Category Archives: Symphony

Final week of symphony polishing

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I start the morning’s composition session by looking at what I wrote Friday. I see that I then thought the shape was about right, and that it mostly needed detail work.

I listen through the ending. I feel content with the transition from B minor to C major. The ending feels like the timing is about right, but it definitely needs more orchestration doublings, maybe some other figures in the winds and brass and percussion.

I listen through the entire movement. I make a note of a trumpet part that needs a note fixed, I see a second clarinet part that totally looks incomplete, like I wrote one note and somebody interrupted me. And from page 20 on, I know I need to look through the orchestra and add in lots of doublings and more figures because it’s basically string orchestra only, and it needs to be a tutti section, more or less.

Where I had written a contrabass solo, the melody doesn’t come through well, and I’m thinking I might double them with cellos. I try it, and realize the cellos will totally overpower the basses. I give the tuba a lower dynamic, and give the contrabasses a fortissimo, and maybe it will work now.

I make the second clarinet part a little longer so he or she can stay on that trill for ten beats instead of four. I start working on the second flute part in that section. It’s definitely fuller and more complete.

The string orchestra section that is supposed to be tutti is first supplemented by a triangle part. A few measures later, I write in two flute parts, an oboe part, a clarinet, and a bassoon part. Even though the figure of the section is familiar, the new-ish bassoon part is the one that stands out as most melodious. I decide to double the gist of the line with trombones, add in some trumpets after that, and it just continues to flow with more brass parts. I know I’ll need some shimmering flutes to double the shimmering violins in the next few measures. But the trumpets have gotten to the end of the piece, which is very exciting.

I add in the timpani, cymbals. I listen through the piece again. Wondering if it’s any good. Making notes of adding in some punctuating horns, possibly a viola part, and a marimba. And then I don’t know what to do. So I’ll break for lunch soon. But first, I try to do the ideas I wrote down. It’s a good stopping point.

It’s concert day, and time for my viola to get a sound check, so I spend the rest of my day taking care of my instrument, warming up, playing through the most difficult parts of the orchestra pieces, and drive my daughter to climbing practice, drop her off and head straight to call time for the orchestra concert.

Orchestra concert is fun. It’s a new venue, and at our preconcert practice I can hardly hear most of the orchestra. I just hope we sound together. I sit close to the cellos this time, but when the concert is going on, I can hear most of the sounds I’m supposed to. It’s surprisingly well-balanced, and it’s a lot of fun. I think my favorite part of the program is Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns. Because it’s the last on the program, it’s easy to have the melody linger in the mind after the concert is over.

Playing the Imperial March this time, the trombones are glorious, and I am basking in the fun accompaniment that the violas participate in. Our conductor has some weird Star wars helmet on which brings a kind of gravity to the piece.

It’s my first time performing Peter and the Wolf (by Sergei Prokofiev). It is kind of an odd piece, that has lots of little parts. I think my favorite part is when the duck is swimming in the water. If you’ve heard this piece, you may remember that it’s the oboe that plays the duck theme. The violas accompany in divisi, meaning there are two viola parts and we split.

I know I’ll try and finish the orchestration either tomorrow or the next day. I might have time to also go over all the bowings and phrasing for the strings.

More thoughts on writing a symphony, part writing, etc.

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I ended up getting in another fifteen minutes last night and I worked on making the orchestration shimmer with some more woodwind parts.

Today when I pick up work on the symphony I’m thinking more about the clarinet line. There was this section where I had two bassoons playing, and it seemed a little bare. So I put in two clarinet parts and a flute part, and it’s more complete. I’m finding that I’m very pleased with the string parts I worked on yesterday, but second guessing the ending again.

I settle on changing the viola part at the end, which easily lends itself to another five measures of closure (I’m hoping it’s actually the end, because the piece is over seven minutes now), and I pump out a second violin part and a cello part to harmonize and play with the viola line. I’ve got to listen through the entire piece to see if I feel content with the way it ends.

I go to clear my head, walking outside, visiting a neighbor for a little while. Listening through the piece, I conclude: It’s probably not the end after all. It’s not definitive enough. Breaking for lunch. Adding in one more measure, extending the wrap-up. Adding in another measure at the previous transition, and the key change is more satisfying now.

I go back to the beginning of the last section, and start filling in contrabass and cello parts. What kind of accompaniment figure/bass line should they get? Well, after writing a piece that runs about 24-28 minutes, I think I have an idea of what figures will feel like they belong in the piece. It is not time to introduce lots of new material. It is time to wrap up, and we want to hear something that sounds like the ideas already introduced to the piece.

I’m reflecting on my first exercises in my first arranging and composition class as a junior in high school (Södra Latins gymnasium, Stockholm, Sweden). I think I wrote some songs, that were more like vocalises, and I was supposed to write a harmony part, so it was two-part harmony. I think a group of my classmates and I sang it together, and I think we performed it in some obscure venue that I have since forgotten. When I took my first composition class in college, with Dr Christian Asplund, one of our first assignments was to write a duet for flute and oboe. You can hear my piece, “A play for two“, right at the top of the page titled “Woodwinds.” It is a very basic skill to master as a composer. You want to be able to find a harmonizing line that stands alone. I find that much of what I do when I work on my symphony reaches that far back into my training, and I think of independency of lines, of what harmonies I want to hear, and it extends to a third part, and a fourth part. The more parts you introduce, the more doubling you will need to introduce, so you don’t end up with a total piece of mud cake.

I come back some hours later, and I fix this and that. Some articulation here, adding a second trombone to a particular line to give more volume when that sounded a little thin against a full string section and woodwinds. I add in dynamics where I notice some missing. I’m wondering if I should add in the violas at rehearsal E or just let the violins take care of the accompaniment to the soft woodwinds. Should I add any percussion in that section? I’ll probably spend some time thinking about soft options for percussion next time I have some time to poke around. Hmm…

I know I’ll need to look through each individual part to look for any anomalies that I may have overlooked while working on the score. More missing dynamics, phrasing, articulation. I’m happy to leave the project for tonight fairly confident that most of the shaping of the movement has been done.

Another non-zero day

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I wrote some more on a first violin part I had started another day. I continued the idea I had stopped on yesterday, and was able to get to the “actual end” of the movement. I added in a tuba line to accompany a contrabass solo line. I gave a few more notes to the snare drum, and took one away from the bass drum to allow for a quick switch.

I added in some more slurs to help with phrasing. I added in some dynamics where that was missing.

As I was making lunch, I had the thought to maybe cut out part of a timpani line I wrote the other day that didn’t seem to fit.

I listened to Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. With the Chicago symphony, and then LA Philharmonic. I was struck by how many intense notes the upper strings had. Wow, that’s a lot of notes to play. I was reminded how talented the orchestra musicians usually are, and that I ought to try and give them a small challenge.

Refreshed after lunch, I set to put in a second violin part to sustain the firsts, and then a viola part. Wondering if my key change is working or what I should do about it. Is all I’ve written over the past eighteen measures an accompaniment or does it hold its own? It’s interesting to see the work unfold.

Leaving the computer to clear my head. Coming back, and adding in a measure to improve the key change transition, continuing work on the viola part. Changing the ending note to a whole note instead of two half notes. I want to bask in the glory of the high strings in a C major chord just a couple of more beats. Seeing that a section really calls for a marcato and adding in the marking to clarify for the orchestra members.

Wondering if the parts that I think are very emotional will speak to anybody that hears it.

Tweaking the timpani part to take out the offending notes. Adding in a snare drum part to a quiet woodwind solo for an accompaniment. Changing the ending note one more time, to let us rest in the chord before the bass comes in. Found a spot where I want the oboes to fill in the texture of flutes, clarinets, strings, and percussion, wrote some notes for them, doubling some string parts. It’s more satisfying now.

Taking a break again. We’ll see if I get back to writing later or if that’s it for today.

Just another day in composing paradise.

How to think about a symphony

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I was about nine years old, and I listened to symphonic music on the radio, and I knew I loved that sound. It took me long enough, but I am in a position now where I get to play in a symphony orchestra at least once a week, often twice. I love sitting in the middle, where the violas usually are placed. Sometimes I sit in front of the oboes, sometimes the flutes, there was another time when I sat in front of the snare drum and the rest of the percussion section. There are often either second violins or cellos to my side, depending on what chair I have in that concert. On occasion, it’s the harp that’s on my side.

As a violist, I get to see my own part, and I get a feel for how much in a symphony I play. For our Halloween concert with American Fork Symphony, we’re playing The Imperial March from Star Wars. You all might know that it has a very strong feature of trombones, one of my favorite instruments ever – what a glorious sound! – and yet, because I’m playing the accompaniment, which is really intense, I am focusing most of my attention on the accompaniment, and that is as it should be.

As a composer, I write down my idea for how the music is growing from one idea to the next. It is usually based on what will the melody be, who is playing it, and who takes over when I want a different sound.

However, sometimes, I just have an idea for a cool accompaniment figure that I want to explore. The melody grows after I’ve come up with the accompaniment texture, the rhythm, and the bass line. Or I decide that the bassoon, tuba, or contrabass is taking the melody, so the accompaniment needs to be in the higher register to not conflict with it.

And then it’s endings. How do you know that a piece is over? It can be kind of difficult, until the orchestra stops playing for long enough that you know they aren’t starting up again. Case in point: Beethoven’s 5th symphony. Listen to the fourth and final movement, and tell me that you weren’t surprised at least once that the piece wasn’t over yet. There’s something about the cadence, we kind of expect it to be over when everything is tied to a unison or an acceleration of texture and rhythm. Or it could be really quiet, and the Italian word for this is morendo, dying. The sound dies slowly and you know it’s over because you had time to adjust to the quiet.

If you’ve read some of my other posts or talked to me lately, you may be aware that I’m currently finishing up my first symphony. It’s the fourth movement. I thought, I’ll aim for about 6-7 minutes in length. But then this section with the horns chasing the melody and then the strings joining in, and I had this fabulous ending landing in my lap. The problem: I was only about 5 minutes in. The piece was too short. So I decided to give a recapitulation nod to Beethoven, and let the oboes come in with the first theme in a new key. So fun! Let’s see where that leads. I haven’t completed it yet, but I’m aiming for next week.

Another thing I’ve had fun with the past few days is adding in the spice of percussion. I had started out the movement with timpani and marimba, but I’m writing the piece including two more percussionists, which means I have access to more spice. A snare drum is excellent to emphasize the rhythmic figures of the orchestra, and cymbals can accent the beats really well when that is what you need. A triangle has a delicate but still penetrating sound and is a nice addition to my accompaniment idea. Etc. One of the biggest instruments is a bass drum, and the thunderous sound is sometimes exactly what you are looking for.

In a brief interaction with one of the percussionists, I confirmed that a marimba player can easily have several instruments in front of him or her, and therefore, I wrote a Glockenspiel part. I think about the Glock a little like a piccolo. It’s extremely high pitched, and it’s kind of like icing on the orchestra, and if you have access to it, you’re just excited.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to reply (click on “Leave a reply” at the top of the post), and I look forward to talking more about orchestra music next time.

Composing every day

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I have been working on my first symphony since April. The first movement took about a month to complete. The second went a little bit faster, and I felt so pumped. I started working on the third movement, and I decided to go for a faster tempo, it being subtitled Un-even dance. With the faster tempo, I can fit a lot more notes in! It took about three months to finish. (I also wrote a song for SSA, viola, and piano during that time).

I showed my finished draft to my friend yesterday, and I decided to make a couple of changes after that. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I also played in a concert last night. One of the pieces was Mjölnir, by Lucas Garner. When I was listening to Tracy Furr playing as the soloist, I realized that I wanted to start off the fourth and concluding movement featuring the timpani. And I also was reflecting on how many notes the violins play in a concert. Thousands, probably. So I decided I wanted to add a lot more notes, to showcase how agile and lovely the violins can sound.

And so it goes on. One treasured comment from a friend, a musical experience, and a dedication to hit the computer even if I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do. I just start writing something, and one thing leads to another… and hopefully before too long the symphony will be completed.