Solitudes: Weeks 4-6
Well.
What an interesting couple of weeks it’s been. I hope everyone is staying safe, sane, and especially home! Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a two movement piece for solo piano that I had hoped to record professionally with a pianist friend of mine. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic essentially halting everything, the recording will most likely have to wait. I am not giving up, though! I hope there will be a way to make it work, but as for now my goal with the piece is to finish and submit it to publication by April 29th. You may notice I have changed the name from Quietudes to Solitudes for reasons which will become apparent when you listen to the recording at the end of this post!
My composition studio while confined to my house during the pandemic - I thought it would be nice to give an idea of the space I’m working in!
I had hoped to finish the first movement in the last week, but I hit a little (giant) snag - much of what I had written was unplayable. It is not uncommon for me to get slightly carried away with what I am writing, and thankfully my composition teacher Yuanyuan He caught it before it was too late to restructure the entire piece. Unfortunately, I did have to retool much of what I had written, which means I could not make forward progress on the movement. This process meant I spent a lot of time at the piano working out the fingerings as a performer would and trying to make it doable while retaining as much of my original intention as possible. Luckily, there were few sections that I had to change completely. Most of the edits were moving notes from the left hand to the right or changing what beat a chord lands on. Ultimately, it is disheartening to have to compromise on what I have written, but playability cannot be sacrificed for the sake of “artistic vision.”
An excerpt from the piece before my edits - the left hand part had too many leaps which would have been impossible to execute at the written tempo.
The revised version of the same passage - unfortunately, some of my engraving work was undone by this, so I will have to go through again and engrave carefully. As you can see, much of it remains intact, but the difference in playability is night and day. Even for myself (not a pianist), I could play this version much faster and with ease than how I initially notated it.
The past few weeks have proved very difficult for all of us. Performers are losing gigs and composers like myself are having performances of our works cancelled. It is a necessary evil, but it is difficult to find inspiration to write, practice, and create music when future performances are so uncertain. But, I’ve been trying to continue working to restore as much of a sense of normalcy as possible. My work on this piece halted for a few days as I was trying to just adjust to how different things have become, but I am confident in saying I am back on track. I can finally say that I will actually likely be able to finish movement 1 in the next week. After that comes movement 2, and a completely different kind of compositional challenge…
Stay safe, everyone!
Here is a quick video of what engraving a piece actually looks like - with an excerpt of the MIDI recording of the piece! Enjoy.