Concerto For 4

 Why did I want to do this?

I am not sure if the title is appropriate.   Maybe after reading my notes and listening to the music you can tell me if I should call it something else.

The name “Concerto” for me is a piece of music where a solo instrument has center stage and is supported by the orchestra in many different ways.  Most often either one or the other plays, rarely do they both go at it full tilt at the same time.

Well, I don’t have an orchestra to play any music for me and Sibelius / NotePerformer cannot produce a sound I want to hear for a full orchestra.  Having said that I cannot claim that I have at this stage any expertise in how to write music for an orchestra.  Mind you, I would like to give it a go and hope that I will make the contacts to sneak up on that topic before the afterlife takes over!

But I thought 4 instruments can when playing together “imitate” an orchestra and at times each of them can act as the soloist for a concerto. So that would give me 4 soloists that I would have to satisfy and 4 instruments to create a full sound!

Looking back I think that making 4 instruments play together in different ways was interesting me. Having one instrument being the solo player against the other 3 as the “orchestra” was one option I had not tried before.  Then I thought why could they not be the solo player at different times?  So the idea of a concerto for four and with only four instruments was born.

As usual I started with a musical idea that had popped into my head and had been resting in my IPhone after I had hummed it into it.

Expanding On The First Idea

Next I went about coming up with ideas of what to do with this   Managing these ideas in itself, I have learned is important because as it is easy to land up with lots of different idea files and things quickly become and you can find it hard to continue coming up with truly new ideas rather than repeating yourself.  Clearly I have been there and done it lots of times!

At this stage I am not concerned about instruments, just coming up with ideas that I might want to apply.  I can spend 2 weeks or more on that process.  I wonder if one reason is that it allows me to postpone the moment of reckoning when I have to find a way for the 4 instruments to do something with these ideas?

Scales and Harmony

One sort of “logical” way to go about this might be to assign an instrument to one of the melodic ideas that I developed from the first idea and then find ways for the other instrument to support the one who is carrying the melody.  If they are all supposed to play together then why not use harmony to assign the appropriate notes to the other instruments? 

Since my days with Octatonic Scales I have been trying to live outside of the conventional scales and modulation approach.  True, most melodic ideas fit into one or possibly more of the major or minor mode scales.  Also true, what I have learned is that you can also create melodies that exist quite happily in an octatonic scale.

The nature of octatonic scales is that you can combine notes on that scale in more ways than with conventional scales and the result is not such that you would hate what it sounds like.  It is also very easy to have a situation where a dissonance is released into a minor third.  Combining 3 minor thirds creates a pleasant sounding chord with 4 different notes without any need to repeat any of the notes.

I did not feel a strong urge to develop “my own” harmony for my compositions.  I did not want to pick one of the styles of the past, say Handel and use that nor a combo of different composers in the past.  At the same time the music that I wanted to write was not focusing on dissonances or being “atonal” in any way.  I had surprised my tutor at the university with what I had come up with using 5 note and 8 note scales.

 So I hoped I could use an approach that would be “tonal” instead of “atonal” and not copy any of the harmony systems of the past and apply some of what I had learned using octatonic scales.

Of course that can lead you to thinking that “anything goes”.  Sadly at university nobody seemed to want to delve into thinking about and discussing the “meaning” of harmonic chord combos, other than their existence in cadences and aspects like leading notes.  We would discuss at length when reviewing a score from a master of the past how a chord went from one scale to another and from one mode to another but my interest in understanding why this had been done was never a topic.

I do hope that one day I will find someone who would like to discuss with me how octatonic chords can be used to good effect in melodic ideas that fit happily into major, minor conventional modes as well as octatonic scales.  Meantime I am happy to play in this sandbox all on my own and find that there are enough things I can do on my own. One variation of my first idea uses all 3 octatonic modes.

Forgive me this digression.  I am sure I have been on this soap box before!

In any case I have learned that applying rules of harmony for selecting an accompaniment creates for me music that I don’t like at all.  A second or third voice needs to have some meaning on its own.  Maybe I am simply making excuses because I don’t have what it takes to engineer into being good sounding chords for a melody?

 However the well of collecting ideas runs dry after a while and in addition a feeling of guilt also drives me forward to tackling the next phase.

The Next Phase

Usually I start playing around with ideas and land up with a lot more Sibelius files.  There will be solos in this piece as well which should show a little more virtuosity which is fun to think about.  Selecting what you want to use and what not takes place and cleaning up your files and deciding what might happen when.

Next I will take an idea and start thinking about what I could add to it in the form of other instruments.  Similarly you start pondering about whether you should take the sections of an idea and give it to different instruments in order to get some contrast or if this could not be a good idea.  One aspect is that I want to make each instrument happy about being in this group.  It is not easy to do this when you know that the higher sounds somehow come to the brain’s attention much more clearly than the lower ones.  So the flute will be heard better than the viola, for example. 

A Discovery

I had picked the first 4 notes of the initial idea and played around with them to come up with a slow melodic line that I thought would fit the flute and could be used as an introduction.  Something that would suit the cello to play at the same time without being just a slave to the flute took me a while to like but I managed to do so. 

I wanted the cello to create its own “sound” rather than create chords to be played by both instruments.  I also did not want to try to hide the chords by applying the usual contra point approach of changing the rhythm, for example playing quarter notes underneath the half notes.  Starting the cello at a different point than the flute is a good beginning, creating gaps for one of the voices that the other voice does not follow, making a separate “statement” with the cello was what I was after.

 When replaying them together I noticed that at parts I was listening more to the cello than the flute, which was what I wanted to happen.

So I felt I had a good slow start.  Next came the idea to repeat the opening but to have the viola and English Horn contribute their own ideas in addition.  Playing that back produced a very meditative sound experience for me!  The slow sounds (half notes) of the flute and cello which in the repeat where then being extended by the quarter note sounds of the French Horn and the Viola created a synergy and wholeness that felt special to me!

Pondering over it later I found it fascinating that it was not one melodic idea on its own that created the magic but 3 of them being played by 4 instruments together.  I plan to study this some more.  I am not able to focus on all 3 at the same time, but they are there and my mind seems comfortable in them being there at the same time.

I suspect that starting off playing 3 melodies at the same time might be confusing and distracting for our brain.  Even doing this only for 2 melodies will not work well most of the time and a delay before melody 2 comes into being might be a good thing to do.  With 3 melodies it is even more important so that your hearing is OK about hearing melodies 1 and 2 sort of in the background while now also becoming aware of melody 3.

For some time I have been fascinated by playing different melodic lines “together”.  In one of my trios I start with the cello playing a longish melody and when it repeats the flute starts adding a completely different idea and the third time around the piano comes into it as well.  I have to admit that the piano was adding more a new rhythmic element than a new idea.

To what degree it is the repeat that allows my brain to tolerate 2 different melodies to exist at the same time I don’t know and can experiment with it to find out more.  It appears to be a wonderful way of creating synergy that adds a new element to the musical “sensation”, for want of a better word.

Solos

In my melody collection phase I was not driven by an interest in virtuosity in performance.  However for the solos I thought each instrument and player might enjoy showing off a bit.  Of course what they were going to show should somehow be related to the ideas I had come up with.

One question was how to get them to play their solo pieces?  One after the other did not feel right to me.

Some Duos

In the process I had also come up with a couple of duos and then felt that it might be good to have a duo follow a solo.

Structuring The Piece

So I landed up with a structure with 3 sections.  In the first section there are no solos and the 4 instruments work together.  The second section contains solos and duos and the last section is again where they all work together.

Tempo Changes

I cannot explain it but tempo changes seemed to be a good idea.  Of course, the listener should not find this a bother but be happy about it.  So I go from one quarter note being 130 up to bar 150, then it slows down to 90 for 10 bars, going from there to 110 for to help the solos before settling back at 130 for the last 250 bars or so.

Sibelius has no problem in changing from one tempo to another.  I wonder how the performers can do it.  I have seen lots of music with tempo changes but still find it hard to imagine how I would be able to go from 110 to 130 and back again correctly while playing a piece.  I don’t have a metronome in my head!  I wonder how musicians do it. 

I like it but hope you also enjoy this piece, which turned out to be longer than previous ones, over 17 minutes.