Belkin ch. 3

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Main divisions of ch 3
Writing for the voice
Setting words to music
Recitative vs Aria
Musical form and the text
Composing for choir

Personal reflections on ch 3

I composed a 20-min piece for soloists, choir, and instruments called “Cantata for Lent”. A cantata is (usually?) religious in nature and is like an opera but without costumes or action. There are actors, monologues, dialogues, and reactions from a crowd. Some sections are like opera recitative (exposition) and others are like aria (“I’m going to stand here and emote for a few minutes”)

In my cantata, most of the lyrics were taken from a modern translation of Psalms and other passages from the Bible. The melodies followed the rhythm of normal speech. I often used “word painting” (voice raises in pitch when joyful, lowers in pitch for grief).

I had been a member of this choir for several years while working on the composition and so I knew what the choir was capable of. Ex. splitting the choir into male and female sections singing an octave apart was a lovely way to change the timbre without taking up a lot of rehearsal time.

I used a variety of textures:
solo voice
unison choir
unison in octaves (women, men)
3 parts —     soprano & alto, male
4 voices, homophonic (” 4 part harmony”)
rarely — 4 voices, polyphonic (voices moving with complete independence)

I wrote for 4 soloists:
“Wisdom” — a “matronly” alto
Prophetic voice — a soprano with dramatic, brassy timbre
The Devil — a spoken role
Jesus — a tenor

When I wrote the parts I conferred with the soloists and changed things to suit their voices.

There are many more things I would love to write about this experience. I feel very grateful to have been given the opportunity. It was terrifying, and joyful, and included moments of skin-crawling humiliation which I still shudder to recall. Afterward I was completely burned out and did a 90 degree turn away from church music and was seduced by a bamboo flute that I found at a Rennaissance fair. This led to several years of Irish Trad music. But that’s another story 😉

 

 

The Belkin Project

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Some friends and I have been reading Alan Belkin’s book Musical Composition: Craft and Art. We are all at different stages in our musical journey and have found the homework problems to be different degrees of difficult!

I’ve been thinking about how I can make this book part of my music education. Yesterday I did a flying overview of the whole book (chapter names and subheadings). There is a chapter a little past the halfway mark called “Rondo Form” (ch. 14) and I realized that I would really like to compose something in Rondo form.

For the last 6 weeks I have made a big change to my daily schedule: as soon as I wake up, I go outside (carrying a tray with pencil, notebook and coffee) and sit on one of our park benches. There I alternate back and forth between enjoying the nature around me, and capturing my stream of consciousness in a notebook. Many of the chains of thought are visual images. Could I express them as an animated video? I was recently inspired by a visual accompaniment to the Genesis album “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”. In this case the video was not a fully-fledged animation, but instead a series of still images, like a slide show. The still images were given motion by transitions: fade to black, zoom in, cross fade, pan from one side of the image to the other.

I would love to do that!

These morning park bench meditations could make good material for a Rondo composition. A rondo takes the form A B A C A D…   The recurring sunlight, park bench, bird calls could be represented by the “A section”, and the various other streams of thought could be the B, C, D etc.

In conclusion, I  plan to rush through chapters 3 through 9 (not doing the exercises), skip chapters 10 through 14, and focus on chapter 14, Rondo form. With each chapter I will make an outline on a separate “page” of this blog. I’ll put my questions and personal observations on the chapter in daily entries here.

Synchrony

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I’m having a creative phase right now! Several things have lined up —

We’re finally settled into the new house. The seedlings I brought over from the old house are doing well. The plants and I are putting down roots.

I’ve been meeting with my Discord group for about a year! Because of this group I’m getting more consistent about working on music. It’s great to have some people to report back to every 2 weeks.

I JUST installed some software that I purchased 6 months ago. Now I’m exploring these new plugins.

I hit # 500 on my Random Note compositions, and decided to kick it up a notch by entering the latest ones into FL Studio, at least in sketch form. Because of this I’ve been spending about twice as much time on music every day.

These little compositions were interesting enough that it gave me the craving to make videos again. My previous video editing software is gone (motherboard from previous computer died). It was called Movavi and much as I loved it, its latest upgrades have gone off in a direction I didn’t like. I decided to bite the bullet and purchase something different. I picked Pinnacle Studio because it’s a one-time purchase, NOT a subscription model. It’s by Corell and I’ve had good experiences with their software. …So I’ve been struggling with learning Pinnacle Studio for the past 2 weeks. I made a sort of test video and now I’m working on a “welcome back to the channel” video.

A couple days ago I installed Audacity 3.0 on my new computer. This version of Audacity is a little different than what I worked with 5 years ago — it saves projects with a different file extension — but otherwise very similar. The interface looks the same. …I had been putting off this decision because I wanted to force myself to learn Reaper, or, the new Audacity with the new interface and features. But I finally decided to just take it easy on myself and stick to the familiar. As soon as I started editing a sound clip in Audacity I got such a wave of nostalgia. Memories came flooding back — layering and transforming sound clips in a journey of discovery. It’s a safe and familiar place. It surprised me to get such a strong emotional reaction to some SOFTWARE. But wow, it’s good to be back!

Here’s Tantacrul (Martin Keary) talking about the latest changes to Audacity. I have such positive feelings about Martin so I will definitely try it some day.

And just for nostalgia, here’s the video that came out when I was first learning FL Studio. I still think this song is a banger lol

 

Some Videos about Modes

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I haven’t posted here for a while — it’s great to have a reason to come back!

Today at our “Synth Nerds” Discord group, part of our discussion was on modes and how we feel about them. I realized that I had absorbed a lot of my intuition about modes from various videos over the years. So here I will list some of my favorites.

Here’s a video by David Bennett. He teaches music theory from the viewpoint of someone with encyclopedic knowledge of popular music. For every music concept, he can come up with several examples to illustrate it. He’s a little stiff in this video, but when he’s talking about the Beatles he really lights up.

 

Here’s the video with the mode mnemonic that we were laughing about. “I do pot, leave me alone, Locrian”. The whole video is worth watching, but I fast-forwarded to the most pertinent part.

https://youtu.be/DFFqVFNVcYM?si=S7if-6ql9iCMMAdI&t=141

 

What is so weird about Locrian in particular? “This is Locrian, there’s a reason that we don’t use Locrian”. You can never feel at home, because the home chord, the tonic, has a messed up note (the flat fifth).

 

And here’s a group of You Tube friends challenging each other to compose something in Locrian that doesn’t suck.

 

Seven examples from Belkin chapter 2

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Alan Belkin’s text Musical Composition, chapter 2, uses these seven examples

 

Fig. 2.1 Mahler Symphony 3 , Last movement

Fig. 2.2 Beethoven String Quartet # 9 in C major ( op 59, no 3)
Fig. 2.3 Béla Bartók – String Quartet No. 3, Sz. 85
Fig. 2.4 Domenico Scarlatti Sonata in D major K 336
Fig. 2.5 György Ligeti: Sonata for Solo Cello
Fig. 2.6 Debussy plays Debussy – Estampes: No. 2. La soiree dans Grenade (Evening in Granada)
 fig 2.7 Avatar soundtrack — James Horner

Trouble with Focus and Organization

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Since the change in “regime” on Jan. 20, I’ve had a lot of trouble with focus. This past 2 weeks I didn’t hand in any work — even my daily random note exercise had been impossible. I would sit in front of the piano, unable to think. After 300-some random note exercises, it’s interesting that that behavior was knocked off the rails. “I was so upset I couldn’t even do my favorite thing”.

I had my bi-annual meeting with my psychiatrist the previous week and we talked about some behavioral strategies to help with the anxiety. These have been working, and my hum of background anxiety is growing quieter. Yesterday I was unexpectedly gifted with a beautiful set of bookshelves. I decided to make a tapestry fabric panel for the front, and use the rest of the fabric for a screen for the other end of the room. This process took several hours. By the end of it I felt the most normal I had in weeks, and I woke up this morning feeling clear as well.

But even when I am anxiety-free, I still have a lot of trouble deciding WHAT to do. Ex. what to work on first! I think the problem I have with clutter and disorganization also relates to my difficulty with making decisions. The times I’ve done the best with organization and decision making are when there’s a beautiful, singular creative idea that over-arches and unifies the process.

I also have the occasional day when I wake up with clarity and look around and say “I can’t stand X any more, and I know just what to do to fix it”. And other times something makes me angry to the point where I think “fuck it, I’m throwing this stuff away”. But I can’t be too angry, because that leads to destructive decisions! There’s a Goldilocks zone which doesn’t happen very often.

In conclusion, I’m able to make decisions when
it’s just the right kind of project
I’m in just the right mood.

Here is a video I watched today while having lunch. It inspired today’s line of thought.

 

 

 

 

A video by Bandsplaining

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I’ve been thinking about what I will work on after my album project is done. I’m still working on my Random Notes of the Day but currently I’m guided by my mood and patience level. At some point it might be interesting to challenge myself to write in a series of different genres.

This vid talks about “Library Music” — music that was recorded specifically to be used for film and TV — and the many genres it encompasses.

Note, I had not heard of this Youtuber before. He has an interesting series of videos.