Trombones, Composing, and Why Schenker Rocks
So I was reading oboeinsight and came across this post. And it made me laugh! Because
“It doesn’t become dangerous until it starts playing the trombone” is pretty much true of everything.
If you are an oboist and you don’t read oboeinsight, you should! Patty is the superhero of oboe bloggers.
I finished my first-ever piece for orchestra, you guys! I am so excited about hearing what it sounds like. It is colourful and sparkling and always in motion and I *hope* sounds original without sounding ugly. I don’t have a problem with ugly music, but it is not what I hope to do with my career as a composer. I have a piece in the new music concert coming up this Wednesday, as well! It is for double reed ensemble; nearly every oboist and bassoonist in the school is playing. 14 of us! It is kind of idiomatic and pretty, but I tried to make it sound a little medieval and modern *at the same time* so who knows!
Sometimes I fear I try too hard to make my music something people will like to play.
Some of you may know about 24-hour comics, or the 24-hour album I wrote in The Cord about recently. I am going to do something similar over Reading Week, which is the Canadian equivalent of March break, but with composing! I am going to write a piece every day–either 7 days or 9 days (with the weekends surrounding the week) for solo tuba, and combine them into a suite. My friend Christopher, about whom I have blogged before, is going to play them for me. It is exciting! In the meantime, I have to write a full, short, piano piece for Peter by next Wednesday, need to get back to work on “Scoot” for trumpet and trombone duet, and have begun work on my aural comic!
That’s right. My aural comic. One day in the semi-near future you will come to the site and all there will be is a play button and you will listen and smile to yourselves. Aimee is going to play it for me live, but I may very well record the version for the site myself. So you will be able to hear my oboing!
Speaking of oboing, I am playing the “Introduction, Theme, and Variations” for oboe by Hummel, and I love it. I LOVE IT. It makes me feel and sound like I can really play. I would try to get it in a noon-hour recital, but it seems like most of them are full.
Do you know what else I love? Schenkerian Analysis with Dr. Swinden. It’s actually a great class for performance application since what we look at is primarily melody-based. Essentially, we reduce music to its most important notes, and then most important notes again, and again, and again, until we reach a I-V-I progression in the bass and a descending 3, 5, or 8 note passage
in the melody. It’s great for performance because it illustrates where the most important notes are, why phrasing is shaped (or should be shaped) certain ways, and where the goals of each section are.
Also Dr. Swinden is my favourite favourite.
In conclusion, Peter has me writing copy for KWS’ bi-yearly convention/festival, Open Ears! So if you read any of the literature, you will be reading some of my writing. He says it will add up to a free pass, and I am so excited.
February 6th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
[...] read it here and it warmed my heart. Or at least made me smile. Or blush. Or something. (Yeah, I am frequently [...]
February 7th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Hi obohemia!
philosophical question, isn’t making the people potentially playing music you compose important because it makes it easier for the performers to then transmit their “yay music is fun!”-ness to the audience?
Also, I spontaeniously decided while reading this that from now on I’m pronouncing “oboing” as o-boing. Boing! I don’t know if you care.
February 8th, 2009 at 7:18 am
That is what I think! But there is a fine balance between writing for the music and writing for the musicians. In general, arrangers write for the musicians and composers write for the music, and the best of us try to do both! But the key is not to go too far over onto either side, and sometimes I think I might.
Secretly I also pronounce ‘oboing’ o-boing. I am glad I am not alone!
February 9th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
I have been different without the fora around, too! I miss you guys, but it’s hard… I get so addicted to online things… there are all these beautiful worlds created online, by people I understand. And there’s only one physical world, and it’s not. I am always physically surrounded by people I have little in common with, and I’ve been trying to meet more of them, or if nothing else (being not the most social person), read their pamphlets. How could I, a couple years ago, have thought I’d perform at the same open-mic as a hip-hopper singing “Fuck, fuck all those who administrate / it only breeds hate”? I’ve really tried to force myself into the physical world in Chicago, and it’s challenged and changed me although I see I’ve only scratched its surface (whenever I feel I’ve scratched the whole surface I find a new place!)… maybe I’m at the point where I can stop being addictive about the Internet. Maybe I’ll come back! But not at least until March, because I’ve got an album to finish…
That being my RPM Challenge album! At least 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music recorded and mixed in the month of February! http://www.rpmchallenge.com for the info, if you ever want to do such a thing. Writing a 7- (or 9-) piece tuba suite sounds damn tough, though. Makes my challenge look piddling!
February 13th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Glad to hear that you’re enjoying Schenkerian analysis! However, I am curious…do you really believe that every single piece of well-written music (by Schenker’s definition, anyway…) can always be reduced to a 3-line, a 5-line, or an 8-line? I don’t know…to me, it seems that most of the time you end up trying really hard to make that shoe fit, even when it clearly doesn’t. This became particularly evident to me when Margaret analyzed a Mozart Fantastia that was very clearly broken up into a few distinct sections, each kind of like its own little ‘fantasy’. She argued that each section had its own ‘local urlinie’, which made total sense. However, her teacher insisted that this was not Schenker’s approach, and that she should analyze the whole piece in terms of a 3, 5, or 8-line. To do that, you have to try REALLY hard to make the piece fit into the 3, 5, or 8-line analysis…
Don’t get me wrong, I think analyzing things at many different levels and peeling away the layers of music to uncover the basic structure is incredibly valuable, but to say that every single piece of ‘well-written’ music has an underlying descending 3, 5, or 8-line…I think that’s pretty silly!
February 13th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Oh no, of course not! I am a big fan of all kinds of music, and Schenker only considered certain composers to be worthy–composers A) who were German and B) who wrote music that fit with his theory. He was an ass, basically, but his theory actually works really well with composers like Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart–who were really the only composers Schenker liked–and I like how it works! It just makes me kind of happy. But no! I mean, my favourite composers are John Adams and Rimsky-Korsakov, and their music certainly doesn’t do that, and it is very well written. AND I don’t write music like that! And my music is totally, undeniably, flawless.