White, Unexplored

Interlude I

Recently I have been reading Royal S. Brown’s “Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music”. It is quite good, if a bit dry in places. A particular passage this afternoon caught my attention; at the end of a section discussing the collaborative efforts of Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone he includes a brief overview of the film “My Name is Nobody”, a film obsessed with western “mythology”. Of note, Morricone in his theme for the “Wild Bunch”, the villains of the picture, includes a large chunk of “The Ride of the Valkyries” from Wagner’s Die Walkure. Brown posits that Morricone’s reasons for so doing are that, far beyond the tie-in of “riding”, music in Wagner’s operas has had a far reaching influence on film scoring, and musical structure and ideas in Wagner’s operas (and certainly in the Ring Cycle) in effect act as parallel and, sometimes, comment upon myth.

So a comment from Wagner on (German) mythological ideas becomes a comment on Spaghetti Western mythological ideas. (And then a comment on myth as a whole?)

The epiphany for me was that this made clear the appearance of “Ride of the Valkyries”, in a Morricone-esque instrumentation of banjos and kazoos, in Gore Verbinski’s film “Rango”. On the surface the appearance of that piece in “Rango” seems a parodical reference to “Apocalypse Now”, as the villains appear riding bats a la the helicopter gunships of that film. But “Rango”, a decidedly “cerebral” effort for what is ostensibly a children’s movie, is also obsessed with the mythology of westerns, spaghetti and not, with characters taking on archetypes of mythical proportions. The obvious answer is that the appearance of “Ride of the Valkyries” is a reference to both “Apocalypse Now” and “My Name is Nobody”. The visual cue in the film as a reference to “Apocalypse Now” and the aural cue, in the context of the film overall, as a reference to “My Name is Nobody”.

There’s nothing quite like the movies.

Excellent advice on self -criticism from Arnold Schoenberg

From Schoenberg’s awesome Fundamentals of Musical Composition.

“The preceding discussion of melody and theme is chiefly aesthetic, rather than technical. Technical advice can be formulated more easily in the negative than in the positive. The sense of melody enables one who has it to do the right thing at once without the intervention of self-criticism, but even a master may stray on to the wrong track.

1. LISTEN

Play or read harmony and melody separately several times. This sometimes prevents self-deception. Perhaps only one of these factors is poor, its shortcomings hidden behind the virtues of the other. If the harmonic progression is satisfactory the beginner may easily overlook shortcomings in his melody. A good melody is smooth, fluent and balanced when it is played without accompaniment.

(Every good musician must possess the ‘inner ear’, auditory imagery, the capacity of hearing music in imagination.)

2. ANALYSE

Be conscious of the significant features of the basic motive, and determine whether they, or the less characteristic, are developed. There may be empty segments with no real content, without significant melodic or rhythmic movement, even without harmonic change.

3. ELIMINATE NON-ESSENTIALS

Too much variation, too much embellishment and figuration, excessively remote motive-variations , too abrupt a change of register, may contribute to imbalance.

4. AVOID MONOTONY

Too many repetitions of tones or melodic figures are annoying, if they do not exploit the advantage of a repetition— emphasis. Watch especially the highest tone of the melody. The climax normally appears toward the end, and can be repeated or exceeded only with caution. Beware of too restricted a compass, and avoid moving too long in one direction. Evaluate sensitively the endings of phrases.

5. WATCH THE BASS LINE

The bass was previously described as a ‘second melody’. This means that it is subject to somewhat the same requirements as the principal melody. It should be rhythmically balanced, should avoid the monotony of unnecessary repetitions, should have some variety of contour, and should make full use of inversions (especially of seventh chords). Chromatic progression can be as melodically advantageous in the bass as in the principal melody. Semi- and quasi-counterpoint help to make the bass interesting.

6. MAKE MANY SKETCHES

Change the method of variation frequently. Try each method several times. Join the best sketches to produce others and improve them until the result is satisfactory. To make sketches in a humble and unpretentious approach toward perfection. A beginner who is not too self-assured, who does not believe too firmly in his ‘infallibility’, and who knows that he has not yet reached technical maturity, will consider everything he writes as tentative. Later he will be able to base his composing exclusively on his sense of form. The student should frequently review the methods of motive variation. Methodical variation is no substitute for invention, but it may be stimulating, like the athlete’s ‘warm-up’.

7. WATCH THE HARMONY; WATCH THE ROOT PROGRESSION; WATCH THE BASS LINE”

There is no Try

Composing is either something you must do, or it is not.

If it is, get on with it.

Composition, Google Maps, and more!

I think it might have been Arnold Schoenberg who wrote about how even though a piece of music is perceived temporally from beginning to end it exists for the composer in an instant. This is how music exists on paper, beginning to end and middle are all there in one place, perceivable at one time. Static, complete. It’s like taking a scene from a film and putting the celluloid on the wall so everything can be seen at once.

In Simple Composition, Charles Wuorinen gives the sage advice that a draft of a piece should contain roughly the same detail throughout. This is sort of like planning a trip using Google Maps. We might start zoomed out somewhat to give a nice overview, and then set our start and end points. Where we are and where we want to be. We might then zoom in a little bit and start tweaking points along the journey, a stop at a restaurant here or a little jog over to visit friends there, etc. As we keep zooming in to make the route more exact more and more details become apparent, side streets and houses and so on.

When we make the journey everything passes by in sequence, but the map shows everything at once. If we are stopped at that aforementioned restaurant we can look ahead and see how far away and just where our friends’ house is. Even though we perceive the trip moving through time we can understand it as a whole unit.

So with a draft of a piece of music we have a beginning and middle and end, and we can slowly zoom in and add details throughout until it is finished. And even though we perceive the music temporally when performed we can understand it as a whole unit also.

Is pre-composition a waste of time?

A lot of my classmates, when I was in my undergraduate, seemed to dislike the idea of pre-compositional work. After deciding upon an ensemble they would dive straight into writing, no formal scheme in place and no defined thematic ideas upfront. This frequently resulted in backtracking, getting halfway through a movement and realizing that the material now in play was far better than that with which they had begun. (This is also a danger of trying to write from beginning to end of a movement.) More work in the long run, not to mention the frustration, than if they had at least made a few preliminary jottings to keep their bearings. (I can’t be too harsh though, several of my former classmates are far more accomplished composers than I.)

All the great composers started with some form of preliminary work. Even Stravinsky and Schoenberg, for whom composition was clearly not difficult on the whole, spent a lot of time sketching and working over ideas before putting them in shape. Beethoven’s sketchbooks clearly show the care with which he crafted his themes.

I attempt to sketch some every day, it builds character and, if focused, can provide fertile material for later use. More importantly, I now try to plan ahead with all my pieces before diving into the actual writing.