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.
