This article is adapted from an entry in a journal I’ve been keeping since late 2019. Not every piece I write makes it into my composer’s journal. In fact I’ll usually let a few months pass before I decide whether or not to add a recently completed piece to the journal.
The point of the journal is not simply to reflect on the piece, but on the process of its composition. It’s about better understanding the practice and not just the result— though both take their place in my reflections.
This won’t be the first entry to make it here, either. Little by little I’ll adapt each entry into an article like this one, including any future entries. This journal has mostly been for my own benefit, but I’ve become interested in opening it to others because of my interest in education— composition pedagogy in particular.
So without further ado, here’s entry #1 in my composer’s journal: The Becoming, for solo piano.
From Bachelor to Master
In the fall of 2017, five years after completing my Bachelors degree, I began work on my Masters at Northern Illinois University. Not without trepidation, I might add— I don’t know if you noticed, but that’s a five year gap between programs. For a considerable period of time, I was really unsure of whether I wanted to continue my education and pursue graduate work. This delay had less to do with uncertainty about music, and more to do with uncertainty about myself. Would I have what it takes to do it? Imposter syndrome is not a joke, Jim.
This wasn’t just about your garden variety imposter syndrome type stuff, though. I’m not sure what your musical background is, personally, but studying composition in an academic environment exposes you to a lot of musical ideas and styles you might not have encountered otherwise. Many of these styles and ideas are often grouped together under one or more of a few blanket terms: New Music, atonal music, experimental music, and others.
(Click the underlined to link out to other articles or relevant materials. I would prefer to give you the Grove’s Dictionary entries for the above, but not everyone has that institutional access. When I find a more thorough, freely accessible write up on these things, I’ll switch out the links).
When I first came across some of this music during my undergraduate work, I was both fascinated and confounded. Encountering new forms of music or art can be inspiring, even thrilling; but it can also be shocking, disorienting. I remember the day my theory professor played for us an excerpt of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. One of my classmates was so repulsed by the sprechstimme that he overturned his desk and stormed out of the classroom— insert Stravisnky/Nijinksy Rite of Spring joke here.
Now whether this is old news to you or not, I think it’s worth while to consider or remember that people can have strong feelings about music that subverts or defies their expectations for what music does and doesn’t do. And during my undergraduate work, I had not found my footing in those spaces. And honestly, I was not at that time sure I really wanted to.
But in 2017, as I prepared to continue my education, I resolved to return to those spaces with a posture of curiosity. I came to my Masters program with questions about New Music. I wanted to better understand how these musics were put together, and why they were put together that way. More than this, I wanted to see if I might find new ways to imagine— and not at the expense of what I already loved about music, but in addition to it.
Inspirations for The Becoming
During that first semester at NIU, I was quickly exposed to the music of several composers that were new to me: Gérard Grisey, Donnacha Dennehy, Julia Wolfe, and Salvatore Sciarrino. Grisey’s spectralism was groundbreaking and fascinating of course, but it was his gestural and textural use of droning figures that made the deepest impact on me. They were shapes I could conceptualize, solid footing from which to conceptualize the rest. Wolfe’s use of folk and popular idioms in pieces like Steel Hammer and Anthracite Fields further encouraged my growing security in the desire to integrate my present musical values with new ideas— rather than supplant them.
Sciarrino’s Un’immagine di Arpocrate in particular would go on to inform my doctoral dissertation, but all four in one way or another drew my attention to an idea of material. I now know that the term idiom is probably more precise, but at the time this was the word that came to mind. I was looking for a place to start, a place from which to begin imagining. If not melodies or melodic fragments, if not periodic meters or rhythms, then what?
Highlights from The Becoming
With the piece that would become The Becoming (no pun intended), I settled on a persisting piano tremolo as a droning figure. I wanted to try working with a constant stream of sound rather than motivic gestures, to see what kind of approach this different kind of material would require of me. Inspired somewhat by Grisey’s extensive use of spectral analysis, I decided to make use of the overtone series as a textural shape toward which to expand that piano tremolo— with deviations from this mold serving as a means by which to create tension.
As you can see in the image above, time mostly unfolds in seconds rather than metered units— with the indicated number of seconds being approximate. Approximation is an important thing to this piece, actually. For instance, the streams of flurried notes (quarters to feathered beams) shouldn’t be played with the precise number of indicated notes, but in an approximated figure over the indicated period of time (8 seconds in this case).
This next image shows a passage that plays an important role in the scope of the piece. While looking over Grisey’s Periodes with my composition teacher, Dr. Brian Penkrot, he pointed out a place in the piece that served as what he called a moment of repose— something of a reprieve from the push and pull of tension and release. This stuck with me, and I decided to build something similar in the scope of this piece. The gentle octave E’s, placed in a range yet unused in the piece, bring a moment of new and fresh color.
Now that push and pull I mentioned is largely created through deviation and return— from and to the overtone series mold, as I also mentioned earlier. The image above shows the appearance of an Eb and Bb at a position that is serially out of place. Other similar and more extreme deviations appear elsewhere. The images below show a few examples of this— clusters, and did I mentioned clusters?
The process of deviation and return is something I still think about, something that still interests me. I feel like it governs so many of the choices we make in many different kinds of art— music and story-telling in particular. So far I’ve pointed toward how I explored this idea via pitch content. But I also explored this idea in the use of time.
Around this same time I was exposed to music that explored phasing processes. Now while Steve Reich’s Clapping Music is probably the first thing most of us encounter, it’s more recent electronic examples that really struck me. Phasing processes have been making the rounds as trends in social media over the past couple years. Here’s one example. And here’s another.
That’s right. I got an idea for a composition from videos I saw on YouTube and TikTok. I’m a little busy today but if you email me we can schedule my appointment to be tar’d-and-feather’d at our mutual convenience.
Anyway, these videos just tickled my brain so much. As the sounds moved into and out of phase with each other, I experienced this series of emergences. I heard arpeggios crystallize and melt into the chaos, I heard polyrhythms or familiar sound grooves take shape and then slip away. This was just fascinating to me. I wanted to recreate this kind of emergence.
The image above shows a way in which I attempted this— in the midst of an unmetered tremolo a clearly rhythmic groove takes shape, and then melts back into the tremolo. The image below (8) shows a similar passage toward the end of the piece.
Feedback and Reflection
A few years later, I would go on to present The Becoming at a composer’s seminar during my studies at the University of Iowa. Now the language I’ve used to describe the piece here is actually fairly different from how I described it then. At the time I composed it, I conceptualized my musical choices by creating something of a narrative in which the persisting piano tremolo represented a kind of living entity. In this narrative those deviations I mentioned were re-conceptualized as failures and mistakes, and emergences as acts of intent on the part of that entity.
During the course of this presentation, a colleague gave me some feedback that at first rocked my thinking pretty hard, but I have since come to value very deeply. They said that while they were able to follow my thinking and to make the connections between the ideas I described and the actual musical choices I made, these connections would not have been made without my explanation. In other words, my particular ideas about those choices were not communicated by the sounds alone.
Now yes, “duh”, and so on. But to an extent, it really was something I had attempted. In my labors to expand my practice and my imagination, I’d narrowed my intellectual focus on a narrative as a conceptual tool for making compositional choices. I would later come to recognize ways this sort of thing played out my composition of other pieces, to the detriment of my ability to think more precisely about the musical choices themselves. I would later go on to confront this tendency in my work, and have been working toward a more balanced perspective.
I’m hoping that this last anecdote illustrates the purpose of my composer’s journal. If you’re a composer or creative of any kind you probably know how important editing and revision are for the quality of our work. They help us to bring critical and evaluative thinking to our creative processes. My journal has been something like that, a place in which to reflect on my practice and ask myself questions about it.
We often find space to consider what worked after a performance, whether we’re reveling in success or kicking ourselves for not knowing something wouldn’t have worked in the first place. But really, we spend far more time writing the piece than we do experiencing its premiere. I want to improve my practice not only for better results, but for a better process.