The Happy Idea Story

Dec 24

Well, I am not sure if I should call it a blog, since that assumes that others will read it and even comment and that this could grow into something more.

The whole process of turning a little fragment of a melody that pops into my head into a piece of music fascinates me. Maybe I have an overactive “inner observer” that is pondering how and why I am doing what I am doing?

January 3, 2019

Let me start with such a melody fragment, which popped into my head one morning. Usually I hum it into my phone but that little idea seemed to want to be whistled so I did.

Usually this rests in my cellphone until I get the urge to do something about it! Maybe to be more honest until I get guilty feelings about so many of them languishing for quite a while there. Since there is no hope for me being able to remember any melody that pops into my head for any length of time (unless I keep repeating it in my mind -:)) I find it much easier to sing it into my cell phone than to attempt to write it down on note paper that usually I don’t have with me anyway.

I can’t explain what happens for me to want to pick up one of these ideas and then spend weeks on it. I have to admit that at times I have picked up an idea, created something out of it and then it languished in my computer for months or even longer until something prods me to bring it up again, feeling it deserves to be completed and then spend a lot more time on it.

The first order of the day is to turn what I whistled into notes in my music recording system (Sibelius), which is pretty easy to do:

Well, the score is only part of what I whistled, but I am happy because after some trial and error I have learned how to get a score into this blog software. The system did not like a pdf file nor a bmp file, but if you keep trying sometimes you get lucky! -:)

Even though I have been busy “escaping” 7 note scales into 8 note scales where terms like Minor and Major modes make no sense, this little melody looks like D-Minor. Of course, the thought pops into my head why I called something that is in a minor mode a “happy idea”? It still feels that way to me though. -:)

This is what Siblius makes of my idea played by a flute:

I can’t say that some voice within me tells me that this idea would make a perfect trio for piano, violin and cello. So what next? First I like to collect lots of ideas and play with them.

The first goal for me is to see what complete melody I can create out of the fragment.

I could not say thait this idea simply called to be turned into a song or a duo or a trio or a quartet, which is as far as I have gone todate. So I thought why not try them all, one after that other and give my internal observer plenty of food for thought?

January 10, 2019

So I came up with a song first, including an idea for lyrics and a title. I called the song “Will you be my friend?” I wrote it for a soprano and piano. In order to make it more suited to the comfort zone range of a soprano I brought it down from D to A.

It is meant to be an intimate song, sort of like you would be talking intimately and privately with the person who you want to be your friend. So the piano is also a bit subdued, which makes sense. I thought this idea is OK for a song because apart from the main melodic idea there is a second aspect, which allows me to come up with the main line of the lyrics and then offer explanations in the second section. For lullabys one would not need to do this but I feel it avoids for an idea to become “monotonic” (is this a valid English word? probably not!).

I wrote 4 verses to go with it, but will not bore you with repeating the music for each verse, so here is an MP3 file with the music for that new song without repeating anything.

January 16, 2019

DUO FOR FLUTE AND CELLO

According to plan I started playing around to use my idea with instruments. Since I don’t like the sound of a violin on what Sibelius and NotePerformer produce I prefer to use a flute instead. The cello sound is rather pleasant so it was easy to decide what instruments to use. I do like to hear the music I create and until such time that real people who can play instruments want to play what I compose I am grateful to be able to listen to what I come up with.

Why would 2 instruments want to spend time together on a simple melody, one may wonder? In a conversation one party tends to talk while the other listens, possibly interjecting a “really” or “go on!”. If both were to talk at the same time (as does happen from time to time) the parties tend to have stopped listening to each other.

As many composers and in particular Bach have shown it is indeed possible for 2 or more instruments to “talk” at the same time and express different ideas rather than simply supply validating or conforming harmony support to the leading voice. This increases the complexity of the music and can indeed be appealing to the human brain. I have found this fascinating ever since I first heard music from the Baroque period and composers like Bach.

Some of that music makes me feel like I am sitting in a cathedral and my mind is being blown away by that incredible musical experience. Needless to say when I started having a go at composing this is something I wanted to learn how to do as well. I once told a friend that I wanted to learn to write mind boggling music!

I hope that one day I will! -:)

When it comes to writing music for 2 instruments I like to try to find “space” for both insturments to say something “interesting” at the same time, but not be obsessive about it.

Unlike with a song which needs to be compact somehow there is no reason to keep things short with 2 instruments and one also does not have to worry too much about getting out of range etc.

What I seem to have landed up doing is to first collect lots of ideas without worrying about how things will come together. I try to get supportive and contrasting ideas and stick them into notations files I call Ideas1,2, 3 etc. until my mind refuses to continue to come up with new ideas. This will usually take days and much of what I write down gets kicked out on reflection. Somehow this is a comfortable stage because you are not yet doing any composing.

At some stage I feel guilty about this enough to get started. The question of how this piece should get started needs to be pondered over and once an idea that pleases me enough for that surfaces the process is underway! I am not the sort of person who would organize my ideas into some sequence, mark things up and then work them from the start to end. I also don’t yet “see” the entire piece in my mind and just need to assemble it together. It is more a mix of chaos and order with new ideas popping up and often being irresistable enough to take charge and land up in the score.

The question of how long a piece that started up with one idea and its many mutations should be is not one I can answer. A little while ago I started work on what I thought would be one dance but it turned out that I needed to break things into 3 dances rather than keep things in one piece. Usually I have material left over that has not been used at all because it felt right to come to an end.

I like to wait a couple of weeks after thinking that maybe something is now finished in order to go back and see if it really is.

What I am going to link here just now I just completed yesterday and I like it enough to do so. Things ran away with me a little bit and it turned into a piece of over 5 minutes. The music in the song also makes it appearance of course, particularly at the end. I hope you like it too! I may “fiddle” with it a bit over the next few days to see if the computer generated music is too loud or too soft at places and replace the fiile. Try to use a decent loudspeaker, of course.

January 20, 2017

Adding Instruments

I got waylaid this last week. I am still pondering how adding complexity can make for a more comprehensive or fulfilling listening experience. So rather than have one melodic idea at the time and support it with rhythm and harmony why not try to bring 2 different ideas together.

If you take 3 instruments you get more chances to do so but does it work and how? Is it worth doing? How do you create something where the listener will say after hearing it the first time “I liked that! I want to hear it again!” -:)

An idea popped into my head to take a look at a piano piece I had written a few years ago where I had tried to do something like that. That led me onto a new project namely to see if I could change that to use 3 different instruments. I thought that a trumpet, english horn and cello might work well together. A few days later this is what it turned into:

These 3 instruments sound good on NotePerformer and I think the trumpet fits in well with this piece. When the trumpet plays it is sort of the boss and from time to time it needs to be quiet because of that. A piano in a group of instruments can have the same effect, i.e. it can turn into the elephant in the room too easily and the other instruments can land up playing some background supporting notes awaiting their turn in the lime light too often. If the paino plays loud rhythmic chords it may not be a good idea to instroduce an intimate melodic idea via say the flute at exactly that time.

It was probably a good idea for me to take a break from my Happy Melody idea. It is easy to come up with the idea to take a melody fragment and then write a song, a duo, a trio, throw in a piano somewhere and maybe also a quartet, but how can you keep going back to the same melody and keep wanting to apply it again and again? It is too tempting to find an excuse to do something else in between.

If I discover 2 other ideas that can co-exist well with my happy idea then finding a way to make them all come together would be something new and different from say writing a song or duo. I can’t explain why this is something that I want to do. Composing to me is a bit like trying to tell a story or to say it differently to creat a special experience. Of course there are many many ways to do this and I feel I have to pay my dues in this direction.

January 21, 2019

Theory and Practice

To me a theory must not focus on defining rules but must provide meaning. Much as I enjoyed studying “Tonsatz” at university in Germany the search for meaning was rarely if ever evident. Rules were given in abundance. When analyzing the music of the masters of the past it seemed important to be able to see at a glance at what place in the score exactly and to what scale the music had suddenly modulated and what harmony was in evidence. So you could lay a trail of tonica, subdominant, dominant and dominant-sept chords and the movement from major to minor scales through a piece of music but understanding their meaning was not part of the curriculum sadly.

When I asked I was told that no theory of melody existed and in fact even searching via Google today does not bring up much in that direction either. I came across an interesting pdf file about the chaos theory of melody, full of references to fractals and the Mandelbrot set (all of which I am happy to be familiar with having studied physics many years ago and having enjoyed discovering what fractals are about during one of my midlife crisis) but there was not one bar of music in evidence in that document.

So what is the meaning of my interest in finding ways to bring different melodic ideas together in creating a piece of music? I suspect that the corresponding increase in complexity adds to the experience of the music, i.e. the way if affects our minds. How this can work and when it does not is probably a matter to trial and error.

In the last example, that conversion of some earlier piano piece of mind to a trio for trumpet, English horn and cello the most memorable melody to me was this:

Then there were two others melodic aspects that I hope found a way to live well together and bring out the best in each other:

Neither of these ideas is original. I remember having heard the first melody in music more than 300 years old. It spoke to me strongly, even though I felt it needed to be played more slowly and that it had a special peaceful, concluding quality to it. The rest for me was telling a story that leads up it in various ways to allow it to be said and then to find ways to vary expressing it. I have to admit I want to play with this idea a bit more; when something speaks to you like this it is a bit like putting away a present without having fully opened it and looking forward to the day when you can open it up to discover more of the magic within it!

February 6, 2019

The Happy Idea Trio for Piano, Flute and Cello

Yes, more than 2 weeks later!

After the short detour via the trio for Trumpet, French horn and Cello to get away from the Happy Idea challenge for a while I felt I could not chicken out and that I had to tackle a trio based on the Happy Idea tune or ideas that came to my mind as a result of it.

One idea in the Happy Idea Duo had been telling me to give it a little more airtime and to play around with it a bit, but as soon as I started playing with it using triplets as well became irresistible. I used a Piano, Flute and Cello, since these 3 produce a pleasant enough sound with Sibelius and NotePerformer.

Having said that, now that the Trio is complete I have enjoyed listening to the Duo and the Trio and liking them both! -J

As usual for me the beginning was time consuming and problematic. I start looking for ideas and then record them in Sibelius for later decision making. In this process I can easily land up with 5 or more different Sibelius files and can lose track about what is all in there. At that stage I only collect melodic ideas without thinking about which instrument should “own” it.

For a while it feels “safe” to hide in this “let’s see if interesting ideas come up for this new piece” mode, but there comes a moment when it is time to get real; well, almost. There is one more delaying tactic that works well for me, namely to play around with what the other 2 instruments could be doing while the third instrument hugs the lime light with a particular musical idea. Of course, this creates more Sibelius notation files and it is time for a bit of pruning to be done. I should have done that much earlier but it is painful to delete something you thought you liked enough to record it a week earlier.

Once the real process of composing a piece gets underway you are in any case not in control anymore and the piece takes on its own momentum and in some way tells you what it wants you to do.

A question for me always is when I should start thinking about coming to an end. The question in my mind is should I, could I introduce another idea (of which by now I have more than I need) and play with it or will this be overkill and I should think about how to end it now? Another decision is whether or not to repeat a section. Since I am not following any “standard” with all its rules, like the sonata form I need to decide this on my own. Not that the sonata form was not a good idea, probably driven by a desire to keep listeners wanting to hear more rather than an urge to create another set of the 10 Commandments for a specific aspect of music.

Of course, you do not want to keep a piece too short. Even with a song if it is rather short, I fix that “problem” by coming up with lyrics for more than one verse.

When I am OK about bringing things to an end the next task is to tweak everything that is not quite right. Right now I place notations about how loud or soft to play something in order to make Sibelius and NotePerformer sound acceptable to me. This project includes me emailing an MP3 file to my Ipad and playing it back there using my Bose loudspeaker. During that time new questions pop into your mind, like would this phrase not sound even better if you mark it as a trill? You try it out of course and immediately realize that was a crazy idea.

So for say 2 or 3 weeks I manage to create a piece that takes maybe 5 to 10 minutes to play. Now it would be nice to have an outside “editor” who could give me feedback where I might want to consider changes and also get a real living musician to tell me how the score should really be marked up with notations for an actual performance rather than make it sound as good as I can make it possible with the computer generated MP3 file the software produces for me. I am not complaining too much. If such resources come into my life I will be happy to work on their feedback, until that happens I am grateful to be able to hear what I have composed as well as is possible for me.

Again, if you are going to listen to it, try to use a decent loudspeaker. I particularly like the second half of the piece.

Now the question is should I also still write a Quartet based on the Happy Idea? I almost feel I have no choice now, after having written a Song, a Duo and Trio. If I do I will probably use Flute, Viola and Cello and am not sure which one to use two of.

Before doing that I plan to take another detour and want to visit some of my earlier piano work like I did after I wrote the Duo and come up with another piece for the Trio for Trumpet, French Horn and Cello. Well, maybe??

Before starting on the Happy Idea Quartet I plan to take another detour and want to visit some of my earlier piano work like I did after I wrote the Duo and come up with another piece for the Trio for Trumpet, French Horn and Cello. Well, maybe??

February 19, 2019

WOW! It has taken me 13 days to get around to an update. I have a good excuse. I took the 7 items in the Left Behind Soprano and Piano pieces and redid them for Trumpet, English Horn and Cello. It turned into more than half an hour of music. I am very happy with the outcome! -:)

It was interesting for a number of reasons for me. The main one was the topic that has been on my mind now for some time, namely how to tell a “story” when you have 3 instruments. When you have a song the soprano has to sing the entire song, of course and the piano is there to embellish it all and if possible to help the soprano as well. You can’t just give the l;eft hand piano section to the cello, the right hand piano section to the emglish horn and the soprano section to the trumpet. Well, you could, but it would be terrible. -:) A minor matter is to make sure that the range of these instruments is correct since Siblius and NotePerformer will create a sound for each insturment even outside of its range.

Why did I select these instruments? I could have taken a flute instead of the trumpet but I wanted to experiment with the sound of the trumpet. I thought some of the music was fitting for that sound. Sadly I don’t like the sound Sibelius and NotePerformer produce for a violin, as I have already stated a few times. The viola sounds really nice in a certain range but here I need something higher where it does not impress me. The cello is a winner for me anyway.

What can I take away from this experience? First of all I like what it all sounds like. Before I had to use a flute to “imitate” the soprano and I had the piano for accompaniment. Working the same melodic ideas into a trio like this creates a much more expressive musical experience!

How to leverage the existence of 3 instruments was also something where I enjoyed the practice. There are places where I was able to have all three instruments “do their own thing” and it comes together nicely, like in the pieces “Healing” and “Thy Will be Done!”. I do like each instrument to “feel” that it is playing music rather than making background sound. Sometimes it is tempting to cheat on that principle in order to make progress.

The mind probably finds it hard to follow 2 different melodic ideas if they are played at the same time. in the famous Bach contatas where this happens and which I love, there is usually not a complete overlap and it is easier to switch between each of the 2 somehow complimentary ideas. When the mind has become used to each melodic idea on its own, it becomes easier for the listener to cope with both of them being played at the same time and in fact it can be fun to hear them being played at different times by each instrument.

I doubt that the mind wants to hear 3 different melodic ideas and somehow merge them internally into a harmonious, fulfiling whole. However when one of the instruments is making mainly a rhythmic contribution with a minor melodic component there is less of a conflict and each instrument can play something entirely different at the same time and it all sounds pretty good just the same (well, at least to me! -:)).

I also created a quartet for trumpet, french horn, viola and cello, but it was more a conversion of something I had originally intended for a choir. Since the chances of a choir ever singing it are small to non-existent I thought it would be fun to convert it into insturment form. However in that case I did not need to make any decisions on who plays what, the soprano turned into a trumpet, the alto voice into the french horn, the tenor into the viola and the bass into the cello. That was that! I like what it turned into, so that is OK for me for this specific occasion.

When I get around to writing the quartet for my Happy Idea, which is still pending, I have to decide how to best make use of 4 instruments, based on ideas that popped into my head before any consideration of what instrument would be used. I am thinking of using flute, french horn, viola and cello for it.

I am thinking about changing the website around a bit, moving what in December was still NEW into their proper places etc. I have quite a list of the changes I want to make and will need some help. When you tell yourself what a wonderful idea a website would be you don’t think that there is a sizable maintenance job pending for you. I till think it is a good idea for me to try to “finish” stuff I compose as much as I can on my own. Once real life players want to play some of my music I look forward to sitting down with them and discussing the music and my notation which I had to put in to circumvent any undesirable sound effects Sebelius and NotePerformer are happy to create from time to time.

In the meantime here are the 7 new pieces:

There are 2 sections. The Lament starts with a shrill cry of despair, then shows a mind numb with pain, ruminating again and again about this fateful terrible event. It ends with another cry of lament before starting to say a farewell.

A reflection on the lost love.

Yearning for healing.

Searching for acceptance.

Continuing to live in the past.

Facing up to a new life.

Looking inside and with loved ones for acceptance and meaning.

March 21st, 2019

More than a month later!

I have been busy though. Maybe I was a bit scared to write a quartet around the Happy Idea, maybe I needed some time off?

Anyway I started work on a 4 voice fugue first. I wanted to write it in octatonic scale so that each voice had a different pitch. I liked the theme I selected but I was not happy with what I came up with. I was ready to throw it all out and start again the conventional way, offsetting by a quint rather than a minor third (or multiple thereof) and in fact did make a start with that.

Something saved me and after a little break I went back and fixed the original fugue so it would not make me feel awful listening to it. I feel I could fatten it up in the middle, but I don’t have a strong urge to do it at the moment. A fugue has a bit of the same element in it that does make the new non-tonica modern classical music not appeal to me, i.e. there is too much engineering and construction going on and too little of the “spiritual journey” that I love music for. I have already that there are indeed fugues that blow your mind, so this is probably just a feeble excuse.

There was no reason for me not to start with the quartet for the Happy Idea! As usual I got scared, not knowing how to do it. Then I hid myself in collecting lots of melodic ideas that I might want to use, reviewing them, discarding some, putting them in order, until I was guilty enough to start. As usual once started the piece took over and dragged me along. Hallelujah! I do like what I came up with and hope you do too!

So now I have a song, a duo, a trio and a quartet all “inspired” by the Happy Idea.What would be fantastic is to have the lot played in a performance with one of the players first whistling the Happy Idea and then one after the other being performed, ending with the quartet.Maybe the fugue could be thrown in as the second last piece?Well, I have my dreams too!

The second half of the quartet has as its main part 2 intertwined melodic ideas that I thought would also make up a nice song. Once I had done this I had to write the lyrics for that song. As I have noticed before writing the lyrics took quite a bit longer for me than to write the music for it. Here are the lyrics:

Why, Just Why?

Song Lyrics

What has this world come to, come to?

Why is it that so few care?

Destroying evrything there is!

Contaminating the air we breathe,

Poisoning the ground, our fish, wiping out insects,

Allowing plastic to choke the world!

Why, just why don’t you really care,

helplessly standing by,

doing so little

to protect this world?

Every parent wants their child to find a better world.

How is it that you can’t see

what world we will have to live in,

after you all are gone, after what you have done?

After destroying what could have been paradise!

Why, just why don’t you really care,

helplessly standing by,

doing so little

to protect this world?

Why is it that you elect leaders

that don’t take the action

needed to make the change

to bring back this world to health?

Why don’t you use the power you have

to give us leaders that really do care?

Why, just why don’t you really care,

helplessly standing by,

doing so little

to protect this world?

As you can see I am impressed with the youth of this world standing up and asking for more to be done about pollution and the like!

So now I am trying to find a young lady to sing the music, a cello player to play the accompaniment and possibly a drummer for some background rhythms. I would love to have a video and put it onto YouTube.

Another dream not to be fulfilled?I sure hope not!

Well, that ends the story of the happy idea. It was good for me to keep track of what and why I was doing what I did. I wonder how I will feel about in reading it some time in the future?

Rolf Kessel