Composition

I'm fully aware I've not been doing much blogging recently. And I've also left in limbo how A Child of the Snows turned out. The two are related:

Well, it is at least finished. Why was this not announced in a blaze of fireworks and publicity? Because it's also sort-of not finished. It's probably going to need re-orchestrating or arranging for a smaller chorus and the baritone part possibly to become a tenor one.  To cut a long story short, it's not the piece that's going to be performed this Christmas. There are various reasons for this, chief amongst which it's turned out rather difficult for an amateur choral society, even a good one, and it's also a bit on the long side, nudging twenty-seven minutes when the brief was for around twenty. Happily, I have had guarantees that it will be performed next year, but only when a group of experienced singers and an ensemble that can rehearse in advance (that was the other thing: the instrumental parts just weren't something you could put together in an afternoon) are recruited. 

This left the Andover choir in a bit of a fix - they suddenly didn't have half their concert programme. Obviously the entirely sensible thing for me to do was to write something else in less than a month, which, considering it would have to be as long as ACOTS should have been, and I have a day job, is a perfectly reasonable undertaking and not at all a ridiculously short timescale to do this in.

So I cheated. Five minutes could be taken up with a Christmas carol I'd written last year for a competition. Conductor likes it, few minor revisions, sorted.  It's also unaccompanied, so no messing around arranging an organ or orchestra part either.  The rest of the time would involve an entirely new piece, a setting of the Regina coeli, which is what I'm working on now. Again here I cheat a little. The model for the work is Mozart's noted setting (made at the precocious age of sixteen...), using his division of the text into four movements, similar length and forces (sop solo and chorus) and imitating several of the melodic shapes he uses. With the mantra 'amateur choir, not much orchestral rehearsal' impressed on me, I decided to model the four sections broadly on the structure of a classical symphony. It's a little more complicated than that in practice, as the first movement is a sonatina form but which does not use the usual 18th-century key plan; the second a 'Beethoven scherzo' with alternating fast and slow sections, the third most like a Handel aria for solo soprano and the finale short and frenetic, like the end of the Ravel piano concerto.  Added to the mix is my 'public style' of harmonic writing which is completely unlike most of ACOTS - tonal with some fourths-based stuff, short sections rather than long wandering evolutions, and sounding somewhere between Poulenc, Prokofiev and contemporary post-minimalist composers (Jonathan Dove, John Adams, possibly MacMillan).  My aim, as usual, is to reinvent old forms into something a little more inventive and contemporary whilst not being particularly difficult to sing. The choral writing sets out to be tonal and traditional in the use of voice-leading and harmony most of the time, with a few more interesting twists remaining, I hope, within the bounds of practicality. The result is a work that I hope can be described as 'likeable' - it is certainly very conservative for my output and is designed to appeal to those it is being written for, as well as fitting into the other works in the concert.

At the time of writing I've completed seven minutes in three weeks (all of the first and third movements, including string orchestra parts) and have the other two fairly well thought out. To be honest, I quite like the pressure of having to get something done in a short space of time, and one can hardly protest at the effort required given the historical precedents. Handel and Mozart could write whole operas and oratorios in a few weeks, and even a more individual piece such as Shostakovich's Fifth was completed in less than two months.  Ten minutes for choir and strings shouldn't actually be a lengthy process, given sufficient motivation and experience.

As a closing thought, I often think about trying to record precisely how long it takes to compose a piece. When I set a benchmark (generally seven minutes a month for a full orchestral score: this is based on The Sun Rising taking 3-4 months and ACOTS 5-6) this doesn't really represent working flat out, but rather the amount of spare time set aside from doing other jobs. Of course, thinking about a piece away from the piano and the computer is part of the process and, as Stravinsky claimed, 'the real composer thinks about work the whole time; he is not always conscious of it, but he is aware of it later when he knows what to do'; time which is hard to record.  A stopwatch kept on the desk for weeks and set going whenever a musical thought presents itself would be a difficult thing to maintain, so I have to estimate.