So You Want To Write A Song
Composition is a mysterious thing. I mean this in the typical artsy sense of "I don't actually know the precise mechanism by which things 'come to me' when I'm composing", but also in the sense that I don't think most non-composers know what we do when we disappear into a practice room for hours at a time. To be sure, some of it really is just staring into space and trying to imagine something musically compelling, but some of it's considerably more plodding, methodical, and mundane. It's art, sure, but that doesn't mean there's no reason to the rhymes. So today I want to open up the hood and give you a peek into my compositional process.
songwriting, process, composing, composer's toolbox
Some Pointers for Concert Logistics
May 27, 2016 by Brin Solomon
I have never been shy about my opinions on the logistics of running a concert. I think they're tremendously important, and also often overlooked, with the result that many classical music concerts are considerably more tedious than they need to be, a state of affairs that does nobody any favors. Like it or not, presentation matters. Concert presenters who don't take these details into account come across as disorganized and inadequately prepared. My frustration is amplified, I think, by the amount of time I've spent in the theatrical world. As anyone who's done a play or musical can tell you, the rehearsal process devotes a lot of time to hammering out logistical details like set changes and lighting cues, a hammering out that's almost never been done for the classical concerts I've been a part of. Granted, the logistics for classical concerts are usually less daunting — most string quartet performances don't call for hundreds of light and sound cues along with various large pieces of scenery flying in and out from above, after all — but that makes it all the more irritating to see them muffed again and again and again.
Some time ago, after listening to me gripe about a concert that was particularly bad at this, a composer friend of mine asked if I wouldn't be willing to put together some kind of checklist or document that outlines specific things that concert presenters should keep in mind when hashing out the logistics of putting on a show. This is that document.
May 27, 2016 /Brin Solomon
concert logistics, concert design, rants, tech rehearsal, rehearsal process, process, planning, pet peeves
The Scaffolding of Theory
My favorite internet comment of all time was one I saw way back in middle school, or possibly my first year of high school. It was in a music discussion forum the name of which I am too lazy to recall, and it read simply "Remember everyone! Music theory is a theory and not a fact!", as tho someone somewhere out there was taking a valiant stand against the forces of analysis in favor of some kind of sonic creationism.
composer's toolbox, process, music theory, rambles, about me
Clever Accidents
April 22, 2016 by Brin Solomon
I'm in the middle of writing an oboe sonata! And I really do mean in the middle — I've gotten past the initial stages of figuring out the opening and the basic musical materials, and now I'm in the messy central stretches of picking those materials apart and recombining them into a compelling path to the double bar. Sometimes I sit down beforehand and hammer out intricate plans for the innards of pieces like this, but sometimes I just dive in and figure out what the piece wants to be in the process of writing the thing. This piece very much falls into the latter category.
April 22, 2016 /Brin Solomon
process, composing, analysis, motives
The Spigot and the Chute
November 06, 2015 by Brin Solomon
I have a lot of feelings. I know, I know, this is hardly an earth-shattering revelation. But still, it's true: Going thru life, I have lots and lots of feelings about the things I experience.
I also write music. And unlike some composers, I explicitly want my music to be emotional, to express feelings and to get people in the audience to feel things in turn.
Are these things related? Do the feelings I have in my day-to-day life translate directly into the art I make?
Well, yes and no.
November 06, 2015 /Brin Solomon
about me, composer's toolbox, process, composing
Don't Be Boulez
September 04, 2015 by Brin Solomon
When the French high modernist Pierre Boulez was studying with René Leibowitz, the older composer dared to suggest several places in which his student's first piano sonata could stand some improvement. Hugely affronted, Boulez — who had been planning to dedicate the sonata to Leibowitz — screamed "Vous êtes merde!" ("You are shit!") and stormed from the room. Later, when preparing the sonata for publication, he saw the dedication on the title page and viciously scratched it out with a letter opener.
This is, to put it mildly, not the most graceful way to handle criticism. And yet, I've definitely been there. Composing is intense, intimate stuff, and even mild criticism, gently couched, can feel like an attack on you as a person and everything you hold dear. When it's not couched gently, when it digs below surface slip-ups to target the fundamental structure of a work, it can cut like the most vicious of knives.
And yet, criticism is an integral part of creative life. You don't get better without people pointing out where you've gone astray, often repeatedly and at length. How do you handle someone tearing into something you wrote without comparing them to excrement and symbolically stabbing them in the face?
September 04, 2015 /Brin Solomon
composing, feedback, process, advice
Against Motivation
People often describe me as a very motivated individual. Whether it's writing music or editing term papers, organizing sheet music or setting up rehearsal schedules, numerous people have commented appreciatively on how motivated I must be. And such comments never fail to bring a wry smile to my face.
Because the truth is? I'm really not.
process, about me, motivation is bullshit
Rotational Games
So I'm currently in the middle of writing a bassoon sonata. It's the first entirely new concert piece I've written since finishing my musical, the first such piece, in fact, since finishing my clarinet sonata in the fall of 2013. (I've done a couple of concert arrangements of selections from Window for various forces, and while all of them have new material spliced in, those additions are really just connective tissue to make the music work without the words; they lack the depth of compositional intensity that building a new structure from the ground up calls for.) It's going well: I have solid drafts of the first two movements and the third is off to a promising start.
composing, process, composer's toolbox, sonatas
The Cut Scene
Exactly a year ago today, Window Full of Moths, the musical I wrote for my senior project, opened in the Crescent Underground Theatre. [For those who only began following me recently: I wrote a musical! It's got lady scientists, same-sex love songs, and many other delightful things besides! And impartial reviewers found it deeply moving! You can watch the whole thing on my YouTube channel! The full show is about 80 minutes long, but if you don't have time for that, the title song and the voicemail apology number are both highlights that will give you a taste of it. Everyone who worked on it poured their hearts into it, and it would mean a lot if you checked it out.] I chronicled some of the key stages of the writing and production process on this very blog, and today I'm going to mark the anniversary by going behind the scenes once again and showing you the only scene that wound up being cut entirely in the revision process.
Window Full of Moths, theatre, scriptwriting, process, characterization
Making Up and Making Over
Western concert music, with its centuries-old tradition(s) of scholarship and study, has some very specific terms for very specific things: Essential Structural Closure, a modulation to the flat submediant, and my go-to bugaboo hexachordal combinatoriality — these all refer to pretty specific things and those specific things only.
Western concert music, being a rowdy and living tradition practiced by untold numbers of people with wildly different levels of formal education, also has some terms that can pretty much mean anything you want.
"Arranging" falls decidedly into the latter category.
I think most people, even non-musicians, have a pretty firm grasp on what it means to compose something. The specific process will vary from person to person, but at its heart, you go into a room with a blank piece of paper, and you come out with a piece of music. For some people, that involves literally sitting at a piano and plugging away, for others it involves fiddling with audio samples in a computer program, but either way, the result is much the same: The composer is the person who decides what sounds happen when*.
Arranging is much more nebulous.
At one end of its possible meanings, you have what can also be called transcription: Taking a work originally scored for one ensemble and scoring it for a different one, as with the concert band version of Leonard Bernstein's Overture to Candide compared to the orchestral original. Calling something a transcription implies a high degree of fidelity to the original source material. The instruments change, but the form remains the same. If you run across something labeled as a transcription, you wouldn't expect to find different harmonies or new countermelodies, at least not in the way that most people use the term today.
At the other end of the scale, you have things like Jimmy Mundy's arrangement of Louis Prima's "Sing, Sing, Sing" for Benny Goodman, which alters almost every aspect of the original**, up to and including the melody itself. (Few arrangements take this degree of latitude in the concert music world, what with our general reverence for scores and source material, but it's absolutely common practice in jazz and other less score-based musics.)
A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle. When William Schuman arranged his New England Triptych from orchestra to wind ensemble, he transcribed the first two movements with minimal alteration, but completely revised the third, nearly doubling it in length from its original incarnation. Gustav Mahler's piano parts for the piano-vocal versions of his Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs are not simply reductions of the full orchestral score from his orchestral arrangements.
Then, too, there are cases where the orchestration — the determination of which instruments play which notes — is so striking, so specific that, even tho the melodies and harmonies of the original are preserved in every detail, it seems misleading to call the new work "just" an arrangement of the previous one. The most iconic instance of this is probably Anton Webern's arrangement of one of the fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach's Musical Offering — Webern's meticulously detailed and relentlessly modern scoring transform Bach's exacting counterpoint into a psychedelic whirlwind of motives and fragments; it's an arrangement, sure, but one so strongly marked by the arranger's aesthetic that one almost wants to give them co-compositional credit for the resulting masterpiece. (You don't need two different people, either. The end of Igor Stravinsky's Svadebka (aka Les noces aka The Wedding) is another place where "the notes and rhythms being played" and "the instruments playing them" seem impossible to separate; orchestration and composition become one. (The passage in question, where frenetic energy gives way to the purified ringing of bells, begins around 8'17", but the whole thing is worth a listen if you have the time.))
Given this nebulosity, it might be tempting to dismiss "arranging" as a useless term. To the contrary, it's precisely this nebulosity that makes it useful. I can say that I'm "arranging" some of the music from Window Full of Moths for wind ensemble, and I don't have to clarify that, while the second movement is essentially a transcription of "Beside You", the third is a mixture of the opening of "Hey" and a radically altered version of "Stop Dreaming", with some new material thrown in to stitch them together, and then —
Arranging encompasses all these things in a way that gets at the core of what I'm doing: This music existed before. I'm changing it in some ways so that it exists in another form as well. Some of these changes are small, and some of them are big, but for the most part, we neither need nor want to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty specifics of which are which. Having a catch-all like "arranging" lets us get away from worrying about arbitrary distinctions on a continuous continuum and gives us more time to spend actually making art.
*There are, of course, exceptions where composers leave room for other people or things to make some of these decisions. For now, I'm simply ignoring this type of composition, but I think it can be subsumed into this framework with little difficulty.
**I am not actually 100% certain that this is the original arrangement given the sheer number of recordings of this tune and Spotify's spotty bibliographic information. If someone could confirm this or provide a link to the actual original arrangement, I would greatly appreciate it.
composing, process, arranging, music, rambles