Quietudes: Week 2

Welcome back!

I am currently working on a two movement piece for solo piano that will be recorded within 8 weeks. The piece is called Quietudes and the goal for each movement is to emulate the style of two composers whose music I deeply connect with: John Adams and George Crumb, respectively. The first movement is called “Andromeda Fragments” and depicts constellations, while the second movement is called “Seafarer” and deals with the isolation of the deep sea.

This week, very little composing was actually done. I am working in crunch time on my Solo de Concours for clarinet and piano, which you can look forward to soon! I have a lot of difficulty actively composing two pieces at once, so while I made leaps of progress on the Solo, my work on Quietudes was relegated to score study - which is a very valuable thing! How am I to emulate the style of different composers without thoroughly studying their work first?

Here I am looking over the comically large score for Crumb’s Vox Balaenae at my favorite coffee shop, Black Crown Coffee Co. (where I do 99% of my work and am currently writing this entry!) The photo was taken by my very close friend Reason Meyer.

As I mentioned last week, George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae is a huge inspiration for movement 2 of my own work. (Yes, we’re discussing movement 2 first this week because I most certainly do not write my music in chronological order!) Crumb always explores such a wide range of sonic capabilities of the instruments he writes for, and the extended techniques he uses for piano in this work are myriad. Since inside-the-piano techniques are something I have used very sparingly in the past (only in After Midnight), it was important for me to really get a sense of what can be done safely before I really dig into the sketching/writing process for movement 2. Think of it as an artist assembling the colors on their palette before they begin a painting. Some techniques Crumb uses in this piece are perhaps too aggressive for my own work, such as glass rods placed on the strings, but I found several things that would work beautifully, such as:

Excerpt from Crumb’s Vox Balaenae, in which he asks the pianist to run their fingers along the low strings and create harmonics.

To explain the concept of harmonics in detail would take much longer than a brief blog post, but suffice it to say that they are accomplished by lightly touching the string at its midpoint before striking the corresponding key. The effect is a pitch much higher than the regularly struck pitch with a clear, “icy” tone color. I was fairly awestruck when I saw this notated in the score because this is a technique most commonly used on string instruments, and I have never encountered it in piano music. The effect is, in this composer’s opinion, awesome and I will certainly be exploring it.

On the other end of the spectrum, I looked at John Adams’ excellent solo piano work Phrygian Gates. Most of what I took away from this is the way he chooses to notate: with very, very long beams that blur where the beat is. This is roughly how I am notating the first movement of my work, but I am taking it a step further and writing entirely without barlines or meter. The effect is a sense of continuous motion, an endless sea of notes. Apt, I think, for a movement about the endlessness of space!

Excerpt from John Adam's’ Phrygian Gates. Ignore the shadow!

The biggest challenge I face is to maintain my own musical voice while trying to channel Adams and Crumb. A few weeks ago I spoke with composer Brian Petuch and something he said really stuck with me. He was discussing his love for the music of Pierre Boulez and that he used to beat himself up over the fact that his own music was considerably more accessible, “like microtonal pop music” he put it. But he learned to hone his own voice. “There’s no use being a second-rate Boulez impersonator.” So, I need to straddle to line between becoming a lazy impersonator of Adams and Crumb and incorporating elements of their music into my own while retaining my musical language. It’s a challenge I look forward to taking on.

Next week, I hope to finish movement one. It’s an ambitious goal, but feasible. We shall see…