Settling the Scores

Well, all of my scores for this first major project have been submitted, and it is with a sigh of relief/exhaustion that I can put them to rest. Of course, as soon as they're submitted, I hear things that I would like to fix or change, but that's probably par for the course.

Since my 3rd song has not actually finished when I presented it class last week, I decided that I would spend some of the final week working on that song itself, before polishing all 3 into a final score. Of course, I ended up taking the whole week and then some, leaving the tiniest sliver to time to get the score for it done up.

The 3rd song is easily my favorite at this point, and is the longest and most developed. Perhaps that's because I effectively had twice as long to work on it as any other song. To be honest, the endings of the others (and even still this one to some extent) feel very rushed to me. Basically, I can feel the song naturally continuing for quite a bit longer, but I was running out of time, so I had to put some sort of an ending there. I'd hoped to go back and expand them this week, but it turned out that I didn't have time then, either.

This is the first time I've ever composed anything under any sort of a deadline and it's been a bit of a learning experience. I find it very hard to feel that I'm 'finished' with anything on any sort of a timeline. Some pieces come quickly, and some take a long time of shuffling notes around before I'm satisfied that it is complete. Most real world deadlines are obviously not as flexible as one's muse, and sometimes (frequently?) will necessitate one being finished with a piece before you really feel it's finished. I guess composers who do this sort of thing for a living (like writing soundtracks or something) need to learn to make peace with this, since they're always operating under this kind of constraint.

Fortunately, a couple days ago I discovered a way to coerce Sibelius into importing midis in a more or less unbroken fashion. Certainly less broken than my attempts on previous weeks, where it seemed quite content to place notes where there were not notes, and pepper rests and other markings all of the place.

On the whole, this has been an interesting experience, though. I've written a few songs, all in a style different than I would have attempted outside this course, and I'm fairly pleased with much of it, especially my 3rd piece.

Atonal #3 (Temporary)

The clip above is what I would have played in class today, if only the cd player was working. I thought I'd put it up for those who were interested in what I'd intended for it to sound like. More to follow (with hopefully a shorter delay than the last time I said that)

Atonal #2 (Sorry for the delay)

[This was supposed to have been published earlier. It was written a few days ago, but my connection with blogger was on the fritz at the time, and refused to publish it, and it simply slipped my mind in the intervening days]



I've ended up being relatively pleased with my second song, which is nice, because a few days before it was presented in class, this was definitely not the case. I wrote the first section (up to about 0:20) one day, and liked it. And then, on the following days, found myself seemingly incapable of writing a subsequent section that I both liked, and which sounded as though it fit with the song.

I think I have nearly a half-dozen sections, or at least beginnings of sections, which were written and discarded. Some of them are even pretty nice, but just didn't sound like they belonged with this song. You know, sometimes when you've pushed notes in a phrase around enough times, your mind (or at least mine) tends to get a bit numb. This is normally when I'd let the piece lie fallow for a little while and come back to it later, however that's not really possible when you're working with a deadline.

One nice thing may have come out of all the rewriting, though. At least one of the rejected sections I like well enough to try writing my third variation around it. It's a bit waltz-like, I think, although the atonality makes it sound a little different.

Hearing it performed live in class was an interesting experience. Never in my life has anyone other than myself performed anything I've written (and even I haven't done that in a long time, as my compositions become more complex and my technical skills rusted). I felt a little bad thrusting the score into their hands mere moments before they were expected to play it, but it literally was not finished until that morning. Well, the song itself had been finished by the beginning of the previous day, but the notation wasn't ready until then.

I realized that I never specified a tempo on the score, and although this was somewhat intentionally, in retrospect I should have nonetheless. I didn't know at what tempo they'd be comfortable to sight read the piece, so I thought I'd leave it to their own discretion. However, it somehow slipped my mind that they'd have no frame of reference from which to just how it 'should' be played.

Actually, I think I kind of expected one of them to ask, but by the time it was evident that they weren't going to, they'd already started performing. However, although it was immediately clear that they were playing it at a very different tempo than I expected, I thought it would be interesting to hear it at that speed just the same. It creates a very different effect than the original, moreso than I might have expected. If I were to give my overall impression of it at that speed, I'd probably say that the faster sections were more emotive than in the original, while the sections which were already fairly slow at the fast tempo sounded more static.

Some of the feedback I received in class related to the static-ness of the slower sections, and I think it was fortunate that I'd played a draft copy of the digital version to Dr. Ross previously, since he weighed in that he thought most of the issues pointed out disappeared at the faster tempo.

Someone mentioned whether I'd considered writing in slurs for some passages for the violin, and I'd said at the time that I hadn't, possibly because I'd never written for a real physical violin before, but in retrospect, I think it has as much to do with my inexperience writing actual sheet music in general.

For many years now, whenever I've done any composing, I've done it in a midi sequencer. Midi notation is much more specific. You can specify note onsets down to the millisecond, and the exact force with which every note is played (although, admittedly, I tend not to spend as much time fiddling with the dynamics as I could if I were to get the best performance out of them). As with most things involving computers, there is no subjectivity or ambiguity. You tell the computer exactly what to do and it will do exactly that, no more and no less, every time. You think that one note sounds a little too loud? Well, just make it, and only it, a little quieter. Of course, it raises a number of its own technical problems that live instruments in the hands of competent musicians tend not to have. I won't get into them here, since some are a bit technical, but let's just say that sometimes you have to fight to get a simple passage to come out sounding right, when a real person with a real instrument could easily nail it first try.

Well, what I meant to say by all that is that it's probably easy, as a general rule, to not notice what you're taking for granted about how a piece is intended to be played. Especially when one is not used to thinking in terms of notation.

Speaking of notation, this was the first time that I attempted to use actual notation software to work on the score. Sibelius has... a bit more of a learning curve than I anticipated. Although it's clearly quite powerful, many features, even ones that seem relatively basic, are often buried deep in some hidden corner of the menus. For example, I could not find any way to convert a single staff with all of the piano section on it into the standard piano double staff. When you were adding the staff, yes, but not after it was already there. Since the song itself had already been notated mostly correctly in Sonar, I didn't relish having to type in everything from scratch just to get it to come out right. (I did eventually find a way around this)

Most frustratingly, there are a few 16th notes that simply refuse to beam together with the adjacent 16th notes, and after a few hours working with that, I still have no idea why. I'm following the instructions in the manual exactly, but the appropriate buttons simply do nothing, or just add beams to the notes that don't connect to the follow notes, and simply end abruptly in space. Sonar doesn't beam the notes because they're on different staves. If I move them onto the same staff, it works fine, but even this doesn't work in Sibelius. I think I've tried at least 5 different approaches, which all failed. I'm not quite sure what to do about that at this point, actually.

Back to feedback on the song, one of the most strong points that Dr. Ross brought up was that he didn't really like the ending. This was actually a bit surprising to me at the time, since the 3rd section of the song was actually the one that I felt the most satisfied with. I'm not sure if he was referring just to the couple bars immediately before the end, or the whole build up to that point. Having listened to it a bunch over the last couple days, I can maybe see the point about the second-last bar, although I remain quite pleased with the several immediately before that.

He suggested that instead of ending on B-flat, I try F-sharp instead. I tried that, and my immediate reaction to listening to it was that the preceding section (at least the previous bar, anyway) needs to be heavily rewritten for that to work. I tried moving some of the existing notes around, but nothing seemed to gel for me at the time. I'll probably go back and see what I can do with that, later, but at the moment I think I should be directing my compositional efforts towards the third song, or I risk not having it ready for Friday at all. Writing music quickly was never my strong suit.

Atonal 2 uploaded (update to follow)

Well, here's the recorded copy of the song that was played in class today, more or less as it was originally intended. It's interesting how different it sounded compared to today's performance, although that was interesting in and of itself (and thanks to Kate and Mike for playing it) I'm putting this up here immediately on the off-chance that anyone from class will actually listen to it. If you do, it would be great if you could leave some sort of a comment, even something as simple as 'Yeah, that does feel different'. I'll have something more insightful to post when I get home and have time to write it.

[Edit: MP3 moved to above post]