Surfeit

In the end, composers want to be appreciated. Money's nice but applause is better. I'm lucky to have found a classical music performance vehicle in a group of classical and opera lovers that meet monthly to performances.

At these peformances I've been cycling through what I call a Hexatone. This is a st of 6 capriccios progressing from through the keys of C,D,E,F,G, and A. I've written and performed all but the last of these. Four have been for solo piano; two have been duets for piano and violin.

A cappriccio by definition is lively and not hide-bound to structure. At the same time, I am a great devotee to harmonic and metrical structure. I like my passages to have 4, 8, 16 bars. I think our minds like this. Once in a while I appreciate doubling the last bar to create extended tension. Simple, huh?

Having a place to play live classical music is a treat because I get to test out ideas and listen to the audience response. They, too, seem to respond better to the clarity and predictability that comes from a structured pattern. And, at a compositional level, the voice of a piece is the melody. The more structured the underlying chord progression, the easier it is to craft a compelling and novel melody.

Not everyone puts their emphasis here. Composers who concentrate on harmonics and timbres don't seem to prioritize melody, tension and resolutions. They may be gifted at their pursuits. It just doesn't hold the same appeal for me. Prokofiev is a master of texture. Mozart was not such a master. But I'm more likely to be whistling Mozart half an hour later than anything I hear by Prokofiev (whom I am analyzing at the moment) .

Growth, however, requires a push. Sometimes we have to crawl out of a cozy valley and climb up the ridge to see the surrounding horizon. So as I explore expanded measure patterns I am also exploring expanded scale runs. There is a passage in Beethoven's Pastoral Sonata (the 15th?) that always tickled me. it was the inclusion of a non scale note, perhaps a flatted 5th. Now, tickling is a great experience in music because you know something is happening. Someone is violating our expectations, but not enough to break our interest. That is art. That is effect.

So the idea is that if you want to craft a run from High C to middle C that instead of it taking 7 notes, it might take 8 or 9. This is not surfeit; its not too many notes. It ornaments the tonality in an applicable way. But which note do you insert? The flatted 5th is nice and customary to my ears as it evokes the blues scale. But for a classic feel, adding the extra 7th has a melodic flavor; this is the major 7th if the flatted 7th was expected or vice versa.

So now I have two paths to explore: Extended bar patterns and extended scales. How rich! I've been getting a lot of mileage out of my vast experiments with diminished chord structures. I'm not sure anything will prove as liberating as that handy tool. After finding a hundred uses for it you feel idiotic that you hadn't been using it before. It makes some of your previous compositions seem monochromatic. It would be a delight if my experiments with denser scales should prove so enabling.

So there.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

One of the fortunes we have that were not afforded to Haydn, Bach and Mozart is that we can turn on the radio any time we like and here outstanding music-- for free. Our exposure can be as high as we like. We must appreciate that.

Hold on just a moment... I'm appreciating that....

OK that's good.


Nothing inspires confidence more than hearing something you don't like. You can tell yourself "I can do better than that." Really? "Yeah, I think so." Listening to the radio or CDs exposes you to fantastic music as well as some that you just don't like.

What I've found is what I don't like is music without structure. Especially structure at the bar level. I'm OK with pieces that lack large structure. I don't care if a symphony is in 2,3,4 or 5 movements. But I get irritated when there is no apparent structural organization. I like Mozart's tidy 4 or 8 bar motifs. I like, (perhaps because I'm simple) tension and resolution. I like a good old fashion V7 chord resolving to the tonic. Structure is my friend. Lack of structure is harder to grab onto. It's less inviting and less compelling. It feels dissolute.

So, naturally, it becomes time for me to explore what I despise. And the truth is, even my favorite composers stretch the structure out of recognition. My quest is to understand why and in what ways. What is the order behind their chaos.

The first way I experiment with is simply extending a tension by another bar before the resolution. That's fine. Not too big of a stretch. Not too glaring. Doesn't really detach the audience from the end of your tether.

Then I began experimenting with vaster selections of non predictable structure. Some is acceptable as a graceful pasture for the mind to wander in. Any more than that, exceeds my patience and leads to the worst of all musical sins: boring the audience. I teeter back from the edge and decide that this is as far as I can go at this time.

So there.