There’s Nothing More Inspirational Than A Deadline
In early January, 2016, I woke up confronted with a blizzard and a choice. In late 2015, I had contacted the head of a student-led modern music ensemble on campus about writing a piece for the student-composer concert in the spring. I submitted an old sketch I had written a few months prior for a string sextet as a model for what I was hoping to write. I liked some of the musical ideas I had had in the sketch, but as a piece of music it was long and unfocused, lacking the coherent structure that would make it a truly enjoyable piece of music.
I did not hear anything for most of break, which were long at my alma mater, and winter breaks especially could be five weeks—too long in my opinion. When the blizzard arrived, I was preparing to return to school the succeeding day, having heard nothing back and having composed nothing myself. By now I assumed I was not composing for the ensemble, not wanting to begin working on a piece without knowing its future. To my surprise, I received an email in response to my initial December correspondence with the attached sketch, to the effect of, “this looks great!”
It did not look great, for reasons I have already mentioned. So I could do one of three things: 1) I could just clean up the sketch a little, smooth out its rough edges, and be done with it. 2) I could drop the matter entirely, and ask that the sketch not be performed since by this point in time I had little confidence in it as a piece of music. 3) I try to write something entirely new in the next 24 to 48 hours. Option 1 was off the table, and option 2 I could always revisit in case option 3 did not work out.
With that in mind, I set to work. In the preceding months, I had been particularly transfixed by Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, or Transfigured Night, a string sextet translation of the poem of the same name by the German poet Richard Dehmel. I originally became familiar with it through a recording by Hebert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, since Schoenberg revised and transcribed it later in his career for orchestra. Schoenberg is perhaps most famous for his “Twelve Tone Technique” towards composing atonal music, and his atonal compositions. Transfigured Night is not atonal, and more in line with the late Romanticism of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, fluidly shifting from key to key.
Strauss was also a major inspiration, particularly his Metamorphosen, which he composed at the end of his life in the late 1940s, and is in a similarly romantic vein to the Schoenberg piece. Additionally, I wanted to experiment with a chord progression I had come across in both the end of the fourth movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s second string quartet (listen from 8:40 on in the link) and throughout The Ecstasy of Gold by Ennio Morricone from the movie The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I liked how it felt differently heroic than the what one might normally associate with heroic-sounding music.
The very beginning of the resulting piece that emerged over the course of the next 36 hours I will admit to borrowing from Schoenberg—opening the piece with sustained low notes in the cello, establishing both the key and the tempo, though from there the resemblance more or less ceases. Instead, I experimented by building chords over the repeated cello, creating an ambient texture that felt like it belonged in a documentary about outer space.
While working on the ambient opening, I decided to use a melody I had written in early December and done nothing with, and a slow theme I first used in the original sketch and wanted to feature more prominently. The early December melody is quicker and more dramatic than the opening ambient section, while the slow theme from the sketch is darker and more heroic. I wrote out both melodies into the music notation software I had on my computer, and then returned to the ambient section, taking it as far as I could. I also had no transition yet between these two sections.
Between staring at my computer screen and taking breaks to stare at the snow dancing outside my window, I lost myself in writing the sextet for the next day and a half until I had finished a full draft from start to finish. In one of the bigger surprises of composing during a sustained period, I nearly tried to leave what would become my finale in the middle of my piece, before realizing that it was just the right burst of energy I wanted to tie everything together.
The piece, which I would later title The Voyage, had a coherent structure, a major improvement over the original sketch. It was nothing elaborate—slow ambient section first, fast section second, a reprise and extension of the first section, and a coda based on a transition material. Although I made some changes and revisions to the piece over the next few weeks, the overarching construction remained the same. Most of it was fleshing out musical lines here and there, either making transitions more graceful, or altering rhythms (particularly in the more ambient section) so there was a steady pulse for the players to follow.
Although I was, and remain, proud of the sextet as it was premiered, it still feels unfinished to me. There are sections that, when played, feel too busy to the point of sounding unintentionally cacophonous. The real solution to this involves being honest—ideally I would like to re-orchestrate and re-write The Voyage for a full orchestra—which is why I pushed the instrumentation in certain sections to sound like something larger than it was actually written for. Additionally, it also means I need to be better aware of the practical and technical difficulties of the instruments I write for, in this case strings. I can address this primarily through simply writing more, and maybe not starting so close to a deadline next time.
