A note on musical notation
Give musicians the information they need to do what you want them to.
A saxophone ensemble I’m a member of is preparing one of my pieces (Romp!) for a July premiere. Last weekend in rehearsal, we got to break it down and get into some of the nitty gritty.
The penultimate section builds with a fairly simple texture: soaring melody atop a very active eighth-note accompaniment.
After a full run-through of the music, I asked if we could revisit that section because it didn’t quite have the energy and bob and weave I had been thinking of when I wrote it, specifically the accompanying eighth-notes. Below, hear the recording of us rerunning that section (w/o melody) the first time:
It sounded so lovely and smooth and clean! But it didn’t have the intensity or dynamism I wanted for it as the section builds up to the finish.
However, it turns out they were just playing exactly what I had written on the page…
I had written straight eighth-notes with no particular emphasis. And my skilled colleagues were doing their best (and doing a solid job!) of smoothing out the disjunct lines I had written.
I was hoping that the registral jumping in the eighth-note lines (when a line of steady eighth-notes suddenly jumps up or down) would provide enough of a change in color to clearly define the subdivisions without me having to make those emphases explicit in the individual parts. Here are the subdivisions I wanted to hear:
Turns out I was wrong! I was being too tricky by hiding the ball. I should have given folks more information!
After a bit of prodding about what I wanted and helpful suggestions from others in the group, I realized adding accents where I wanted these subdivisions to be stressed would clear everything right up. Not being able to adjust the parts and print them out new ones on the fly, we did another run-through where my colleagues imagined there were accents where I wanted them and I think the result is much closer to what I was going for!
In the video, you can start to see some of my fellow musicians get into the subdivisions now that they understand what is going on—the way the subdivisions start out big and steady and then gradually get smaller and more irregular as the intensity of the music builds to the final bars.
Afterwards, folks let me know it was a lot more fun to play with this added information. In the earlier version, it looked like 10 bars of straight articulated eighth-notes, which is not a particularly fun or pleasant thing to do on saxophone. Out of all those notes, it was hard to know which were more and less important.
After feedback like that, you’d better believe I went right home and fixed up those parts and sent them out…!
Moral of the story is 1) talk to musicians (even when you are one and think you know better…) and 2) give them enough information to do what you want them to do!
If you want to learn more about how I wrote this music (and how I’m rearranging it for multiple ensembles!), I wrote a couple of posts on it.