Posts Tagged ‘Libby Larsen’

Extracting Parts: Not the Worst

Saturday, September 14th, 2019

I don’t know what the worst part about being a composer is (probably the rejection), but many of my colleagues feel that making parts out of a large-ensemble score is just about the worst. I disagree: with a change in attitude and correct workflow in your notation software, extracting parts doesn’t have to extract its pound of flesh, and it can even be joyful.

Joyful? you say. How can something that is just mechanical drudgery, a chore to be completed after the long slog of creating a score that looks halfway decent–essentially the creation of twenty to forty more little scores–how can that be joyful?

My answer lies in outlook: what is it that we are really doing when we create parts?

For me, the music I create is for people: for the people who will perform it, and for the people who will hear it. I don’t write it so that I can print a beautiful score, sit it on the shelf, and put the MIDI playback on while I sip a beverage. The music needs to go out there, mingle with performers and audiences, and in so doing allow all of us to have a conversation about something. Perhaps, as Libby Larsen says, about what it means to be alive (if I have done my job).

It can’t get out there without the parts. A score is great for the conductor, but we can’t hear it without the parts. Theorists and musicologists and other composers need the score, but for a performance to happen, we need parts (unless there is going to be a page turner for every musicianon stage).

When you are making parts, you are creating the material that will allow your music to come to life. You are creating the thing that will ultimately allow someone to bring your music to life. This isn’t a chore: this is the final link in the chain, and the musicians in the ensemble are honoring you by spending time with the parts you create. You need to honor their time and effort by giving them material that is clear and easy to work with. There is no music without the parts that you are about to create.

That’s the philosophy. Now, how do we manage workflow to make part extraction less painful? (I use Sibelius v. 6, so ymmv).

The approach I’ve found is that you actually do what composers started out doing at the dawn of polyphonic music: you start out by writing the parts. This doesn’t mean some Percy Grainger setup where you write thirty parts on thirty different pieces of paper, but it really isn’t far off.

I start with a short score (a debatable practice as I discovered recently on Twitter) as my first computerized step (these days, I do a fair amount of sketching at the piano with pencil and paper first). If I’m writing a band score, one staff for each instrument or even family: there will be three b-flat clarinet parts eventually, for example, but for right now they all go on one staff, if I’m writing a band piece. If it gets very polyphonic within the section, I may jump over another staff and make a note to myself. It’s still a sketch, after all.

The next step is crucial, and it’s something that honestly took me far too long to figure out. For many years, I left dynamics and articulations to the end phase of the process, but as I’m more comfortable and mature as a composer, I am more confident  deciding on these factors earlier on. The result is this: there is quite a bit of copy-and-paste in the next couple steps, so why not copy and paste all of those dynamics and articulations right along with the notes?

Having fleshed in the short score to the degree possible, and decided that I have essentially written the piece, it is time to create the parts. In Sibelius, I create a new instrument for every part I intend to have in the final version. Each instrument gets its own staff. This is crucial. Then, I copy and paste from my short score staves into the new instruments. The result is what I call my “ultrafull” score, but it really is all the parts, with one exception: every percussion instrument gets its own staff at this point.

I will admit to being less than confident as a percussion writer. You would think, that a few decades as a trombonist sitting in front of the percussion section, or as a conductor dealing with all manner of scores and solutions to printing parts for the percussion section, I would have a little better idea. The truth is that for some reason, I am intimidated by writing for percussion the same way that I am for guitar, or organ, or accordion. Other composers may be able to think of percussion much more integrally then I do, but it seems like I always get to the end of the sketching phase, and discover that I have bars and bars of rest for the percussion section, when they should be playing a much more active role.

The ultrafull score then, is the place where I rectify my percussion writing with reality. I hope that I have by this point determined just how many percussionists are available to me, and what instruments the commissioning group has in their closet. If not, it’s time for that conversation. On my most recent band composition, I had to spend some time whittling 6 percussion parts down to 5 after the director had a slight shortfall in the back row. Once I have exploded my short score to ultrafull, I have all the parts, since the next step is to render all the individual percussion instruments into the appropriate number of parts, playable by one musician each. I strongly recommend making a chart with color coding for each percussionist so that you can think about how long it takes to change instruments, and just how much work everyone in the section will have.

The next step, once I have my “score of parts” is to reduce parts onto the staves that I want to appear in the score. In Sibelius, I am going to keep all of my single instrument staves. Some of them will appear in the score, for example, there is usually only one piccolo part. If there are the typical two flute parts however, I will create a new flute instrument that will show both parts and will end up in the conductor’s score. I have to be pretty sure that I don’t want to make many changes at this point, and if I do, I need to make sure that I change both the single player staves and the full section staff, but Sibelius’ Arrange function makes it fairly quick to get more than one part on a staff. By paying close attention to where there are unisons, rhythmic unisons, or multi-rhythmic moments, I can work through the part fairly quickly, with a minimum of error. As the Arrange dialog box always suggests, it’s best not to try more than a few measures at a time. This is also the moment, when I add a2, divisi, or similar markings.

I will typically mute these combined scores in the Mixer window, so that my single instrument staves are the ones I hear on playback. This eliminates some of the clunkiness that happens when too many instruments are on the same note. Truth be told, I am still using Sibelius Sounds as it came out of the box, partly because I am a cheapskate and all of my equipment is old, and partly because of my maxim that if you can make it sound passably good in MIDI, there is an outside chance that it might sound good with human players. If I were better at audio, I might have a different approach here.

With the score staves muted, then, the next step is somewhat ironic. To make my full score, I now hide all the staves  that are actually playing back, i.e., the staves that will be my parts. (I typically do this using Focus on Staves in Sibelius.) The staves you hear are not the ones you see, and the staves you see are not the ones you hear! This means, that if say, 1st and 2nd clarinets are playing the same music, you hear two clarinets in the playback. Again, I don’t put a lot of stock in MIDI playback, but it’s an old habit that dies hard.

With the score finalized, that is, with the score staves visible and the part staves hidden, it is time to turn to the parts. I found an old score recently that I had created in Sibelius v2, and my score was in a folder with a bunch of other scores that represented the extracted parts. I know that I am not the only person whose workflow was revolutionized by the Dynamic Parts function of Sibelius, and to this day it is one of my favorite features of the program. It means that when it is time to create parts, all of my parts are right there with dynamics, with articulations, and basically ready to go. Remembering to set as many things in the Parts menu that will apply to everything as possible, it is just a matter of opening the part, checking the layout, making sure that page turns are sensible, finding those collisions that always sneak in, and creating a PDF.

I don’t want this post to sound too much like an advertisement for Sibelius, and I can’t really speak to Finale, which I haven’t used in 15 years, or Dorico, which I have never used. I have dabbled with Lilypond, and it seems like a similar process might be possible in that program. I consider myself to be a highly proficient user of Sibelius v6, but there are lots of nooks and crannies in that program that I have yet to explore. What I can say, is that I started with an ultrafull score this morning at about 7 a.m., made a few final corrections to it, and then started extracting parts. By 10:30a.m., I had 35 parts saved as PDF files for a 4-minute concert band piece. Tomorrow, I will give them a final proofread, and then send them off. Making them was a little bit tedious, and I was glad to take a break to make breakfast for myself and my kids, but it all went very smoothly in the end. Within a month, the commissioning band will be reading from the parts I created this morning, and my goal of bringing a new piece of music to a fantastic group of people, some whom I have known for years, and some who will be playing my music for the first time, will have again been accomplished.

 

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A View of Twenty Views, part 2

Thursday, February 2nd, 2017

In February, I will be travelling to Atlanta, where I will give the premiere performance of the complete Twenty Views of the Trombone at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery, at the invitation of Olivia Kieffer.  This is the second in a series of posts about that piece and how it has come to be what it is.

Read the first post, on the history of this piece’s composition so far, here.

I performed Twenty Views of the Trombone in October 2013 on a concert of the Cleveland Composers Guild.  At that time, it was still a work in progress, with only eight or nine pieces complete, but you can listen to that performance here.

The premiere performance will be Friday, February 17 at 8pm at Eyedrum.  Admission is $7 at the door.

I will be tweeting using the handle @MattSComposer before, during, and after this process.  Join the conversation with #twentyviews–the final post in this series will be a Q&A, so send me your questions about the piece, or composing, or life in general, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Twenty short pieces is a lot to keep track of, even for the person who is writing and performing them.  I’m not completely sure how to keep the audience on track–perhaps they should open their phones to this blog during the performance!

At any rate, here are my thoughts on the first seven pieces, in the order in which I am currently planning to play them at the premiere.

1. What It’s Like

This is the piece that started it all.  The title is deliberately incomplete: the full statement is “What It’s Like to Play Trombone.”  Every idea behind Twenty Views, musical or otherwise, grows out of this one-minute sketch from 2009, first performed at Jan Hus Church in New York City in March 2009 on a Vox Novus Composer’s Voice concert organized by David Morneau, with a preview the month before on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  I had been out of graduate school less than two  years at that point, and I hear quite clearly my style from that period.  There are distinct resemblances to my graduation piece for orchestra, Five Rhythmic Etudes, especially the first movement, “Hobnob.”  Thirty-seven measures of mixed meter, an essentially pentatonic approach, and is it in the key of A?  Possibly.  I tried to write a piece that was comfortable, humorous, and light-hearted, and I think I succeeded.  I also succeeded in creating a piece that was exactly one minute in length, and this was useful a year or so later when I arranged it for orchestra to enter in Vox Novus’ call for scores for 60×60 Orchestra.  It was selected, but that project has yet to come to fruition, so the amplified version of this piece has yet to be performed.  Luckily, I amplified What It’s Like in another way: the final piece of Twenty Views of the Trombone, “What It’s Really Like,” is an expansion of the first piece.  I don’t know what “official” order I will eventually settle on for these pieces, but I do know that “What It’s Like” will be first, and “What It’s Really Like” will be last.  Any partial performance should begin (and always has) with “What It’s Like” and end with “What It’s Really Like.”

One idea that I incorporate in Twenty Views of the Trombone is synecdoche.  I didn’t start out thinking this way, but as the movements accumulated, it turned out that there were some opportunities for pieces to represent parts of a whole.  (The phrase All hands on deck is a synecdoche because the word hands substitutes for entire human beings).  Thus, “What It’s Like” is a synecdoche both for “What It’s Really Like,” and, in a way, for Twenty Views as a whole, and for the entire experience of playing the trombone or listening to trombone music, or for the experience of life.   Libby Larsen said that music tells us something about “what it’s like to be alive,” and there is that sense in the title as well.  As Twenty Views of the Trombone came together over the years, I found that in many ways it was a piece about my life–I have played trombone for most of my life, after all, and my love for doing that has determined the course of my life.

2. What It Once Was Like (I)

Also from 2009, as I began to expand upon “What It’s Like.”  First performed on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and then premiered formally at an Oklahoma Composers Association Salon concert in the fall of 2009, alongside three other movements, and, again, Let Everything That Has Breath Praise the Lord.  This is the first of several backward-looking pieces–in this case to my studies with Tony Chipurn at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in the mid-1990s.  It begins with an interval–Bb3 up to Gb4–familiar to any trombonist as the first two notes of Alexandre Guilmant’s Morceau Symphonique.  

3. What It Could Be Like (I)

The third piece that I presented for the Oklahoma Composers Association in 2009.  The “What It Could Be Like” pieces envision the future–specifically, life after death.  As a Christian, I accept salvation, but more on that later.  This piece envisions the mind fading away into nothingness as the brain fires off a last few electro-chemical bursts.  Marked Sempre rallentando e diminuendo, it is written in free rhythm, and calls for the Harmon mute, which has me greatly concerned, as I’m not sure how to safely get my mutes from Cleveland to Atlanta on a commercial airliner.

4. What One Philistine Thinks It’s Like

First performance at Eyedrum in February. From the sublime to the ridiculous, then.  I don’t know if I should call the method for playing this piece an “extended technique.”  There are plenty of people who choose not to understand what it is that musicians do.  This is a reminiscence about one of them, and something of an inside joke between my wife and me.

5. What It Sounds Like When the Philistines Talk About What It’s Like

First performance at Eyedrum in February.  I am an expert in the field of music.  Over the years there have been many ways in which people have said things about playing the trombone to me that, if they only knew what they were saying, they probably wouldn’t have said.  Am I an elitist snob?  Probably, but no more so than anyone who involves himself deeply in some area of endeavor who then has to speak to people about it outside the field.  I try not to be a jerk about it.  This piece explores what I’ve heard from people–most well-meaning, some not–over the years, starting in the 1980s, when everyone I met seemed to mention Glenn Miller.  This is the first piece in the cycle to employ spoken word, something I have been thinking about for quite some time, since I heard Dan Trueman’s doctoral composition recital in college in which the Amernet String Quartet spoke a somewhat Dadaist text.  I incorporated a “commercial” with a narrator in my clarinet concerto Daytime Drama in 2011, but the use of speech in these pieces is somewhat different–perhaps as a shorthand for musical expression, since these are short pieces.  Perhaps a better composer would not require such recourse.

6. What I Thought It Would Be Like (I)

First performance at Eyedrum in February.  A short piece as a sort of march with lots of 16th notes.  You enter a career with certain expectations, and sometimes those are met, and sometimes they aren’t.  This piece isn’t not what being a trombonist has turned out to be (especially since it has turned out that I am playing this piece), but it isn’t exactly it, either.  It would be more fun if more trombone music were like this, but it would also be much more stressful.  Woe to the trombonist who would write music for himself to play.

7. What It’s Like When I’m Working (Aubade)

First performance at Eyedrum in February.  As a father of young children, the solution to my need for a set composing schedule over the last two years has been met (somewhat) satisfactorily by getting up an hour before everyone else.  This works because I compose at the computer and can do so in silence.  It then becomes a race between my ability to keep working and not get distracted by email or social media, and my children’s desire to awaken seemingly earlier every day (my daughter is stirring right now…).  So, the piece begins with a warm-up, and just as it seems to get started, it has to stop.

This is the second of a short series of posts about Twenty Views of the Trombone.  The first post gave an overview of the history of the composition of the piece, and next posts will continue to discuss the individual pieces and serve as a program note.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 9, first movement

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

Of the nine Mahler symphonies, the Ninth is probably the one I come to with the least familiarity.  I’ve never seen it in concert, and I’ve never had reason before to really listen to it.  It is, I’m finding, a very different animal than what comes before, although in many ways, it is a culmination of some trends that really began with the Seventh symphony.

Like the Seventh, there is significantly less clarity of formal structure as motive becomes more and more important.  I’m reminded of Schoenberg’s assertion that motive is what composition really is about—creating a motive and then following its logical developments until a composition is worked out.  Only a few years after Mahler’s Ninth, we begin to encounter works like Schoenberg’s Pierrot, in which motive becomes the music, comprising melody, harmony and rhythm, or Erwartung, which takes a very different motivic approach, giving only exposition, never repetition over the course of a one-act opera.  Only fifteen years after Mahler’s death, Schoenberg devised dodecaphony, which was yet another effort to allow motive to determine all aspects of musical content.

There is, then, a tautness to Mahler’s Ninth that was missing from the Eighth.  The Eighth was motivically conceived, of course, but also had such a sprawling nature, such a blend of instruments, voices and text that it was probably impossible for Mahler to focus on the motivic aspects of the composition.  A text that expresses what the last scene of Faust tries to express cannot be contained in just a few motivic ideas, as Mahler correctly divined.  Both are great works, and thrilling in their way, but I remain skeptical as to whether the Eighth is really a Symphony in more than name.

If I might dwell, then, before entering into specifics, upon what actually makes a symphony.  Chuck Berry sang:

I got no kicks against modern jazz, /Unless they try to play it too darn fast, /And change the rhythm of the melody, /Until it sounds just like a symphony.

 Of course, Berry didn’t mean an actual symphony, but rather the technically driven, studied approach that jazz was coming to acquire in his era—the era of Miles Davis and other practitioners of “Cool Jazz”—in juxtaposition to the raw, often deliberately unschooled approach to rock’n’roll of his day.  But what does it mean to sound “just like a symphony?” 

When I first encountered Robert Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale, I found myself wondering why he didn’t just write a slow movement and have a “complete” symphony, since I was by that time aware that a symphony had four movements in a certain order.  But then composers such as Schumann, Sibelius and Barber also felt able to compose single-movement symphonies, and history turns out to be replete with examples of symphonies that lack a fourth movement or have “extra” movements.  In the end, what is the symphonic concept?  What makes a composition for orchestra (or for band, as the ever-insistent voice of Rodney Winther reminds me) into a symphony?   Some aspects I think are important:

  • Instrumental.  This is probably a basic requirement, and it doesn’t omit all non-symphonies, although it does omit, or threaten to omit, many pieces with the title “Symphony.”  Is Beethoven’s Ninth, with its choral finale a symphony by this definition?  There is great music in its first three movements, but these act as prelude, really, to the cantata that is the last movement.  I’m not certain that a piece with voices can truly be a symphony, but I know that they aren’t required.  In fact, they sometimes undermine the symphonic ideal, at least to my thinking.  The fact remains that as much as we are musical beings, we are also verbal beings, and the marriage of text to music is always an uneven match.  Text, if we understand the language, wears the pants, so to speak, and will almost always compete successfully for the attention of most listeners.  Even the most vapid lyrics seem to win this contest.  Thus, to me, the symphonic concept is inherently instrumental.
  • Relative equality of parts.  As a trombonist, I have rested through much more symphonic music than I have played, of course, but Brahms’ First would not be complete without the trombone chorale in the fourth movement.  In that sense, the trombones are equal in importance to the other instruments, and no part can be disposed with.  That chorale could have been played by horns or bassoons, but not without a change in color and thus in character.  The appearance of a color that has been held in reserve through the first three movements is a profound and noble moment, and as the saying goes, there are no small parts, only small actors.  However, in a concerto, one part is inherently more important than all the others, and in works titled Concerto for Orchestra, or similar names, it is again the virtuosity of the players that is on display rather than the composer’s ability to make a profound statement.  Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra is not a symphony because, although I think there are messages about life in it, it is mostly about the ability of players to perform music written idiomatically for their instruments.
  • Plumbing the depths.  As Libby Larsen said, composition is about telling someone else through music what it is like to be alive.  Just as large-scale formats in other arts—mural, novel, film—put on display the understanding of the auteur of the human condition, the symphony tells us about human experience from the point of view of the composer, and, in the best moments, from the point of view of the musicians who perform the piece.  Is this present in the earliest pieces called “symphony?”  Perhaps, but it is difficult to know at 200 years’ remove.  Certainly in Mozart’s later symphonies and Haydn’s later symphonies, we get a glimpse of this, and of course it is Beethoven who forced composers to rethink the symphonic concept.  The Soviet Nicholas Miaskovsky composed over a thousand numbered symphonies—he was less writing about his life than writing for it, though, and one must wonder whether such pieces should be considered “symphonic” in their conception.  Again, it is not a difficult thing to write four movements in a symphonic pattern, particularly in a Common Practice style, but to pour one’s heart and soul and communicate to all who can play or listen on a meaningful level is a much greater challenge.  We mustn’t discount happiness and cheerfulness, though.  While there is pain and struggle and anguish in the world, a great symphony can also be filled with light—Sibelius’ Fifth, perhaps, or Dvorak’s Eighth, or much of Mendelssohn.  If one actually is happy, and filled with joy, it is probably one’s artistic duty to compose music that recognizes the value of this, an idea almost forgotten in our world of desires and causes and political statements.
  • Internal unity.  Simply writing four pieces on a related concept or program does not a symphony make.  No one would confuse Holst’s Suites for Military Band for symphonies despite their musical worthiness.  In the Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz wisely fuses the five movements through internal self-reference—the idée fixe.   With no knowledge of the program, these five pieces would seem to hang together, as do the movements in Mahler’s symphonies, because in the best symphonic writing, the number of movements is, in the end, less crucial than the way those movements are connected.  Schumann recognized this and did not try to claim the Overture, Scherzo and Finale as a symphony.  The movements of a symphony must follow one another without apology and without explanation.  They must be inevitable.  They must be as different speakers making the same point, “good-cop, bad-cop,” as it were.  Composers use harmony, melody, motive, scoring—all the tools at their disposal—to achieve this.  The sonic world of Brahms’ Second Symphony cannot be confused with that of the Third, and Mahler’s world in the Seventh Symphony is a distinctly different one from the Ninth.
  • Commitment to purpose and purposeful excellence.  A true symphony is a serious, heartfelt gesture intended to be the best work of a mature composer, written without constraints of mediocre performers and looking to the future.  It is likely to be experimental in some regard, although the experimentation is less likely to be in the realm of compositional or instrumental technique than in the realm of expressive capacity.  Just as a good pianist will test and probe the potential of an unfamiliar instrument, a true symphonic composer attempts to determine just how her ideas about existence can best be communicated through sound.  A symphony is not a one-off, but rather the core of an artist’s musical expression.  Yes, at the age of 34, I have still not written a symphony, for many reasons, but I feel that I must first master certain aspects of compositional technique, some of which are approached through this study.  A symphony should lie at the core of my oeuvre in retrospect, and given my social milieu, the opportunities that have and may come my way and my personal style, I may not be a symphonist, or there may be in the end only one symphony in me—perhaps a better situation, as how can one write such a summative piece twice?!

And now, 1500 words into this post, I have not even made a single specific reference to the piece at hand—if this were an assignment in one of my classes, I would fail myself!  But the assignment I’ve given myself is to figure out how to grow as a composer:   I hope to one day be a symphonist, or at least write large-scale music, which I have determined are not necessarily the same thing.  I am learning what I need to learn from Mahler, and my listening and score-study project is yielding fruit, if in unexpected ways.  My score is filled with notes on Mahler’s work, and I refer myself to it for future reference, but why shouldn’t this summative work, written by a man at the peak of his personal powers of musical technique and expression, elicit from me a summative sort of response, albeit slightly early?  If you’re dying for specifics, check out the strange interlude of regular formal rhythm—four-bar phrases—that begin in m. 148 and precede and follow an otherwise nearly complete lack of regularity in this regard.  Also, Mahler’s layering approach to this movement reminds me of some of Sibelius’ music—I don’t know whether there was cross-fertilization there.

Onward!  Keep fighting mediocrity!

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