also learned more about making expressive orchestral music on a computer.  Some things are far easier on a computer than with live musicians:  if, in the midst of a rehearsal, I realize that two sections should trade structures, making that experiment with an in-person ensemble would be impossible, but on the computer, it's just cut-and-paste.  On the other hand, dynamic expression and intragroup balance with musicians is as simple as saying "more clarinet there, please" or "as legato as possible in the viola, please."  Getting a computer to do the same thing, though, requires hours of tweaking velocity and volume parameters -- and that's assuming that the dynamic resolution of the sampled instrument is deep and fine enough to make the subtle changes you're seeking.  In the end, though, I'm essentially pleased with the result; the casual listener can hear enough of what I intended to get the idea and I learned enough to feel more confident in whatever my next project might be.

Technical notes:  This piece was written and performed in Ableton Live 10 Suite using their Orchestral Strings, Orchestral Woodwinds, Orchestral Mallets, and Grand Piano sample packs and Valhalla VintageVerb for concert hall reverb effects.