Today was one of those freakishly lovely early spring days, where it seems like all of Brooklyn has decided to emerge en masse from its burrow. Also I reached a "double bar" on my piece. This is not the same thing as being finished with it, but it still feels like a symbolic accomplishment. One doesn't really plan compositional work down to the day, so reaching such milestones is always a nice surprise. I'm celebrating with a beer on my balcony, watching people come and go from their yoga classes next door.
The great majority of pieces I've written end quietly and this one is no exception. I find it difficult to imagine a truly convincing loud ending. I can't even think of many pieces I like (post Classical-era) that really have satisfying, loud endings. John Adams has a few, though Harmonium, perhaps his grandest piece, ends with a trademark hushed grooves (à la Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians). Messiaen—perhaps a candidate, though I often feel as if he's reached (religious) climax without me. Everything I try in this vein seems too brash, too eager to please, or somehow un-earned, as though any loud event I write requires a quiet, thoughtful comment to follow. One of my long-term compositional goals is to figure out a way to 'end with a bang' but without being all Carmina Burana about it. Perhaps the next piece.
The end is a sort of mirror image of the big, virtuosic opening section—only now it's extremely quiet, both hands gliding over the keyboard at independent speeds, crossing each other, and going back the other way. It's all built from the same stuff, but now those arpeggios sound open, distant, almost Impressionistic. Even the harmonic machinations of the quintuplets simply drift away—we're hearing them from a distance now, and they become a single, large shape rather than lots of tiny inscrutable ones.
After today's double bar there remain a few things to deal with. One is a title; I simply haven't come up with anything remotely suitable, even after leafing through all my sketchbooks and post-its full of possibilities. This will take some thought, or maybe some convenient happenstance. I try not to take titles too seriously even though I am very opinionated about them. If the music is good and title mediocre, nobody will probably mind. But a really good title can draw the audience in, make them curious, stick in their minds and provide something to mull over for a while. After that first impression, the importance of the title fades away. It's just a given name, after all; the music is the thing which goes on to lead an actual life. Also it's gotten pretty tiresome writing an article about a piece which I keep having to call "My New Piece", like a particularly uninspired third-grader.
Two, a bigger conundrum, is that I need to clean up the notation. My New Piece has ended up being very complex in parts. Even though what I've written is for just one musician, there are long sections where the music is essentially of two, three, even four independent "voices" which each move at different speeds, are often in different keys, and occur at different registers of the keyboard. Sometimes they cross each other, passing from treble to bass and hand to hand. What I need to figure out is how to balance the horizontal—keep the musical voices clear and separate—with the vertical, helpfully indicating which notes should be played by what hand.
This is important because notation—the way the composer chooses to convey pitches, rhythms, dynamics, and expressions on the printed page—can have a huge effect on how well the performer is able to receive his or her intentions. There is not usually one single correct way of notating a passage of music, and as complexity increases, so too do the number of possibilities. The 20th century spawned a certain vogue for inventing new notational systems, not based on standard printed music; some of these scores contain instructional prefaces significantly longer than the pieces themselves. I regard this as somewhere between mildly diverting conceptual art and total fraud. The best engravers find an elegant balance somewhere between clearness of intention and graphical cleanliness of the page. You don't want to overwhelm the performer with direction; this is sure to inspire a wooden, uninspired reading. You want to gently guide them into following your directions, careful to maintain a consistent and unmistakable editorial voice without becoming too didactic. The composer can't, and shouldn't, make every single decision; otherwise the performer is rendered a mere robot.
A few days later. I'm in LA for ten days to play a few concerts. On the plane I managed to pry open my laptop and sort out most of the notation issues, and do some last-minute formatting. I'm feeling good about My New Piece, thinking about sending Kirill a PDF in the next week or so. This too feels like an incredibly final step, even though it's not. Revisions are certainly possible, and to a certain extant, likely. But I haven't showed him any music yet, and there's always that low-level fear that revealing the result of the commission will inspire regret.
Also, worryingly, the piece now has a tail. I stayed up late a few nights ago and added a little extra music on the end when I got home, a kind of dour elaboration on the original ending. I haven't decided how I feel about it in the daylight. Amputation may be necessary.
It doesn't feel as though I've truly done much writing at all, over the past month. There's always a curious feeling of distance once I'm finished with a piece, as if it were simply extracted from me while under anesthesia. And in fact, I’m only “finished” with one thing: writing down a set of instructions. The real life of the music starts here—rehearsing, practicing, performing, hearing different people play it in different places for different audiences, revising, recording, poring over takes. Only later, after being reminded by these things does the realization set in: "Oh yes, I'm the person who wrote that music"—and by then it's become an old friend.
The great majority of pieces I've written end quietly and this one is no exception. I find it difficult to imagine a truly convincing loud ending. I can't even think of many pieces I like (post Classical-era) that really have satisfying, loud endings. John Adams has a few, though Harmonium, perhaps his grandest piece, ends with a trademark hushed grooves (à la Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians). Messiaen—perhaps a candidate, though I often feel as if he's reached (religious) climax without me. Everything I try in this vein seems too brash, too eager to please, or somehow un-earned, as though any loud event I write requires a quiet, thoughtful comment to follow. One of my long-term compositional goals is to figure out a way to 'end with a bang' but without being all Carmina Burana about it. Perhaps the next piece.
The end is a sort of mirror image of the big, virtuosic opening section—only now it's extremely quiet, both hands gliding over the keyboard at independent speeds, crossing each other, and going back the other way. It's all built from the same stuff, but now those arpeggios sound open, distant, almost Impressionistic. Even the harmonic machinations of the quintuplets simply drift away—we're hearing them from a distance now, and they become a single, large shape rather than lots of tiny inscrutable ones.
After today's double bar there remain a few things to deal with. One is a title; I simply haven't come up with anything remotely suitable, even after leafing through all my sketchbooks and post-its full of possibilities. This will take some thought, or maybe some convenient happenstance. I try not to take titles too seriously even though I am very opinionated about them. If the music is good and title mediocre, nobody will probably mind. But a really good title can draw the audience in, make them curious, stick in their minds and provide something to mull over for a while. After that first impression, the importance of the title fades away. It's just a given name, after all; the music is the thing which goes on to lead an actual life. Also it's gotten pretty tiresome writing an article about a piece which I keep having to call "My New Piece", like a particularly uninspired third-grader.
Two, a bigger conundrum, is that I need to clean up the notation. My New Piece has ended up being very complex in parts. Even though what I've written is for just one musician, there are long sections where the music is essentially of two, three, even four independent "voices" which each move at different speeds, are often in different keys, and occur at different registers of the keyboard. Sometimes they cross each other, passing from treble to bass and hand to hand. What I need to figure out is how to balance the horizontal—keep the musical voices clear and separate—with the vertical, helpfully indicating which notes should be played by what hand.
This is important because notation—the way the composer chooses to convey pitches, rhythms, dynamics, and expressions on the printed page—can have a huge effect on how well the performer is able to receive his or her intentions. There is not usually one single correct way of notating a passage of music, and as complexity increases, so too do the number of possibilities. The 20th century spawned a certain vogue for inventing new notational systems, not based on standard printed music; some of these scores contain instructional prefaces significantly longer than the pieces themselves. I regard this as somewhere between mildly diverting conceptual art and total fraud. The best engravers find an elegant balance somewhere between clearness of intention and graphical cleanliness of the page. You don't want to overwhelm the performer with direction; this is sure to inspire a wooden, uninspired reading. You want to gently guide them into following your directions, careful to maintain a consistent and unmistakable editorial voice without becoming too didactic. The composer can't, and shouldn't, make every single decision; otherwise the performer is rendered a mere robot.
A few days later. I'm in LA for ten days to play a few concerts. On the plane I managed to pry open my laptop and sort out most of the notation issues, and do some last-minute formatting. I'm feeling good about My New Piece, thinking about sending Kirill a PDF in the next week or so. This too feels like an incredibly final step, even though it's not. Revisions are certainly possible, and to a certain extant, likely. But I haven't showed him any music yet, and there's always that low-level fear that revealing the result of the commission will inspire regret.
Also, worryingly, the piece now has a tail. I stayed up late a few nights ago and added a little extra music on the end when I got home, a kind of dour elaboration on the original ending. I haven't decided how I feel about it in the daylight. Amputation may be necessary.
It doesn't feel as though I've truly done much writing at all, over the past month. There's always a curious feeling of distance once I'm finished with a piece, as if it were simply extracted from me while under anesthesia. And in fact, I’m only “finished” with one thing: writing down a set of instructions. The real life of the music starts here—rehearsing, practicing, performing, hearing different people play it in different places for different audiences, revising, recording, poring over takes. Only later, after being reminded by these things does the realization set in: "Oh yes, I'm the person who wrote that music"—and by then it's become an old friend.
***
Timo grew up in Connecticut and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. He performs widely, focusing on the music of his contemporaries. He earned a bachelors and a masters degree from Yale University. His debut album, Shy and Mighty, is ten interrelated pieces for piano, performed in tandem with David Kaplan on second Piano. His recent compositional works include commissions by the Carnegie Hall Ensemble, Gabriel Kahane, the Metropolis Ensemble, and the New World Symphony.