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The Central Michigan University New Music Ensemble put out a call for scores. The listing
reads:
"Works must be for open [or] unspecified instrumentation. Scores will not be considered if they require
specific instrumentation. Works must be for a minimum of three and maximum of fifteen
players. There is no maximum or minimum duration, but preference is given to works between five
and fiften minutes in length. Works may include fixed media."
Did you catch that? Scores will note be considered if they require specific instrumentation.
That's our challenge this time around.
To make that work I spent a fair amount of time searching through my sample library to
find instruments that don't have any preexisting connotations in my mind, in order to avoid
subconsciously writing for any particular instrument's techinical limitations or strengths.
That means I ended up looking at a lot of synthesizers at first. For purposes of drafting
though, I settled on a Middle Eastern reed instrument with a throaty sound to it for
the second voice, which in this piece carries the melody. Later I substituted the brass
quintet that you hear here. The choice only has relevance for purposes of presentation,
for the context of communicating the intent of the abstract idea. Since I was constrained
to submit this work without specified instrumentation, what you hear now is not really the work that
I submitted, so much as one potential realization of the work. The thing itself is an artifact
that exists entirely on paper, which is in truth a more accurate representation of the
intent with which I approach the page most of the time. It makes sense that we refer
to this kind of music as absolute music as it aims to exist as an independent entity
entirely within itself. It is its own statement; quite apart from reflection upon anything
else, it asserts simply that this is what is written.
I could only speculate as to why the ensemble chose to place this particular constraint
on the call for scores, but I imagine they'd want to make something of a hermeneutic exercise
out of it. As performers, muscians typicaly expend much of their creative effort in interpereting
the pages of inacessible writers, be they long dead or just hopelessly distant. Even
though we as writers do what we can to make our scores as clear and unambiguous as we
know how, some composers are inevitably better or worse at communicating their intentions
through the printed page to their performers and it ultimately falls to the instrumentalists
and singers to decide on and convey a communicative representation of a score to whomsoever may
be listening.
To add, then, the prohibition against specified instrumentation I suppose at once compounds
and enriches the burden of the performer. By willfully taking an integral compositional
decision out of the hands of the composer, the performer is forced to take responsibility
for the success or failure of his own judgement with which he supplants that of the writer.
It affords an opportunity to diverge from the voice of the writer and advance some other
priority -- some other intiative -- in its place.
To turn to the practicality of the matter though, this piece of music to my mind must
be about strong voice leading and strong counterpoint and not about technique because we don't know
in what mechanical context it may eventually be realized. The adagio tempo helps me focus
on that, since technical considerations will not be so pressing when the notes go by so
slowly as this.
I wrote this melody out completely, without much editing. It's nothing special by itself;
it kind of wanders about until it comes to rest here and there at a cadence point. The
voice leading is technically correct, but more importantly it gives me a frame of reference
from which to write the other voices around it.
With the melodic phrase complete, I repeated it and through-composed the accompaniment.
The medial cadence is mitigated by an elision in a middle voice to avoid the appearance
of a strophic structure.
The B section introduces a chorale texture. I contrast the previous countrapuntal material
with a different subset of my harmonic vocabulary.
I'm working toward a notion of formal function which I think can eventually be divorced entirely
from tonal connotations. This piece is neither the beginning nor the end of that process,
but represents one of many possible perspectives on the concept. You can see evidence of the
idea in the B section, where I've strayed a bit from common-practice melodic and harmonic
conventions, yet you still hear an acceleration of the harmonic rhythm and sequential treatment
of the motivic content immediately following the antecedent. If those characteristics remind
you of a periodic phrase structure as it approaches its terminal cadential formula, then you can
see where I'm coming from. Hopefully I'll eventually find out whether the path that
I'm on won't ultimately bring me to a place at which more of such concepts can be applied
in non-tonal contexts.
That's our challenge for this week. Write a piece of music without specified instrumentation.
If you've got some thoughts, sound off in the comments. Until next time, bye.