Summer of 2018
New Music & Background Information
I still have music in my head sort of all day long, even if it is only humming a tune that does not allow me to let go of it.
This summer, I had some good excuses not to do my daily routine working on new music, like celebrating Alexandra’s birthday (my granddaughter) and Olivia’s birthday (my daughter) which we did at Disneyland in Paris; going walking in the Kaiserstuhl wine area in Southern Germany (near Freiburg) with some of my old student buddies or getting together with my brother to play golf (he always beats the heck out of me, but we do have a good time just the same! ).
My 3 years at the University came to an end as well and since the program repeats every 3 years it makes little sense for me to carry on there. I am also currently without a mentor and have asked the universe to decide if I need a new one and then to make it happen. There is enough I want to do but I am sure that I am far too forgiving with my own work and that my compositions will benefit from critical feedback. Stay tuned!
To make it easy for those of you who have asked to be informed if there is new music Vicci (who deserves all the credit for putting together this wonderful website) has created a new menu option with only the new pieces in it. As and when I bring up the next update, say the middle of next year, I will then merge these new items in with the rest and put the next set of new music in here together with some comments and inform you via email. Subscribe here if you haven’t already!
A little overview accompanies each new piece:
Seek and Ye Shall Find
What made me give this title to this piece you may ask?
It is a bit of a long story.
For a little while I have been looking to find that door that would open for me in my search for “my harmony”. I had spent months working with the 3 different octatonic 8 note scales. If you stick to only one of them you have to “shoehorn” your melodic ideas to fit into only the 8 notes that are available. That is not a terrible thing in itself, in fact I had enjoyed coming up with something I really liked and is on the website already using only 5 notes (per octave, so the notes could repeat in octaves higher or lower).
Still it is annoying if a melody that popped into your head and that you want to work with does not fit into any one of the 8 note scales.
However if you “sneak” from one of the 3 scales into another you really get everything you want, it seemed. But was there a way to do it right and many ways to do it wrong? It is not the same as modulating but this way you can get anywhere you want to and use any chord combination you can dream of.
Since these 3 scales together cover all 12 halftone notes in an octave (more than once in fact, i.e. for every note you can pick one of two possible scales) every chord ever played is available to you. I won’t bore you with all the ideas that popped into my head and are still percolating happily in there. I spent a lot of time experimenting. What I found interesting is that as I tried out what chords would fit well together I could not resist creating music with them. Partly this piece is a result of this effort.
I liked the direction all of this was taking me, after having moaned for some time about doing “home work” rather than composing. That was when Seek and Ye Shall Find popped into my head as a title, as in this piece I was able to use by some interesting harmonic ideas that jumping across scale boundaries made possible and the fact that I did not have to stick to one and only one of the 3 octatonic scales for melodic content.
Seeking to find the Promised Land may be admirable but what would you do with the rest of your life once you had found it? Seeking and discovering reasons to continue seeking is just what we need, I believe.
As an aside I believe that if you press too hard on finding the one and only solution to all your problems Viktor Frankl’s law of paradoxical intent may come to haunt you!-:) Look it up! His little book “Man’s Search for Meaning” was a real eye opener to me many years ago.
This piece has 3 sections so please be patient when one section comes to an end. In the first section I feel a bit like a fraud because I make the piano play fast runs that I could never ever do myself. Even though I too (like I am sure every other composer) would love to be contacted sometime by professional instrument players asking me for the score for some of my music because they liked it enough to want to play it, I am very grateful that there is software out there that can make a pretty good sounding piece for instruments I either don’t know how to play at all or I am not good enough to play myself.
Devotion
After finishing Seek I wanted to create something to express Devotion or “Andacht” in German. Even though I am not religious in any practical sense and admit only to being happily agnostic I do stand in awe of so much. So music that would allow you to focus on being in awe, to express a sense of devotion to something you can’t explain nor ever fully understand, but where you have faith that there is meaning, even though you cannot start to comprehend what it might be, that I wanted to express in music. Yes, I admit, there is nothing in my past that would suggest I am qualified for such an ambitious idea!
This piece is for flute and piano. Why the flute? Well, only because the software I use to play music sounds much better for a flute than for a violin.
Again there are 3 sections here as well.
Dance
I wanted to continue on my quest to express melodic ideas in a form that would allow me to get more settled into using all 3 octatonic scales and the harmonies they supported interchangeably in compositions.
So I thought I use 3 instruments, flute, cello and piano and use different rhythms for each piece. I decided to use first a ¾ rhythm, i.e. a waltz rhythm and started collecting ideas. I had more ideas that would fit well within one dance so I now think the outcome could well be 3 different pieces in that rhythm, because a 15 minute dance would seem rather long, would it not?
It’s The Small Things
This is a song for Soprano and Piano. It uses material that I also had used in the first movement of the Seek piece.
I wonder if I was a bit too ambitious with this song in that it has a couple of bars with a chromatic voice. It is not meant to be a happy song nor a sad one, but one where the Soprano tries to make a point to her partner what it is that could make her fall in love.