A Child of the Snows: Growing an idea

In the last post I promised some insights into the business of working a small amount of material into a longer section. As I've been working on the piece today, I have just such a scheme fresh in my mind, so let's take a look:

The particular place is in the central section and sets part of the Field poem; the lines are 'Burn on, O star, and be the light/To guide us all to Him this night'. The first thing to note is that we've already got some parameters set out:

• The music will be in a moderate to fast tempo, as it constitutes part of the middle section of the piece
• The chorus will sing the text as the baritone soloist is resting in between entries (I've already divided up who sings what)
• The orchestra will probably be accompanying for some or all of the music, meaning the chorus cannot be at extreme quiet dynamics whilst this occurs.
• The text is optimistic and exuberant, suggesting a lively character and primarily tonal flavour to the harmonies.
• The speech-rhythms of the text will have to be considered when writing rhythmic elements, as well as which vowel sounds will be advisable at extremes of register.
• The music needs to have 'order of intensity' as discussed in the last post, i.e. it needs to  'go somewhere', and illuminate the words.

The last two are, of course, more general and can be applied to most parts of the composition.

Reading through this text was one of the happy occasions when a setting suggested itself immediately.  Here is my original sketch for the soprano and a bit of harmony, scribbled at the piano:

(Click on any graphic to enlarge)

5/4 time gives a pleasingly natural phrase shape to the line.  The upwards leap on the word 'light' seemed to be the best way of highlighting this word, as well as providing contrast with the mostly step-wise motion that precedes it (I trust it will not be too difficult to find this pitch if the rest of the harmony suggests it).  Rising thirds, indeed thirds in general, feature prominently in this extract and as such it would be a good idea to use them in the remainder. The next thing that I write down is the rest of this chord. At this stage, I'm not overly concerned about what voice sings what when writing down a chord in isolation, as voice-leading can be refined later on. I already have a rough idea of the the harmonies which I can 'hear' in my mind, though.

It then occurs to me that it would be interesting and add to the OoI to have the male voices enter in canon a little after the female. Since the original phrase begins on a half-beat this needs to be replicated here too.

Now I fill in the rest of the harmony as well as possible. This mostly involves repeated stabs at the keyboard, changing one note at a time if the chord doesn't sound right. A fortunate occurrence is that often what looks like good voice-leading on the page will be what sounds the best as well. The harmony is quite sevenths-based, which adds a more interesting flavour than simple diatonic chords without placing unreasonable demands on the choir's pitching skills. Possibly my liking of luscious 1930s film-score harmonies is an influence here - Poulenc's Gloria also comes to mind.

The first phrase seems complete for now.  I already have an idea for the second, and, keeping the female voices each divided in thirds, I experiment with how this might produce harmonies before settling on the following:

Again the phrase shape just suggested itself, but it came from a part of my imagination that clearly recognised the classic anticendant-consequent pairing. This phrase mirrors the first, leaping up and then coming down a little.  The triplets keep the rhythmic vocabulary fresh as well as being pleasant to sing the word 'all' to. I fill in the harmonies again, adding a second splash of counterpoint to the male voices to maintain the symmetry and rhythmic motion.

Now to decide how to end it all. I could bring it to a neat finish on G major, which seems to be the underlying tonality of the phrases, or a slightly more exotic version of it, but I want something more interesting and less closing. I work out that by keeping the altos on G (thus also avoiding them having to leap up to close to the top of their range) I can actually lead the whole choir into this:

F minor 7 - you didn't see that coming, now, did you?  I play through it all and perhaps add/remove a few pitches.  Taking a few paces into the other room where Sibelius is open and waiting, I enter it all into the program on full score and listen to the playback before making a few other tweaks to the writing.  But something isn't quite right (other than the MIDI playback). The climax seems to arrive too early. The music needs another phrase, which will have to be a repetition of 'Burn on, O star' to avoid the same problem in the text.  I don't want to push the existing harmonies around much to achieve this, so have to work out how to 'lift' the OoI in this new segment without spoiling the already-written ending. Back to the piano to note down, sans text:

And back to Sibelius again.  After quite a lot of experimentation and tweaking, I come up with this as the (for now) finished product:

There are some substantial changes from the previous incarnation. The male voices now enter separately in two canonic entries (same pitches) whilst the sopranos enter with the tenors to avoid the low B; the one-beat of the word 'Him' is now two as it provides better proportions to the phrase, and as a result of this the male voices extend their rhythmic canon for another two beats. I wasn't sure about this to start with, but I then realised it results in a nice parallel with 'guiding' in the text by having the singers join up again at the end of the phrase. The latter half is now in 3/4 to accommodate these changes. A few divisis are re-allocated to pre-empt having a tenor section smaller than the others.  Dynamics and placing of words are added and refined.

It probably took the best part of forty minutes to develop and refine this little section of less than twenty seconds. I may tweak it again in future, but for now I am happy. Later orchestral material will be added and I will think about what comes before and after, but I now have a 'strong point' in the score to work around.