Tag Archives: arrangement

I remember now why syncopation is such a royal pain.

The notation. It’s eye-watering to write down syncopated music. Isn’t there some better way of notating this?

ETA: Reading over some Joplin sheet, and he doesn’t seem to beam more than four 16ths together at a time, which is ideal; beaming a quarter note’s worth is the thing to do, anyhow. I wonder if I can’t halve the measures on the thing I’m writing and double all the note values just to make things easier.

I need to make the measures match up with what I’ve done before and see if that will improve things, because having an entire measure filled with a spattering of flags and dots that are beamed to the point where you really can’t use the beams to determine the rhythm is just not working. What I’m doing with my fingers is not that hard to latch onto; there must be a way to enable the visual representation to make as much sense.

It will all be greatly improved once the left hand gets put into place as well. That always functions well as a sort of metronome. But for right now, with only the melody in place, it’s making my eyeballs knock together.

Rhythmic complexity

I also want to do something with a bit more syncopation in it. For someone who adores Scott Joplin, I really don’t seem to write like that much. I keep hearing a sort of semi-jazz version of the sinfonia that runs up to “Pompe vane di morte,” so we’ll see how that goes. I think I’ll poke at that tonight.

Wow.

Last night, I printed out and tucked into a manila folder my eighth piano piece of a collection.

Wow.

That’s where the past couples years of weekends have gone, into that folder.

Now, I buy an audio cable and see if I can’t finagle this stuff in Audacity to the point where it sounds decent. Despite it marking me as a fatally out-of-touch amateur, I will not record to FLAC. If I were in a studio and miccing an acoustic, yes. But recording to FLAC from a digital piano makes no sense to me. MP3 and WAV are fine for that purpose.

So last night, I dragged out the arrangement I’d done of “Se fiera belva ha cinto” again and had some fun with it. That is the most infectious pop intro I’ve ever heard in my life, and it was written nearly three hundred years ago. Neil Diamond wishes he could write hooks like that. And it felt wonderful. :-)

I’ve got a list of intros/sinfonias that I’d like to work on as part of the Haendel Variations project. So far it’s looking like:

  1. The opener to “Dove sei?” although I’d like to get the aria down as well. I do have this opener worked out, the whole thing plus the following rec. accompagnato, but I stopped about half a verse into the aria itself.
  2. The intro for “Se fiera belva ha cinto,” which I’ve worked out.
  3. The intro for “Sospetti, affetti, e timori” and possibly the whole thing here as well since I love it so much.
  4. The intro to “Con rauco mormorio,” which I’ve already done since I’ve got that one finished for piano and viola.

I am mulling “Son nata a lagrimar” as well, but the thing is, all the others are from Rodelinda, and that indicates that it might be fun to make it Rodelinda Variations and keep to that opera as a theme. Later on, I might do the same with Cesare but for now I think I’d like to keep it to this one opera. That means that I might need to do another aria, and … I’m not sure which one. I’m curious about some of Garibaldo’s arias, but there is a problem with putting a basso aria on a piano in that the melody and the accomp bang into one another. :-( They would work best as piano+cello pieces, I think.

There’s “Pastorello d’un povero armento,” as a possibility, which I like. I’d love to do one of Rodelinda’s arias, but they don’t necessarily leap out at me. I’ve got to chew on that. (GAWD, I wish I could do the sinfonia from “V’adoro pupille,” but that will wait for the Cesare Variations project.) I think I just relate to the lower voices more; I’m nowhere near a soprano and pretty much sing tenor when I sing. Typical operatic women’s stuff just isn’t in my range.

“Di chi? Di che?” might be cute. That’s a bit lighter and bouncier than the others …

So anyhow what it means is that I already have three of these four intros/sinfonias worked out at their most “faithful” level, and one variation done on “Se fiera belva ha cinto.” So I need to work out the intro to “Sospetti,” and then get moving on the variations and see how much music this results in. I need to write out the chords on all of them as well — both the actual chords and the Vs and IVs and that sort of junk as well. That really helps. If it doesn’t turn out on the order of an hour of music, I’ll go looking for another aria to work with. Otherwise, these four will do it.

Jeez, I’ve had two projects in mind since I got on this ride — a collection of my own work and a Haendel variations collection — and the minute I pop one off the stack, another one arises to take its place, and I’m back to doing one and keeping another one in mind as next in line. I guess that’s how it’s going to go from now on. At least I’m not running out of ideas.

ETA: Hm, maybe the opening to “Confusa se miri” will work.

ETA2: Or the opening to the one where she tells Grimoaldo to piss off after he proposes to her just after “Ho perduto.” I don’t know the opening lines exactly, but it’s something like “Villainous fate may have reduced me, but it will not bring me to dishonor.”

Never been a huge Liszt fan, but …

These things are fun! I love listening to what someone else’s impression is of the symphonies and seeing whether the same things that caught his ear are what catch mine. It’s also interesting to see how someone with that technique could “chunk” streams of notes. I’m still in the note-by-note mentality, although I can sense myself moving out of it slo-o-o-o-owly, and only because I’m shoving at myself to move out of it. But there are more than a few streams of zillionth notes in the scores that look more like a halftone photograph seen from a distance, where the dots resolve into something smooth and graduated. I’m still working dot-by-dot, and I may always tend that way. I remember when I did graphic art by hand, and my favorite piece of equipment was a rapidograph and not a brush. I may always tend to resolve things into dots unless I make myself squint and stand back, but it’s really neat to see the impression that those symphonies left on someone who could do both well.

And honestly, I also love the fact that my instrument can support so much complex music, and give a fairly decent impression of some really involved stuff, all on its lonesome. Pianos rule. :-)

I got a huge kick out of seeing parts of the music with “hautbois, flute, viola, clarinet,” written over the phrases and thinking, “Yep, and it’s all on a piano!” Of course, the piano has a more limited tonal palette; you can’t bend notes on one, nor can you have a vibrato or a really smooth glissando, and you can’t sustain. But trading in all of that for the power to reproduce something that otherwise takes 105 people to bring it to life … that’s a fair trade in my opinion.

I wonder if Cameron Carpenter has ever contemplated moving these onto an organ? That’s another instrument that could do justice to this whole idea, and he’s moved pianistic things onto the organ before. Of course there’s a translation process that has to take place; some effects on a piano just don’t translate to a wind instrument, but Carpenter has negotiated that really well in the past. It’d be fun to see how he’d approach one of these things, especially #3.

(BTW, I’m not playing them. I’m listening to Konstantin Scherbakov play them. I’ve got some serious sweat equity to put in before I can even think about playing these things.)

Missing Haendel

You know, I just opened a PDF of that old sheet I was working up of “Son nata a lagrimar” for piano, viola, and violin. It’s such a beautiful piece of music, and I really do miss doing these arrangements. I know that I prioritized my own work ahead of arrangements of anything else (be it Haendel, Keating, or Schmidt), and that is the best thing to do right now because getting my own stuff out is absolutely top priority.

But once that’s done, and I feel that I can relax a bit, I really can’t wait to get back to the Haendel stuff. Themes and variations, arrangements for strings, that sort of thing. I might ask my old viola teacher whether or not he and his wife would be willing to read things with me and add in various markings for bowings and stuff that would make the music easier for a string player. I don’t know enough of that sort of thing, what a good player would expect to see on the page and what they could or would rather do without.

Basically, I’m just homesick for Haendel.

A multi-voice piece

I seem to be writing something that assumes, to an extent, that the pianist has three hands. Not that it’s very hard or anything, it just bounces things around among SATB with very little regard for the fact that the piano only uses two clefs. I’m not sure that another pianist would appreciate that much, having to track where the dominant voice is as it ping-pongs around. Dynamic markings will probably be more important on this piece. (Shit. I hate putting them down. It’s like marking facial expressions on a script. >_<)

I think I've officially been listening to Jeff Schmidt too much lately. (And Rachmaninoff.)

I really want to work on arranging a couple of Schmidt’s pieces, specifically “Apotheosis” and “From Under the Weight of Knowing,” but I keep prioritizing my own things ahead of them, which is as it should be. Nevertheless, these pieces continue to nag me. I especially can’t listen to the last one without feeling like my hands want to bounce around. For anyone who is interested, visit his download page at TradeBit and grab the Outré CD. It is truly worth it. He also bounces things around between voices and in a very unique way since he plays “over the bass” (right-strung guitar played with left hand) and hence the lower voices in his work carry a lot of the load.

For my own piece, I am piddling with it at a snail’s pace like I always do, and am not at all confident in the thing. I’m also very concerned that I’m just rewriting the last six-flat piece I did, so I’ll have to sit down and give that another listen to make sure it’s not blatant. A few similar chord progressions are one thing, but I don’t want to rip my own self off, here.

This is the kind of thing that will keep me from ever buying another viola.

Insanity comes in many shapes and sizes

I absolutely cannot afford it — he’s asking for a house down payment, which I do not have — but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep an eye on the thing, and on other classical-style organs on Craigslist. Oh, to be able to score an entire opera with different stops and sounds and things …

Just looking at that Rodgers is enough to make me explode, but it would be like handing a Kalashnikov to an 8-month old baby. The second looks wonderful, but I don’t know if that model is good for classical music. I’m not looking for siss-boom-bah.

ETA: You know, I think that there is something about making gobs and gobs of notes at once that’s appealing to certain types, much more so than playing something that’s for all intents and purposes, one note at a time. Sure, string players can play two- or three-note chords, but it really is a single-note instrument at bottom. It’s more about the quality of the sound than about the structure that’s created, I think. And the more I think about it, the more I really am on the side of wanting to just play more notes at once.

The first time I looked ahead in the second Suzuki viola book, I remember seeing “Minuet in G” there. Like thousands of young piano students, I had played it as a kid. I never got over the general feeling of thinness and insubstantiality that I had while looking at the sheet music. I’ve said before that strings are an inch wide and a mile deep, where as piano are an inch deep and a mile wide. (Organs are miles in both directions, which I suppose is why most organist are a little cracked upstairs. You’d have to be.) String players seem naturally to be able to find joy and fascination in that drilling down process, whereas maybe keyboard players (and certainly this keyboard player) take more pleasure in getting high up and seeing outward.

It’s not hard and fast, of course. Keyboard players have to be able to drill down, and a good string player has to look outward, if only to blend themselves properly with the others around them. But I think our first instincts are to either drill down as a string player, or look outward as a keyboard player. I don’t know. It would be interesting to observe people and see how true this is.

I also keep thinking of me as a kid and how I nagged my parents for piano lessons for years starting at roughly kindergarten age. I don’t really recall when I started nagging them. I often assume it was age 5 plus or minus 1 year. But I never nagged for anything else, and it’s not like I hadn’t seen other instruments. It was that big one with all the notes that I wanted to play! You could play the whole piece of music on that one thing! With both hands! (I do know that had I picked up a violin and been made to hold the bow in my right hand, I would have instantly put it down and walked away anyhow.)