Solitudes: Week 8
Hello again, and welcome to week eight! I hope everyone is staying safe and indoors. If you are new to this blog, I have been chronicling the composing process of a two movement work for piano solo, entitled Solitudes. When the piece is completed (by April 28th), I intend to submit it for publication.
Last week, I completed the first movement, “Andromeda Fragments.” I still need to do one final editing process on it, but I expect very little change in the musical content. With this hurdle leaped, this past week I shifted my focus to the very different challenge of the second movement, “Seafarer.” Movement one had a lot of notes and constant motion, so each individual note was less important to me than the gesture they were creating. This second movement is an entirely different beast, however.
My early sketches for the second movement.
It is influenced by the work of George Crumb, so everything is much sparser and I intend to be much pickier with the micro aspect of things. Crumb’s music also relies heavily on extended techniques (I discussed this at length in week two), which I have yet to explore with any depth thus far in my career. Because of this venture into uncharted territory (the title is quite fitting, I suppose), this week was spent just trying to come up with a plan of attack for this thing. Above are sketches of ideas; I know I want to open with slow glissandi over the low strings and plucking on the upper strings. This will be contrasted with a gesture something like the following:
These specific pitches/rhythms will likely not remain in the finished product, but I know I will use a 3 against 2 rhythmic pattern to blur the beat, and base the pitch content in pentatonicism.
Crumb’s music tends to be very sectional; he’ll present a short gesture outright, move to something else, and then probably come back to the first idea and dance between the two. That is the structure I plan on using in this movement, dancing between the mysterious opening idea with extended techniques and the second, more lyrical idea.
I think I have enough planned out to really start diving into the piece this coming week, but so far it has been very challenging. I initially planned on writing much of it at a grand piano where I could actually experiment with the extended techniques, but because of our current situation that cannot happen. So, much of the extended techniques in the movement will have to be written with only my conception of what it will actually sound like. It’s a fascinating challenge, and one I look forward to confronting this week…
Some conceptual ideas for how to notate this movement.