Music compositional update: on concerti and symphonies

 

As I continue checking off various compositional goals (most of which are piano-related), I periodically like to take stock of my overall portfolio to date, which includes pieces completed, pieces in progress, and pieces that I would like to write but haven’t begun yet. A fourth category includes a vague idea of what I hope to write but not only haven’t begun but haven’t even conceptualized. Concerti and symphonies headline this list. Now, before I proceed in explaining this further, let me throw in a disclaimer: when I was in high school and college, I in fact wrote quite a few such pieces, and in many of these instances I’m speaking about completed pieces, notationally speaking. So why would I include these “completed” pieces as part of a category I describe as “not only not begun but not conceptualized”? I do so because, while these are completed pieces, I also wrote them in high school, before I had received any formal compositional training, and also had written them exclusively on my music notation software instead of by hand and without having researched some important things about the instruments for which I was writing.

One other thing I notice about my compositional portfolio to date is that, categorically speaking, the vast majority of the pieces written fall into one of three categories: 1.) solo piano works (including sonatas, sonatinas, suites, and standalone pieces); 2.) choir compositions (both a cappella and with organ); 3.) lyricked pop songs (with Biblical text, with non-Biblical-but-otherwise-Christian-inspired text, and with outright secular text). I have recently been building out my instrumental-ensemble portfolio, but even then these are single-movement pieces, consistent with how things work in the jazz genre.

I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this story before on the blog, but it is good to repeat (I wrote the below on June 23, 2019, with a few modifications for today’s post):

The short story: I believe that God may have told me “write Me a symphony.”

I believe that God sometimes speaks to me through license plates. Sometimes. On March 4, 2019, I saw a license plate that read “SYMFONY.” Unfortunately, I do not remember the context, in terms of what my conversation with God was at that moment while driving. And, to be fair, that license plate could have been referring to anything: “write Me a symphony,” “go audition for a symphony,” or simply referring to the fact that the owner of that car works for the symphony. I don’t know. What I do know is this: I decided to take the plunge and began sketching out a symphonic movement. I don’t yet know if this is a first movement, a second movement, or a third movement. (Or even a fourth!) Given that this particular document is simply a sketch at this moment, it is at best “a” movement.

In 2011, I wrote a 2000s-style piano pop/rock song titled “Blessing in Disguise.” As of today, that song has not made it past the “composed but never recorded” stage (and considering that this was a secular song that only briefly referenced God once or twice, it will likely stay that way). In 2014, I decided to take the chords (the only part of that song that I really liked, anyway) and turn it into a solo piano ballad of a piece. I eventually found myself writing a brand-new melody, and soon with it, new sections. It was like I had found an old wineskin that still had some life in it, and I made new wine with it! Then, after a couple of recordings, one at home, and a second at a friend’s house, the sketch went back into storage, and waited. And waited. And waited.

Reviving this sketch a third time was my first logical choice when I felt the prompting to begin sketching this symphony. In 2019 I didn’t consider myself all that good at creating new material in a short amount of time, let alone enough to write a symphonic movement, and so my fallback was typically to delve back into my storage unit of musical ideas that I had sketched and compiled over the years. In the sketch that I’ve completed to date are the Exposition and the Recapitulation, with both T1 (Tonal Area 1) and T2 (Tonal Area 2) completed, which gave me the opportunity to combine my sketches from both the original grapevine that is “Blessing in Disguise,” as well as the stem that is the reconstruction in 2014 as a solo piano ballad, and figure out to stretch these ideas so as to take up a reasonable-length symphonic movement.

 

For context, these aforementioned sketches were created right before I went through my worst compositional drought (although, to be fair, I was well on my way there by this point). Since then, the only thing I’ve sketched out is a super-basic set of sketches for the intro and first tonal area of the exposition for a blues-structured piano concerto.

But back when I was in high school, I notated sketches for two symphonies, one complete piano concerto, and fragments of another two piano concerti, plus a third that I’m intending to convert into a saxophone concerto (the middle movement features the saxophone prominently, while the first movement seems to not be able to make up its mind as to whether it is a symphonic movement or a piano concerto).

In college, that output dropped. Among other things, my professors challenged me to write smaller-ensemble compositions and allowed me only to write one large-ensemble piece (which was the requirement for the highest-level composition class before the rest of this part of the major was moved to lessons). It did give me good training grounds for how to write for other types of ensembles, including using the “short score” approach, which would ultimately bear fruit beginning my band years during the 2010s.

Aside from life events and from my more immediate goals of completing piano sonatas and 6-to-8-person band pieces, the other main stumbling block with symphonies has to do with the question of how big and complicated do I want the ensemble to be? As I listen to Baroque-era pieces, particularly by Johann Sebastian Bach, or Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, or even Johann Christian Bach, I’m finding that one blessing of having a much smaller orchestra is that it places more of a premium on tightness of rhythm and tempo, which is not too different from jazz and rock ensembles today (which, because of experience, I have a greater comfort level with them). Similarly, both types of ensembles rely heavily on a consistent bass line throughout (with jazz’s upright bass or rock’s bass guitar merely continuing the role of the Baroque-era basso continuo but with the help of a modern rhythm section), which I find I like a lot. Although I see myself likely to preserve the large-orchestra structure in the symphonic pieces I’ve already written, I could also see myself over the long term preferring a smaller orchestra, if for no other reason than not having to worry about writing parts for all 100-plus different instruments or whatnot.

One other thing I might point out is that, in this post-COVID era, people have tended to prefer a downsized orchestra, either for reasons of medical concern or even financial.

I’ll close this post with a positive note: I had to dig up the binder with the printed-out, partially completed short score of that symphonic movement sketched in 2019 to write out the notes from the first page. This led to my starting to review the music and to hearing it in my head again. As a result, ideas began popping into my head as to how to write the development. This is exciting, and I hope to be able to put pencil to paper soon on this. I also know that I must balance all my obligations, especially unto the Lord; as such, I may not be able to follow through as quickly on this as I would like. But I just wanted to mention a gratitude that, unlike in 2019, ideas have been coming more easily to me than they used to. Praise the Lord for that!