Ave Maria

I haven't posted in a long time, mainly because I was too overwhelmed by many things in my life going on at the same time, which I don't think is a very good thing, since I do tend to forget about very important things when I feel overwhelmed. For me, writing in this blog is very important since it is the only place where I can really express my thoughts about many things, without having too much confrontation or questioning. I can just experiment with ideas and write them one and many times until they are fully formed or fully discarded. So now, I decided to continue. 

I am working now on one piece and outlining in my mind another one. The piece I am working on is a setting of the Ave Maria for soprano and piano. It is not a very innovative instrumentation in itself, since many composers before me have done it and I think it is a sort of canonical form (like a piano trio or a string quartet), almost a cliché. But a friend of mine, who is an extremely talented soprano, asked me to write an Ave Maria for her, and she specifically wanted it to be in this cliché-like form. So I accepted, a but over-confident of the ease with which I could accomplish this task. I was so mistaken. I have never struggled so much with writing something. I spent the whole summer banging my head against the desk, trying to understand which harmonies I should use. The most important thing for me now is harmony, it is something I am still discovering and something I feel will be of the utmost importance in my future work. 

***

Ave Maria

gratia plena

dominus tecum

benedicta tu in mulieribus

et benedictus fructus ventris tui

Iesus

Sancta Maria

mater Dei

ora pro nobis peccatoribus

nunc et in hora mortis nostrae

amen

***

During this time I came across Peter Schat's "Tone Clock" system for organizing twelve-tone series by forming triads and I knew I had an answer to my doubts. I had to check it out because two of my teachers mentioned it to me in different occasions, this was too much of a coincidence to be taken lightly. I followed his system and wrote down a series that is basically composed of two "modal" hexachords separated by a semitone. Of course the system is a but more complex than this, but the sound result is mainly this. The rest of the music came very naturally once I had the harmonies figured out, the rhythm extremely simple (there is only one sixteenth note in the whole piece), the melodies long and in general a very sparse sound. I feel very satisfied with the result. 

I will talk about the piece I am developing in my mind in a later post. 

Before I finish this post I just wanted to talk a bit about a composer I just discovered. His name is Walter Zimmermann and he teaches in the Universität der Künste in Berlin. I really loved his music for its very clean sound, very slow, almost cold feeing. It is a very beautiful music, very clear. I want to learn more about it, I think I will investigate my school's library to see if they have some of his scores. Actually, I want to study with him. I am planning to do an ERASMUS in the UdK next year and my intention is to study with him, I hope I can accomplish this. 

For now, I leave you with one of his beautiful pieces, Festina Lente.

  

Writing again after a while

I haven't written for a while because I arrived two weeks ago in The Hague, and I was just trying to get the hang of things again, get used again to my conservatoire-student lifestyle, living alone and all that. Back home I didn't have to worry about so many things as here, like buying food or cleaning the house, or washing my clothes, etc. so here I need to get used to that again after one month of not caring about it at all. So I was in the midst of that and I didn't give myself time to write here.

As anyone who reads this blog may now already, I think a lot about stuff. Maybe my thoughts are not complex, maybe they are very naive, but I can't help but thinking about stuff all the time, maybe even worrying uselessly about things. My main concern these past two months has been the fact that I haven't been able to write a single bar of music that I find worthy of keeping. I don't think it is because I lack the ability to achieve this, but more that I haven't found the right approach to reach what I want in my music. What do I want in music? Speaking for myself today (this might change in the future), I seek the following things in my music:

• That it is well crafted, meaning that there is a logical relationship between all the elements that compose it.
• That it is not over the top. It has to be expressive without being unnecessarily loud or cheesy.
• That it has substance. It has to communicate something, or at least not leave the audience with the feeling that nothing happened.

These three elements are the most important aspects I seek while composing. The first has to do with the process, the second one with the result of this process, and the third one with the perception by the audience of this result. 

I think my main problem is with the first point I specified. To analyze this I need first to know what are the elements I perceive as composing my music as of today. I can say my main interest for now has been mainly in rhythm and timbre (instrumentation mainly, rather than extended techniques in a  particular instrument). This has left me with a huge void in the areas of melody and harmony. Of these two I feel the greatest weakness in harmony. I don't understand how to form a coherent progression of chords, be it in a tonal or atonal context. I mean, in a proper tonal context it is rather easy because the rules are already given, but to make it interesting and "original" has proven almost impossible for me. In the atonal world it is even worse because there I don't feel any control at all. 

So I decided to read a bit and see what other composers have done to face this problem (I don't think I am the only one that has had this problem, for one I know John cage never solved it and was never interested in it, but I am... so I need to find a way of approaching it). I began reading about Peter Schat's Tone Clock (Toonklok), mainly because there is a huge sculpture of it in the main foyer of the conservatoire. I promise a picture of it on my next post (I have to take it myself since there are none in the internet). Below a drawing of it. It is a very interesting serialist technique which gives very interesting results and which he himself encouraged other people to use. I like the idea of going for some time into serialism because I think it gives a strict base to organize ideas, which can later be stretched further and further, given rise to more interesting solutions to the problem of harmony. The other book I am beginning to read is volume 7 of Olivier Messiaen's Traité de rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie. The reason to read this book is because I have always been fascinated by Messiaen's use of harmony, and the beautiful, strange chords he sometimes finds.

I leave you now with one of my favorite pieces by Messiaen, L'apparition de l'Église eternelle (The Apparition of the Eternal Church).

Problems with my new piece

I have mentioned before my intentions of writing a piece for a friend who is a sopranist. I was fascinated with his voice because he can reach really high notes but he also has a very nice tenor voice, and he can also do weird and very interesting effects with his voice. Together with that, I came across two very interesting texts, which I wanted to use for something. These were the Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina) and the Prophecy of the Seeress (Völuspá). I also had the idea of writing a bigger-scale work than I have written before, for at least 5 musicians, including voice. All these ideas merged into one, but I still have lots of problems with this. 

The first problem is that I am still undecisive about which text to use in the piece. Both texts I chose are very interesting in terms of both content and language. Both are pretty long (the Völuspá is really long, but I intended to make a selection anyway) and both deal in some way with ancient worldviews. I still find myself going from one to the other in my mind, unable to make a choice. I think it is because I feel this would be the only opportunity I have to write a work using either text, which doesn't necessarily have to be so. I could use the unused text in a different occasion. 

The second problem is in terms of harmonic language. I find myself constantly recurring to a kind of film-like, dorian (more like the first church-mode) harmonic context, which I feel very unsure of. It feels somewhat unavoidable for the kind of music I want to write and yet I also have the impression that I shouldn't write it in this style because it would be resorting to cliché. But then again, I can use old techniques and still be myself, can I not? I am not copying anyone, I am using some tools to achieve my aims. I think what stops me most from writing this piece is the constant internal battle I have regarding the harmonic language I want to use and the harmonic language I feel I should use. 

And here I want to extend a bit on this. I think this has been one of my firecest internal battles in terms of the music I write. I have grown to reject the typical Hollywood-action-blockbuster soundtrack with my soul, because I think they always resort to the same kind of sound, the same chords, the same orchestration for the same special effects, the same chase sequences, the same building-destroying shots and so on. That being said, I also feel that my harmonic sensitivities are always on the tonal side. I have colleagues who can write very "modern-sounding" music with the greates naturality. I, on the other hand, love melodies and chords. I don't mean to say I dislike music that doesn't have this; some of my favorite composers couldn't be considered "tonal" by a far stretch, but still I seem to fail at every attempt I take to try this. I think it is simply because of a lack of interest in this, it sounds "ugly" to my ears when I do it, I feel that, to write this music, one has to come up with some sort of system, which I still haven't discovered. Every time I try to write something outside the tonal system or some weird stretch of it, I feel lost and usually the results are less from satisfying.

From this I have come to the conclusion that, in this period of my life, I am either not ready or not willing to leave the tonal area and its surroundings (large as they are, they are not eternal). I need to find a way of making it my own; I need to understand what can I do with it, in which ways I can stretch it to fit my needs of expression, order but also restraint and apparent lack of order.

I leave you to what I consider to be one of the most wonderful solutions to this problem in the history of music: Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (choreography by Pina Bausch)

Being home

A couple of weeks ago, I came back to Chile for the summer vacations. Apart from the fact that I got a really bad cold that has lasted already exactly a week, it has been a very nice, quiet and relaxed time. At first, I must say I had mixed feelings about coming back for the vacations. I mean, there was no choice, the tickets were bought, but still I felt kind of uneasy coming back home after living alone for so long, it is always difficult to get used again to being again under your parents' roof (with all that entails) after you have had so much time making your own decisions and choices.

It was a good time, though. I have rested a lot and slept a lot, both because I have vacations and because my mom cooks (she cooks delicious also) and I also don't have to worry (too much, at least) about cleaning and stuff like that. Also, I don't share the same vacation period as my friends that study here, since here they are already beginning their second semester of classes, so I have a lot of time to myself, and time with my mom. 

This has served me to reflect upon how my previous year in The Hague was, and what can I learn from it in order to have an even better second year starting this September. 

The first thing I realized was that this previous year I was not as focused in my studies as I would have liked to be. This doesn't mean at all that I wasn't focused, just that maybe I got distracted more often than I would have liked and that I could have been more productive in my studies. For this, I need this year to be more organized with the use of my time and also be more strict with myself, not letting myself be lazy (which is one of my biggest problems). This year I will also be having violin lessons, so I need to be organized enough to have time to compose, study and practice violin. 

The second thing is that I didn't manage my living budget very well, so I sometimes spent more than I should have. This overspending was basically due to two things: food and travel. It's not that I ate lots and lots, but that I ate out more than I should (i.e. more than my budget allowed) and I travelled aproximately once every two months, This, of course, meant I spent much more money than I was meant to on a given month. To fix this, I need to travel less and cook my own meals as much as possible. By doing this I will reduce very much my expenses. On top of this, I plan to look for some sort of part-time job to also have a small income to help finance this (my study visa allows for a maximum of 10 hours a week of work, which I think is also the amount of time I will have to work anyway). 

The third thing is that I realized that, despite all my efforts, I gained weight and started developing a belly (oh the horror). This I think is also related to my eating habits, which were a bit too disorganized and also due to the fact that I was not so consistent in my gym-goings. So this year I will try to cook my own meals to eat healthier and also go to the gym at least three times a week, maybe occasionally going out biking long distances on weekends and holidays. 

So this was my little reflection about my last year, and the three points I wanted to improve for next year. I hope I can make it, but even if I make a small progress towards this ideal, I will feel accomplished. It's all about being organized in the end. 

New project

Remember that piece I was planning to write using the text in Latin? Well, in the end I changed the idea a bit. Now I am going to use a different text. It is called the Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Seeress), it comes from Viking mythology, from a collection of epic poems called the Prose Edda. It deals with the creation and the destruction of the Earth, with a subsequent rebirth.

Artistic depiction from one of the final scenes of the Völuspá, when

Thor fights Jörmungandr, the serpent. He is succesful but mortally wounded, 

and is only capable of taking 9 steps before dying.

I like this idea more for several reasons. The first is that the text is much more appealing to me, it is very epic and it deals with themes that have always interested me, such as the Nordic gods, the orgin of life, the end of the world, epic battles, and mythological creatures such as Jörmungandr (the great serpent). Secondly, the text itself has already a kind of rhythm which I can use to give more structure to the music. Third, I can make selections from the text because all the different stanzas are clearly separated. The other text was a very compact whole and I would have to use it entirely for it to make sense. 

The fourth reason is also a main difficulty of using this text, which is the fact that I plan to use the original in Old Norse language. This is very appealing since I love the sound of this language, it is very archaic and perfect for the kind of music I want to write. But it is a major difficulty when trying to explain to the musicians how to pronounce the words correctly, since it has lots of very uncommon sounds and the writing system can be unfamiliar (although it uses the Latin alphabet). To solve this, I have thought of recording myself reading the fragments of the poem I want to use, and give this recording to the musicians, so that they can listen to the pronunciation. I also found a video on YouTube where a man chants part of the Völuspá, so I might also include that. Luckily, there are plenty of resources in the internet regarding the pronunciation of Old Norse, like this, which is I must say a bit daunting. Still, I know it will be a major difficulty of the piece, especially for the singer, since he will have to deal with the text the most, but I have faith in him.

The Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, Iceland. I know, it's a Christian building,

but still it has to me at least the feeling of Nordic epicness.

Also I think it is very interesting the fact that I am going to collaborate with a male singer that has a soprano voice range. This kind of ambiguity is also perfect for what I want, since the poem is narrated by a Völva, a Seeress, a woman who gets into trance and can speak to the gods, see the future or register can and the past and give advice based on that. I think that having very extreme changes in range from a high soprano voice to a tenor voice can add to this sense of being in a trance, of speaking with many voices. 

In terms of instrumentation I am keeping the choices I had for the previous idea, plus some percussion. So the instrumentation in all will be 2 harpsichords, accordion, cello and percussion apart from the singer.

I am very excited about this, I think this idea can have a very ncie result, now I just need to sit down and begin writing, slowly but surely.

I leave you now with a traditional song from Iceland, telling the story of a man that dies because he refused the love of a mermaid to save his soul for Jesus Christ.

I have no idea what this other song is about, but it's really cool. Apparently it's about Siegfried (the one from the Nibelungenlied) portrayed as a dragon slayer.

Final exam tomorrow

In approximately 12 hours I have my final composition exam for my first year. I want to have a moment to reflect on how my year has been, what did I learn, what did I leave behind and what lies ahead (at least in my mind now).

This year was a year of lots of changes and lots of new experiences. It is the first time when I have had so many performances of my pieces. It has been a very enriching experience to work with performers because I learned how to express myself more clearly, which influences the way in which I approach notation. I realized that sometimes all the expression indications are redundant and that the music can speak for itself, only needing maybe an f or p to give the reference of intensity. Before, I used very 19th century-style indications like "moderato cantabile." Now I think this kind of indications are superfluous and a simple metronome mark or concise tempo indication is enough. For the acordion pieces, I wrote short pharses that dictate more the mood of the piece, but in a very abstract way. For other pieces, I just wrote metronome markings. For other pieces, none of these were used bu I recurred to other ways of determining the tempi, such as breath length or just the performers' free choice. 

In a more structural way, I started to focus on more simple material, and trying to develop it as deeply as I can or want, but always focusing on very few elements at a time. This especially happened from the second of the accordion pieces onwards. Oh tiempo tus pirámides was a greakthrough in this sense, where I focused on very simple rhythmic motives that were almost not even developed throughout the piece but were just repeated and recombined with other elements, but always very simply and almost like crystal. I also dared more to explore the world of silence, of the space between the notes. It is a fascinating phenomenon to realize how one can create so many different atmospheres just by insinuating a contour with a few notes and silences. It is also a very counter-intuitive way of performing for most classically trained musicians, who are used ot more 19th century music that is sound all the time. 

I also went away from the kind of faux-romantic style that predominated my school years. I was very influenced by the mid-late romantic composers and I wanted to write music like them. I don't reject this period in my life, I learned a lot from it, but now I am more interested in simplicity, in creating musical structures that are pure and simple and elegant without being pedantic. I like this way because I think music like this creates lots of space for meditation and slef-kowledge. In an ideal or naive expectation, I would like to affect the people that listen to my music in that way, to make them feel at peace with themselves and the world, to have a moment to rest from the noise of the world. 

What lies ahead? Well for now I have 3 projects in mind. The first, which I think I can finish quite soon, is to write a cadenza for the first and second movements of Haydn's Piano Concerto in D Major. My sister is studying it and I offered to write her a cadenza to play with it. I already have some ideas for it. The second is the piece I mentioned before based on the Tabula Smaragdina. The piece will be approximately half an hour long and the instrumentation is singer (sopranist), accordion, cello and two harpsichords. My idea is that using two harpsichords will give more depth and increase the possibility for multiple voices sounding at the same time. And the third piece will be a collection of short pieces for fortepiano inspired on paintings by Giger (I also mentioned this a while ago), to pay him an homage after his death. After that, I have more ideas but they are all still quite blurry (a piece for solo harpsichord, a piece for organ, another for two pianos and one for solo violin, and also I thought of one for solo singing bowl), also, I just prefer to focus on what I have clear now before I begin wandering around mroe and more different ideas. It confuses me.

I am excited and a bit nervous for my exam tomorrow. But at least for me this year has been completely worht it, I am really satisfied with what I have done, I learned a lot and I feel like coming here has been one of the best decisions I have made in my life so far. I feel really fortunate to be here and to have learned so much. 

And I am feeling inspired tonight so I will end this post with a simple mantra.

ॐ शान्ति शान्ति शान्तिः

Recordings!

This week I finally got the recordings from the performance of two of my latest pieces. I've already talked a lot about them here, the first one is the vocal piece with the text in Sanskrit, which was finally titled as Pavamana Abhyaroha; the second one is the piece for accordion, the Trois tableaux.

I feel really satisfied with both performances, all the musicians with whom I worked were really interested and involved in the project and they all gave their best to perform my pieces. Also most of them liked the music very much, which is great at many levels. First, it makes me feel reallu happy that someone likes what I do, then it results in the musicians enjoying to play the pieces, this results in the pieces sounding great, which results in the audiences also liking the music. So, it's a win-win.

I was a bit doubtful with the title of the accordion piece being in French, because I feel that it could sound very pretentious, and the intention of the piece was quite the opposite. But in the end I decided to keep it, because in my mind the accordion sound and the idea of the piece has a kind of Parisian air to it that I thought was highlighted by the titles in French, there is no more reason for it. The thing is that still I don't feel that Trois tableaux is a great title for it, it's a bit bland, so I guess I have to think a bit more about it.

The métro in Paris

The other piece was completely satisfying to me. It was great because the organizers of the concert decided to project on the background the texts of all the pieces that were performed (they were all vocal pieces). I sent mine in the original script (in Devanagari, one of the scripts used for Sanskrit), so the audience (unless there was some person that knew Sanskrit) had no idea what the text meant, which is good because I always felt that the translation of the text sounds to preachy and cheesy.

So, without further ado, here are the links.

Pavamana Abhyaroha, performed by Jasper Leever (voice) and Ivan Pavlov (piano) at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. April 22, 2014.

Trois tableaux, performed by Robbrecht van Cauwenberghe (accordion) at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. April 25, 2014.