Reframing/repackaging an old piece of music

Writing a new beginning and ending to make a movement of music stand alone

Recently, there’s been some consistent interest in playing my music for saxophone ensemble. Within that interest, I’ve come across a subset of folks who can’t/don’t want to program a piece as long as those I’ve written (which range from 8 to 18 minutes), aka they want something shorter. So let’s make something shorter!

Writing a new frame for the music

Within my piece After the Bell is a section of music that is fun, energetic, and engaging while being relatively self-contained; I’ve always thought with a little nudging around, it could make a good stand-alone piece, a solid concert opener:

This is the third movement of After the Bell, a piece normally performed with no break between movements, hence the sudden (and kind of inconclusive) way it ends, setting up the next contrasting movement.

At the least, to stand alone, I think it needs a new ending, one that is more consistent with the energy in the rest of the movement, leaving a sense of completion at the end rather than a question mark. And the beginning of this movement sounds a bit perfunctory to me if nothing proceeds it—perhaps because I’m used to hearing the movement in context.

A new beginning

So we’re in a situation where we need a new beginning and ending. Where do we find material that yells “beginning!” and has a clear connection to the main material of the music?

Looking under the hood of the music we’re working with, most of the musical material in After the Bell (including movement 3) is built off of these four rising notes:

And much of the texture in movement 3 is driven by steady eighth-note rhythms:

So what if we took these two elements, which are combined in the third movement, and briefly put them into conversation with one another before introducing them in their combined form?

(Sidenote: Alan Belkin (professor, composer, pedagogue) has a short and illustrative video about the elements of a good beginning I think about regularly)

I like it: it’s bracing, quickly builds interest before shrinking away, and it gives us a place to pick back up at the end of the piece to round things off.

A new ending

I struggled a bit with where exactly to depart from the original music into a new ending, trying three or four spots before eventually settling where I did. I knew that I wanted the music to build to a climax before running into a verbatim repeat of the first several bars of the of the beginning. But whereas the beginning starts to come apart and trail off after the initial statement, the ending needs to take the energy from the climax of the original music and go even further with it.

By the time we get to the ending of the original music, the energetic eighth-note texture has been established. What if we take that texture and intensify it a bit, expanding it in a fresh way to build to new heights? To keep the energy building, I worked in some fun, unpredictable subdivisions in the eighth-note lines that cause the music to sometimes dig in, sometimes float, sometimes bob and weave. The melody atop the activity came in a flash (derived from the main melody in the original music for a hint of familiarity and continuity) and is a bit of a throwaway but still effective as something that floats above and cuts through the activity below. Take a listen to the splice from the original music into the new ending and see what you think:

I’m pretty happy with these ideas so far; the new music has a really exciting energy I didn’t know was hiding in the material and I hope I can do it justice! At the splice, there’s inadvertently a pretty clear quoting of a number from Les Miserables—see if you can spot it!

The more and more I listen to this, the more I think this could also be really effective as an arrangement for wind band—a new project!

Thank you for following along—let me know what you think of the new beginning and ending!