Quietudes: Week 3
Hello again!
If you are new to this blog, I am chronicling my weekly progress on my current work-in-progress, a two-movement piano piece called Quietudes. Each movement is an homage to composers I admire: John Adams and George Crumb. When the piece is finished, I will be working with pianist Brice Kimble to record them professionally!
Last week, I mentioned that I hoped to finish the first movement though that was an ambitious goal. And alas, an ambitious goal it was, and it was not met. Still, I did make progress on the piece despite most of my creative energy being spent on my Solo de Concours (I wrote a whopping 100 measures on that piece last week), which is now finished! In the coming weeks I will only be focusing on this and my wind quintet, so I hope to make more headway on both.
An excerpt from movement one with hidden (greyed out) objects visible, before I cleaned everything up. There is a whole lot of ugliness in the background of pristine-looking sheet music!
This week I want to discuss the engraving process, because it is a much more important and time consuming aspect of composition than many realize. Engraving is the process of making scores look as professional, clear, and concise to the performer as possible. Above is an example of a passage before I took the time to fix spacing errors, etc. The barlines everywhere, random rests, and spacing issues come about when trying to notate a piece like this with no barlines and continuous beams. Here is the same passage, after the clutter has been tidied:
It still isn’t perfect, but hopefully this looks much cleaner to the eye. Before sending the performer the piece, I will be even more meticulous with the spacing between each note in the left hand. They should all be exactly equal!
My biggest challenge this week, as always, was managing my creative energy, and I’m disappointed to say I did not get as much done on this piece as I had hoped. Balancing performance and composition is tough and requires not just time management, but also energy management. I can set aside time to compose and practice each day but if I’ve spent a few hours of focused practice on clarinet in addition to chamber and orchestra rehearsals, I can sometimes sit down at a piano or a Sibelius file to compose and have nothing at all to express. In these moments, however, progress can still be made. Engraving takes little artistic energy, so it can be a great way to make progress on a work without actually writing a large amount.
Next week is my spring break, which means I can plan to finish the first movement and likely will actually achieve it. Until then, enjoy this brief video of me trying (and failing) to play some of what I have written on this piece.
As you can see, I am not the best pianist in the world.