minimania

Wrestling with counterpoint

OK. Counterpoint is just freakishly, mind-bending hard sometimes. I've been working on setting a couple of examples today and I've spent 2 hours on it and still the second one won't come good. But working through it, I'm gradually getting a better understanding of it and where I went wrong with it in the past. The various available intervals for beginning and ending ("should be an octave or unison, but can be a 5th or a 3rd" kind of thing) freaked me out before - how could I tell which was the right interval??? And so I was kind of semi-paralysed from the start. Today I really started to understand that it's a *composition* exercise. And so it doesn't hugely matter which one you pick, so long as you carry on properly and treat it right. This may seem overly simplistic and perhaps I am just a little dense, but the counterpoint course I did at uni was condensed into half a term and there just wasn't time to really understand what it was we were doing so it's taken this long to work that one out.

The other small revelation has been that, well, sometimes the given cantus firmus is just rubbish. The second one I'm working on today has a great long string of descending notes at the end of it, which makes it really, really hard to do anything interesting in the other part while sticking to the rules - there's no scope for correctly resolving dissonances, so I'm having to stick to consonances and frankly it's dull and difficult. But it's a useful lesson to learn, I guess.

I am finding, at least, that as I'm working through these exercises, I'm gradually internalising the rules. I look at an interval of, say, a perfect 5th now and find myself checking how I'm approaching it and leaving it, making sure I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm also finding that, as I'm playing through my work at the piano, I really AM hearing where things have gone wrong - when I played through the first version of the second one, I could tell instantly that the opening was wrong - and sure enough, when I looked at it, I found that I was leaving the opening perfect 5th by similar motion, with a skip in the soprano line (rather than a step as it should be), so that had to change.

I'm still a fair way off resolving the second one, but as we're going out tonight to hear Stephen Sondheim talk about his work, I should really cook our early dinner and get ready so we're not late. Tomorrow I will recommence the battle with exercise 2... then move on to the one in the alto clef. Oh boy, that'll be fun!

Notes at last

With every new piece - and doubly so when the piece has a deadline - I go through a period of trauma when ideas are starting to bubble, but there's no notes to write down. The longer this goes on, the crankier I get. Finally, of course, notes appear and are captured on the stave, and then the real composition can begin, but it's a fairly fraught time when they're there but not there. Today I got notes for the quintet, ending a tense few days. It's not really been too long this time, but the deadline factor and the inevitable socialising of having parents in the house, which makes it hard for me to really focus, made it seem an absolute aeon. In truth, it's really only been since Sunday though...

On Sunday I went to the Tate Modern with the parents and Djelibeybi, where my Da pointed out a group of Cy Twombly paintings I'd not seen before that he didn't think much of but which totally blew me away. They're not much to describe: Oatmealy-coloured giant canvases with swirls of red paint that's been allowed to drip down the canvas. Strange how something so simple can be so powerful.

Standing in the middle of these three paintings, I could feel a warmth emanating from them. And the more I looked, the more I saw. Ultimately they came to resemble a thicket of fiery willows. On second viewing on Tuesday, the bright red made me think of thorns and blood and violence - while still with the exciting, secure warmth of the original viewing in place. They set off a chain of thought which ran through concepts of enclosure - groves, fences, hugs, safety, security, claustrophobia, containment, standing stones, panic, contentment. I don't think any painting has ever elicited a response in me of such total contrasts - certainly not simultaneously.

Gradually I thought my way through all these conflicting ideas to come up with a concept for the piece. It seemed to me that I was really facing two concepts - one where the enclosure was a secure one - warm and soft and safe; the other where it was a form of containment - hard and cold and unyielding, resistant to any attempt to breach it. I started thinking about how to approach this in music and thought a bit about whether maybe the piece should be in two movements - one expressing each approach, but basically felt that this seemed a bit 'wet' and also that the safe and secure piece would be likely to be both a little dull and also stylistically unmatched to the other movement. Last night, after thinking about all this on and off for most of the day, I came to a vague conclusion that the piece should perhaps be a single movement, approximately expressing movement from safety and security to entrapment and panic and how easily something benign can seem suffocating.

So today's notes are fairly tame and - at the moment - they seem almost characterless. When I put them down this morning, they just sort of fell into place but it all seemed a little directionless. This afternoon though, I started listening to The Viola In My Life by Morton Feldman, who was recommended to me by a friend on Twitter, and I'm beginning to think that the judicious use of whitespace in the opening could be very effective in this context.

Not entirely sure what the next step will be. I'm feeling a need to do a lot of reading and listening at the moment - I'm more than halfway through John Adams' autobiography Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, which is just awesome - I think it's one of the best composer biographies/autobiographies I've read because it focuses so much, not just on the music, but on the process of creating the music and the way his thinking changed as he composed each new piece. It's absolutely fascinating. I've also started reading Mark Rothko's The Artist's Reality which has been on my shelf for a while, and suddenly passionately wanting to start in on Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise too. Sadly there are not enough hours in the day...

[Reblogged from caitlinrowley.com]