I’m writing some music for my friends. More on that in a bit.
These little nuggets will one day become my first symphony. I guess wouldn’t exactly call them sketches since the music is written beginning to end, but they feel rough because they are not yet fully orchestrated. Either way, once that final orchestration phase is complete, this work will be a substantial piece of music, with a lot of rich content for the listener to explore.
For now I’ve chosen a basic instrumentation of flute, oboe, trumpet, low strings. This can give a feel of being fleshed out, but is small enough to make sketching manageable, and colorful enough to make it fun. This instrumentation also helped me get away from the violin-centric symphony model, since I haven’t included violins in my original sketches. When I sit down and orchestrate this thing for real I will add violins in at my leisure, like a painter who, with one smooth movement, adds a bit of reflected light to a child’s eye.
The next step is to dive deep into the orchestration and make some hard choices. But for now, I’m savoring the completion of an crucial leg of this artistic journey. This particular piece has taken years to get to this spot, and where it will eventually lead I am not entirely sure. Sometimes it’s just important to pause and recognize a milestone.
The working title is “Adventure Cat!”. I’m not totally settled on all aspects of this music, but the overall arc I love. This is music for my friends. It’s a celebration of what we’ve all accomplished together, what we’ve built, the life we’ve lived, the love we’ve felt. The music goes a lot of different places, as do long friendships.
The music also challenges the ear at times, and other times it’s warm and inviting. It tries to take he listener on a road trip, over a fence, into the dark night. Sometimes it’s a song of love, a private moment, a hidden cave.
When I dive back into this music and turn these nuggets into completed symphony movements, I may end up expanding certain chunks, or slowing down the tempo for a section, or taking the music in a slightly different direction if the mood strikes me. I’m still shaping the clay a bit. But the meaning behind the music will not change. It’s that meaning that underscores every note of this music, every rise and fall. It’s that meaning that drives me to complete it.
Today I finally completed part two of my piece called “Quiquern.” This movement is called “The Dog Sickness”. (Click here for part one).
I thought “Quiquern” was complete years ago. Time and again I would declare it officially finished. But then, months later, something just wouldn’t sit right with me. I’d pry it open again and tinker with its innards. Maybe it will never be done. Maybe I’m destined to dance with this score til the end of my days.
Don’t get me wrong, I have always loved this music. Every time I pick it up again, I’m reminded of why I have such a sweet spot in my heart for “Quiquern”. It evokes so many positive memories: of writing it over Christmas break in San Diego, of reading The Jungle Book over and over, of experimenting with new sounds (new to me anyways), of unhinging my creativity from purely classical harmonies and letting go a bit. Like this sort of thing:
I never go full atonal, I’m always chained in some way to classical forms and progressions, but this piece freed me up in some ways I had never tried. I went wandering a bit through the cold wilderness. I let the images in my mind solidify into a color palette. I focused on the story the sounds told, rather than fussing about the progression. This allowed me to express all the pain I felt after reading that beautiful, heart-breaking story.
So why, if this music was so compelling, couldn’t I call it “complete”? Well there were a few reasons. One is I just wasn’t thinking about form when I first wrote it. I was in “crank it out” mode, writing down whatever ideas popped into my head. I tried to free up my creative process and stop self-editing as I wrote. As a result, the music flowed pretty freely out of my brain, and the harmonies were weirder than I was used to. The musical nuggets that emerged were captivating and exotic. But there was no overarching shape to the piece. It was just idea after idea, with very little connectivity. Throwing a bunch of nuggets into a pile don’t make it a whole chicken.
This time around I wanted to work on that. This is the sort of pre-thought that Schoenberg went on about. In other words, real composers think about form and structure BEFORE writing, they don’t just wander around in the dark hoping to bump into a complete form. When I put some thought into this piece, I was able to picture the arc that I wanted to create with the music. A chaotic, hallucinogenic dream sequence, sandwiched on either side by a poignant but solitary theme calling out in the dead stillness of the ice-fields. Perhaps the middle is what the dogs feel as they begin to starve, giddy and terrified and angry; the beginning is what the Inuits feel watching their beloved animals suffer in the dark, knowing what awaits them if another source of food is not found soon. Or maybe the beginning is a song for a way of life that is slowly dying.
“What is it?” said Kotuko; for he was beginning to be afraid.
“The sickness,” Kadlu answered. “It is the dog sickness.” The dog lifted his nose and howled and howled again.
“I have not seen this before. What will he do?” said Kotuko.
Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little, and crossed the hut for his short stabbing-harpoon. The big dog looked at him, howled again, and slunk away down the passage, while the other dogs drew aside right and left to give him ample room. When he was out on the snow he barked furiously, as though on the trail of a musk-ox, and, barking and leaping and frisking, passed out of sight. His trouble was not hydrophobia, but simple, plain madness. The cold and the hunger, and, above all, the dark, had turned his head; and when the terrible dog-sickness once shows itself in a team, it spreads like wild-fire. Next hunting-day another dog sickened, and was killed then and there by Kotuko as he bit and struggled among the traces. Then the black second dog, who had been the leader in the old days, suddenly gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer-track, and when they slipped him from the pitu he flew at the throat of an ice-cliff, and ran away as his leader had done, his harness on his back. After that no one would take the dogs out again. They needed them for something else, and the dogs knew it; and though they were tied down and fed by hand, their eyes were full of despair and fear. To make things worse, the old women began to tell ghost-tales, and to say that they had met the spirits of the dead hunters lost that autumn, who prophesied all sorts of horrible things.
Prayers to a cruel and fickle ice god.
And while I was working on form, I also put more thought into motifs. This piece has a lot of rich material, maybe even too much. Though I love that there are so many fun ideas in there, sometimes it plays like one of those Beatles songs with too many good ideas but no development. This time around I went through the piece with a needle and thread, and wove my favorite motifs into the very fabric of the piece. In and out they come, appearing and disappearing again, becoming more recognizable with each appearance. Just as a chef might pour a bit of the boiling gnocchi water into the sauce to bind all the flavors together, my goal was to bind all the ingredients of this music together into something coherent (and tasty).
Like this motif, which appears everywhere:
Or this rhythmic motif:
There was something else fundamental that needed retooling: instrumentation. Originally I chose three flutes and piano for this piece, because the flutes evoked the lonely, frozen tundra. But as I was writing, I didn’t pay enough attention to the limitations of the flute. I wasn’t writing in an idiosyncratic way, I was just cranking out music. The used a lot of low C’s on the flute because I liked the sound, but I knew the notes were ringing out stronger in my head than they would on a real instrument, where that low C is easily covered up and lost in the mist. I considered an alto flute, but decided a clarinet would give me a whole other palette to play with.
When one phases in a new instrument like this, one can’t just paste the flute part into a clarinet staff and call it done. The addition of the clarinet changed the whole character of the piece. While the flute is cold and isolated and graceful and metallic, the clarinet is like warm baking bread. It’s also intense, frenetic, a bit insane at times, with low earthy tones that can feel angry or foreboding or subdued. That new voice greatly expanded the range of the piece, so I was able to open the music up a bit and let it breathe.
All these forces combined into something much different than the piece I’ve been kicking around all these years. This version feels like a completed piece of art. It’s not just a sketchbook of ideas, it’s a story arc with real meaning. In other words it really does feel done. For real this time. Seriously.
This music is about suffering, and in a way the audience suffers a bit as they listen. It is not over quickly. But the music is also about hope, and the idea that suffering is a part of life, and doesn’t necessarily cancel out the good. There are joyful memories mixed in with the pain. There is a dream that soon the pain will end. Yes there is fear, yes there is chaos and anger. But the sun still rises at the end, even if the air all around is frigid.
My first piano sonata took me over a decade to complete. Then Jack showed up and POOF, it was done! Strange how that happens.
I always call this piece “Jack’s Sonata”, but half of the music actually predates Jack by some time. In fact, the last two movements are my earliest completed piano music. I was working on the first drafts all the way back in 2006, maybe earlier, when I was still living in the dorms at Cal Poly, a time when I knew I wanted to be a composer but had no idea how to actually write music. I remember so clearly the frustration of having music in my head, but lacking the skills to notate it. Hence, I started this music with the best intentions, but quickly became frustrated when I couldn’t finish it and tossed it in the ash heap. Luckily my ash heap is just a folder on my laptop, so the music was easily resurrected. By the time I picked it up again 10 years later, I was more properly equipped to complete the task.
So why does this music belong to Jack if it was begun long before he was born? Because Jack got me to finish it. I write such better music when I have something meaningful to write about, and there’s nothing more meaningful than the birth of my first child. The gaps I had left in the music over the years were suddenly filled in by the waves of emotion I felt as a new father. Usually I write slowly and methodically, but Jack’s presence in my life lit a fire under me and kicked off an avalanche of creative activity. Jack gave me so many new things to think about, new ways of looking at the world, new experiences. Holding a newborn brought on such a strange combination of intense love and intense uncertainty, and all of that worked its way into my music. So even though the music is older than Jack, in a certain way he owns it. I’m not sure I ever would have finished it if it wasn’t for him. His little face is imprinted on every note.
Paul Dab, my former piano teacher, also owns a piece of this music. When it comes down to it, I had fallen out of love with the piano, and Paul rekindled that fire. He made me excited about the instrument and showed me new ways to explore it. That excitement drove me to finally finish this sonata (including the composition of two brand new movements from scratch). Paul showed me how to think like a pianist again. I put my hands back on the instrument after a long hiatus, not just to tinker with chords but to play, play, play! He gave me the tools to improve my technique, both as a performer and composer, and he showed me how to write idiomatically for the piano, something that is often forgotten when writing music directly into the computer. This work would not exist in its current form without his guidance. Therefore, even though I always call it “Jack’s Sonata”, it is officially dedicated to Paul Dab.
The Four Movements
Movement 1: Allegro con brio
Here’s what the first movement sounds like (computer rendition):
You might be thinking, “hmmm that sounds a little minor. I thought he said it was about his newborn son.” Well, yes and no. It was written right after he was born, but it’s not really ABOUT him. It’s really about me! It’s my musical reaction to some crazy-ass change happening in my life. It’s a burst of creative energy as my whole life gets flipped upside down. I think it’s fear of the unknown. It’s everything I felt when I held that precious, tiny, fragile, little nugget and pondered my place in the universe. This is an example of some music that just poured out. I had a lot of things to work out, and writing music is excellent therapy.
That being said, I still had to put a whole lot of thought into this movement. I spent hours and hours at the library hashing and rehashing ideas, experimenting and prototyping and testing ideas and staring blankly at the wall. Originally I had written an entirely different first movement way back in 2006. But when I picked this music back up in 2014, I realized that that whole thing had to go. There may have been some salvageable ideas buried in there, but I couldn’t help but see the whole thing as student work. I tossed it in the trash and started with a blank page. The music that came out of my brain belonged entirely to Jack.
This movement is highly structured, though it might not seem that way at times. Straight-forward, good old-fashioned sonata form. Ok, maybe not too old-fashioned. But really, it follows the same basic structure as the first movement of most Beethoven sonatas: Theme 1 in tonic, theme 2 in either dominant or (in this case) mediant, followed by an unstable gobblety-gook of the two themes all mixed around and intertwining, leading finally back to the first theme again in the tonic, and the lastly the second theme now transposed to the tonic. So though it may sound at times as if it contains a hundred different unconnected ideas, I assure you it is firmly rooted in classical forms.
For a first movement of a sonata, the music has got to be catchy, a bit flashy (but not decadent), and something the listener will want to hear again. For the first theme I got hooked into this angsty minor bluesy vibe that keeps falling into a mellow waltz. It can’t really make up its mind on what it wants to feel. The slightly slower second theme is cleaner, with a bass line reminiscent of a rock riff. I often find myself absent-mindedly humming this theme. It’s chipper, skippy, but never entirely major. Slices of it almost give off a pop vibe, though I made sure to end it on a sour note. These two themes are a microcosm of my psyche at the time.
Movement 2: Largo, but freely (“Jack’s Song”):
Here’s a computerized version:
And here’s a live performance from pianist Jun Cai, a student at the SF Conservatory (notice how much more flexible Jun is with the rhythm than the computerized version. There are infinite ways to interpret a piece of music):
This second movement truly does belong to Jack. As this music began to take shape, I was thinking a lot about what it means to be a father, which means my child shaped it. This music is a projection from my mind at the time, a reflection of my emotions and questions, my fear and love. The music fades in and out of coherency, at times directionless, until it finally lands on solid ground. It’s asking a question, and just as the answer comes within reach, it slips away again. This movement is tough to pin down, difficult to categorize. The music is searching, searching… It emerges slowly, pops in and out of view, like a distant ship in the mist. Sometimes it’s a love song, sometimes a lament, sometimes a hopeful look toward the future, and sometimes a lonely figure grasping for something in the dark.
I wrote a good chunk of this music in libraries, specifically the Richmond Library in SF and the Shaw Library in Washington DC. The whole ambiance of the library worked its way into this music. Libraries are bustling with activity: people walking around, searching, questioning, writing, working; children running around and older folks quietly reading the newspaper. Yet it’s also an environment where quiet reflection is of paramount importance. It’s a perfect mix of energy and silence, and I find it a very inspiring atmosphere to write music. This piece also feels to me like it is a mix of quiet and activity. I think this movement is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written… though when I first wrote about this music in my composition journal, I clearly wasn’t sure what I thought about it. (See below for the composition journal).
Speaking of my composition journal, reading the entries for this piece reminded me of how crucial sketching is when developing a new piece. I started this movement by jotting down various ideas without editing, then seeing where those ideas led. This was a period of time when the music was coming out rather quickly, and I think sketching had a lot do with that. When I’m feeling something and just need to write music, it is so important that I don’t edit myself, but instead just get everything out. Sometimes I don’t have the time or wherewithal to plan an entire piece in advance. Sometimes I just have to throw paint on the canvas then step back and figure out what shapes I created.
For example, this improv led to an important section in the piece:
And this one became the main theme (listen for Baby Jack in the background):
Movement 3: Minuet and Trio – Andante con moto
Here’ s what it sounds like, computerized:
This movement may very well be the earliest completed piano piece I ever wrote. I’m not sure exactly when I started it, because it predates my habit of keeping a journal. But I think I have a memory of working on it in 2004. I can’t be sure, but it was definitely in a semi-complete form in 2006.
When I revisited this music in 2014, I mainly focused on adding some subtle touches to it (integrating some of the motifs into the fabric of the piece, rethinking dynamics, making it more playable). I originally picked it up again because I was looking for a piece I had written that I might actually be able to play well. This is why I give Paul Dab a lot of credit for inspiring this whole sonata. Once I started tinkering with this old nugget again, I realized I was ready to complete the entire sonata. This is the movement that jump-started it, even though it’s the simplest and more straight-forward movement of the four.
This movement is in a truly classical form: minuet and trio. A short set of Baroque dances, usually inserted into a sonata or symphony, allowed the composer to construct a stately, graceful, low-key moment of rest before the rush of the final movement. Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and all those dudes used it many times. I really didn’t add much to the structure or push the envelope with this one. It is truly a classical piece, fairly conservative. The form looks like this:
Conservative does not mean bad though. This entire sonata is full of traditional harmonies and forms, yet it still expresses what I wanted to express in that moment. This minuet is more traditional than I would probably write today, but when I started it in 2006 and finished it in 2014, that felt right in those moments. Sometimes going back to basics can unlock all sorts of new ideas.
This piece has a slight drunken quality to it, almost like the music is slurring its words. It gets a bit heated, but in a restrained way. The Trio is a bit angelic, very light, with just a flash here and there of tension. Overall, I don’t want to read too much into this one. Not all music is strictly progammatic music. When it comes down to it, this is a simple minuet and trio. I think I was playing more with form here than with emotion. This little dance is really just a calm interlude before the energetic and weighty final movement.
The minuet is nice to play though:
Movement 4: Rondo – Allegro Molto
Here’s what it sounds like (computerized):
This piece is a classic. I have a vague memory of starting it way back in 2003, but I only wrote a few measures before I couldn’t find my way forward. That was when writing a simple chord progression was an uphill battle for me, so this piece was born from pure gut and intuition. Those tools will get you only so far, before technical skill is required to turn a fun little building block into an actual piece. Though I could vaguely hear this music in my head (or at least feel the emotional direction I wanted to take it in), I couldn’t figure out which chords I should use to actually express those vibes. In other words, I couldn’t compose my way out of a paper bag. This tiny nugget was all I had, so I put the piece down for a couple years and focused on learning.
I used to call this music “Tempestates”, I think because I wanted to write a series of pieces about Greek gods or something along those lines. Instead I forgot about this music until 2006, when I was about to begin work on a final project for one of my composition classes. My professor, Meredith Brammeier (who is more responsible for my love of classical theory than anyone else on Earth) suggested that I write a medium-length piece with a clearly discernible form. After pondering my options for a bit, I rediscovered this musical fragment and thought it might make a decent rondo.
Rondo form is another classical form, usually appearing at the end of sonatas and symphonies. It goes something like ABACA, otherwise known as the deli sandwich of classical music.
This piece is very classical-sounding, or early-Romantic to be more precise. Essentially it’s in the style of Beethoven, since that’s who I was obsessed with (still am) when I was writing most of this. Back during that time, when I was still working at the Cal Poly library, I would push the cart of books around the different floors, listening to the entire catalog of Beethoven sonatas on my iPod over and over and over again, until I could hum every movement of every sonata. This Beethoven binge gave me a very strong appreciation of classical form and harmony, but also how to stretch those forms to express something deeper, how to turn form into art. Form is absolutely crucial in classical music, but it can’t be everything.
This movement probably leans more toward form for the sake of form than it does toward pure expression. As a young composer, I think I had to become proficient at form before I could wrap my head around pure expression. But built into this very structured piece is a nice dose of angst, nervous energy, and questioning, the same turbulence that guided the first two movements.
The C section is a soft interlude that plays with a couple motifs we heard earlier in the sonata. But this was not the original C section. I composed the new one mostly over Christmas break 2014 at Erica’s parents’ house in San Diego, on quiet evenings next to the giant Christmas tree, while Erica chatted quietly with her parents in the next room. The old one from 2006 was short, jolly, and fairly tight (not a lot of room to breathe). When I picked this piece up again in 2014, I probably could have expanded that old C section and gave it a bit more flair, but I decided to scrap it and start over. I wanted to write something restrained, quiet, and a bit jazzy, exactly what I wanted to listen to on those chilly winter evenings when the house was quiet.
Here’s the old C section on its own:
It’s got a bit of pep to it, but it doesn’t quite tickle me. I might salvage that one day, but for now it’s on the ash heap with so many other forgotten musical fragments.
Just for fun, here’s a video game version I made a while back:
So that’s about it for my first real-life piano sonata. Is it a perfect piece of music? Absolutely not. The final movement is too tightly wound for my taste. Were I to work on it now, I would stretch it out and let some of the ideas (and the listener) breathe a bit. I do love the first two movements, as they match my more current writing style. But as it stands they don’t exactly fit with the final two movements. This is a lesson I learned while listening to Ozma’s “Double Donkey Disk”: two very different EPs jammed together don’t exactly create an “album”. The two halves of this when taken as a whole do not feel organically written; but instead they resemble a slightly awkward arranged marriage. Which makes sense, considering the two halves were written a decade apart from each other. They are, however, united in one important way: I finished them all at the same time, motivated by the changes fatherhood brought to my life. So though the two halves aren’t necessarily united thematically, stylistically, or even artistically, they are forever united in my memories, and therefore they will remain together for eternity.
Below you will find my composition journal entries for this sonata:
So I’m working on “Not Yet Lost“, trying to finish this first variation, but I’m feeling a bit stuck in the weeds. I keep generating ideas that I like, but I’m not sure how to use them, how they are supposed to connect. I’m pretty good at generating these little nuggets, but then I end up surrounded by fragments, unable to fit them all together. Not to mention that the more varietals I develop, the more I start to lose sight of the main theme I am supposed to be developing.
In the previous post, I laid out the main theme:
Followed by variation #1, now with some additional material:
So that’s the little forest I’ve wandered into. Where is it going? Is it building toward a climax? Maybe it just wants to wander further afield. Or perhaps it’s time to steer it back to a place that feels like home. Where are you going little baby of mine?
New ideas are popping into my brain, even as I write this. I’m going to go work more on this project, try to find the way out. Stabbing blindly with my sabre through the elephant grass…
Sometimes composing music feels like painting a jigsaw puzzle that is already disassembled. I’m not even sure how the pieces are supposed to fit together, yet I’m supposed to paint the completed picture onto the disassembled pieces. It can be a frustratingly slow adventure. Perhaps I need to learn another way to visualize this process. Schoenberg probably would not be impressed with my approach. As he put it,”A composer does not, of course, add bit by bit, as a child does with blocks. He conceives an entire composition as a spontaneous vision. Then he proceeds, like Michelangelo who chiselled his Moses out of marble without sketches, complete in every detail…” Well la dee da. I guess I’m not quite up to that level yet. Better keep practicing until I can chisel a perfect symphony out of marble without sketching first.
In the spirit of Schoenberg’s method, I am trying to visualize as much of the Polish piece as possible BEFORE actually writing it. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
The piece will no longer be called “Polish Piece”, but will from now on be known as “Not Yet Lost”.
For form, I’d like it to be Theme and Variations. However I don’t necessarily want the variations to be obvious restatements of the main theme. I’d like to play around with motifs and create something entirely new, even if it at times wanders deep into the woods, far away from the original theme.
I think I will start with a calm statement of the theme in 4/4 time. That theme might look something like this:
Main Theme
The next part uses pentatonic melodies over an almost R&B style rhythm. To me, it kind of sounds like if a Nordstrom’s pianist started noodling around with this material, but that’s just me:
Variation 1
Here’s what that whole introduction sounds like:
I still have more music to write to complete that Nordstrom’s section. Perhaps I will weave in the ascending motif from measure 15 and mix it with the syncopated vibe. Not sure yet.
After this section is completed, I think I want something minor. I haven’t written anything yet, but maybe this could be the foundation:
Following that, I’d like to introduce a version of the theme in 3/4 time, maybe something kinda funky. To be honest, this is where things get fuzzy. I’ve got a bunch of ideas, but I’m not really sure how they fit together.
You see, though I’m trying to picture the piece in its entirety, I still can’t help but visualize these sections as puzzle pieces waiting to be assembled into a complete picture. I seem to generate little islands of music, then try to string them together into an archipelago.
Well, that’s where I’m at for now. I’ll let you know if I miraculously generate a fully-formed piece in the next hour or so.
I’ve generated enough ideas for this Polish piece, that now I can no longer hide behind the old “I’m still sketching” excuse. I could, if I let myself, just sketch new ideas forever. But then I would never finish anything. Rule number two of Robert Heinlein’s Rules for Writers is “Finish what you start.” It’s time to develop these ideas, flesh them out into a completed thought. That kind of work is the real work of composing, and it’s hard.
I am searching for a suitable beginning to this piece. I like a number of the ideas I have developed, but I’m having trouble deciding which one to start the piece with. I don’t think I want to start the piece with a simple statement of the theme…. I don’t know, it just feels a bit dated to me. Plus the theme has a nice patriotic punch to it, and I’d rather save that punch for later in the piece. I am leaning toward using this iteration of the theme as the beginning:
It’s got a nice vibe to it, mixing major and minor modes. It also states the main theme of the anthem without being too obvious about it. However I don’t know if the timing is quite right yet… More space, less space? So hard to decide. It also feels a bit repetitive to me. But I think it’s in my nature to imagine my music is more annoyingly repetitive than it actually is. My wife Erica recently reminded me that people enjoy a bit of repetition, especially when it comes to the main theme. Music does not need to be a collection of thirty random ideas one after the other in order to be enjoyable. I want to create “art,” but I also want the average listener to enjoy my work. I do not intend to write music solely for musicologists to enjoy (at least not at the moment). I want to write catchy but deep, varied and creative but cleverly organized, modernesque but rooted in solid classical harmony.
I’ve realized I am not a fast composer. I have to turn an idea over and over in my head until I am finally satisfied with it (or resigned to using it). I figure if it’s catchy enough to stick in my brain, then it’s good enough to work with. I have never been one to just churn out perfect, completed music. I take my sweet time. Maybe one day I will learn how to be prolific, but for now I am still studying the art of completing a piece. Sometimes I want to quit. It’s hard to be creative. It’s easier to go watch tv or cruise Facebook… or write a blog post. But if I wish to call myself an artist, I have to make art!
Back to work. I need to decide if this beginning is actually the beginning, or just something I’ve gotten stuck in my head.