Tilted Sunward

How writing a piece of music is like trying to hit a moving target

As summer falls, September becomes October, and blue skies yield to grey, I'm finishing some music I began during the summer solstice that very much expresses the season as well as this current moment: its ending. 

On the eve of (hopeful) completion, I wanted to look back on the creative problems I worked to overcome (including the final one I'm working right now) and how fascination with a simple musical idea sprouted something that picks you up, takes you somewhere, and puts you down  - hopefully not quite where it found you.

My north star for what the piece is about changed multiple times throughout its writing (and may yet change!).

My favorite way to make progress (and get unstuck!) on something you’re making/writing/composing is to try to be clear what you think you’re making is about - and then revisit that definition frequently to see if it’s still true.

So instead of working directly on the music, I’m going to write about the evolution of what I think the music has been about—so I can figure out how to finish the music—pretty meta!

Version 1 of what it's about

How much music can I write using only two chords?

This is the exploratory pre-piece phase. The germinating chunk of the piece was inspired by a now-lost-to-me YouTube video where a jazz pianist was demonstrating a technique for creating harmony and melody using only the pitches of two non-diatonically related chords. I always enjoy the challenge presented by limiting your musical materials and chose two chords more or less at random - D Major and C Major. After some brief plunking at the keyboard, I came up with a propulsive rhythm that when combined with the chords in oscillation had real infectiousness:

I spent the next hour riding the energy of that first bar, which spun out into 42 bars of music, exploring the high-octane wonders of D and C major in rapid juxtaposition.

This initial section has more or less gone unchanged from the first version to the current.

After a few breathless climaxes, this listener needed a reprieve. I let some of the air out of the balloon, the material fragmenting and winding down to a near dead stop. But now what?

Back to the piano to see what else D Major and C Major could do…

To this point, having (mostly) heard only two chords, I realized introducing a totally new chord would be especially impactful, lending an extra freshness to the next section, a new door opening. So I broke the rule (two chords only!) that had gotten the music this far, and I’m glad I did.

Version 2 of what it's about

Okay, now we have this really energetic idea and this calm idea - what (if anything) do they have to do with one another?

Sometimes two highly contrasting ideas end up in the same sketch. Sometimes they end up belonging together, sometimes I’m unable to make the connection. In this case, I proceeded as if the two were related trying my best to tie them together thematically though their moods and energies were divergent.

Eventually, the contrasting idea became more active and making some kind of return to the energy of the beginning seemed appropriate.

I began to see the link between the two ideas; though one was invigorating and one was calming, both shared a sunny, hopeful orientation.

Version 3 of what it's about

Summer!

Sunny? Hopeful? Maybe this thing is about summer! Those long days where we are all solar powered and can go 20% further and do 50% more things (at least we think we can)! At this point, I made summer the cohering principle as I laid down the frame of the rest of the piece.

One thing that is true about my summers is things start fairly organized and reasonable. But as the weeks start flying, plans and obligations pile up, projects and cleanliness around the house are neglected, the garden goes feral and forlorn, my friends begin to miss me - my focus is: outside, out of the city, out of the normal constraints of time! This sequence of relative “order-to-chaos” became something of a model for how the more energetic sections of the music progressed, each reaching some kind of overload that led to a hard reset: the intervention of the more calming mood.

Version 4 of what it's about

Summer, thankfulness for people and our place in the world, finding a balance

I finally had enough down on the page that there was a beginning, middle, and end that were moderately convincing: at the smallest scale, I found the ideas interesting; in the middle distance, juxtaposition from episode to episode was also engaging; but zoomed all the way out to view the piece as a whole, the two ideas still seemed like they were talking past each other, that they were never really interacting. At the end there was an energetic denouement, but there wasn’t a thematic reconciliation of some sort.

I found myself returning to that early concern that I had chosen to overlook: did these two ideas really belong within the same piece of music? I had been keeping the two ideas pretty walled off from each other and had allowed their surface-level attractiveness to keep me from considering how to integrate them.

This is where some deeper intuition—maybe the same one that had me put these two ideas in the same piece of music in the first place?—nudged me to simply have both ideas sound simultaneously in more or less their original forms.

That was it.

They fit together so well, the character of each idea melded into the alloy I needed. The music had the energy but also the gravitas and sweep the musical moment needed, the sense of pulling back to look at the whole picture. Swapping out the second to last “episode” for this simultaneous restatement of both ideas, the overall structure of the piece became clear.

Order, Chaos, Integration.

“Calm” comes out the other side of the climax not as triumphant over “energetic”, but as hard-earned wisdom about balance in life—a lesson for myself, perhaps in response to a life at times too seasonally lived.

When this integrated music played through my head while writing cards to celebrate the weddings of friends, while sitting on the sides of mountains overlooking glacial valleys, I knew I had hit the mark.

I think this cake is baked! There’s some tinkering around the edges needed, of course, but I’ll be happy to fully share this with the rest of the world in the next few months…!

As usual: happy writing!