Composing: fragments from "The Wanderer" and my new piece for guitar and mandolin

I’ve begun and am now more than halfway done with a work for soprano and nine instruments based on fragments of the old English poem “The Wanderer.” I decided to use transcriptions (creative transcriptions) of wind sounds recorded at various places around the world – among them the ruins of Tughlaq’s palace in Delhi, the Turfan depression in China and others to develop chords and from there composed more or less freely. It is a very strong powerful work that I’m having a great time writing and am proud of. Shockingly it is among the more rhythmically simple of my pieces. I’ve taken little phrases and words here and there from the poem, so to say it is a setting of The Wanderer would be wrong – instead it is a setting of my feelings about the poem in general viewed at through the lens of memory. The text is an instrument, perhaps for the sentiments. One aspect of the poem that seems to be among the more salient is that of decay – the poem has a happy ending per se, but I’ve avoided that part. I’ve decided to enact that in a structure of changing instrumentation – different instruments will drop out with each section become “wanderers” if you will, joining with the voice or going off on their own. I’m quite pleased with it and hope to have it finished by mid-March. No performance scheduled or in the works – any takers?

After working diligently for several months, I decided to take a break from the guitar/mandolin piece in early January as things had reached a point of wrapping up. I was still unsatisfied with the piece and thought that some time away would allow me to return to it with a fresh perspective. Parts that I liked had begun to be changed beyond recognition, I had eliminated parts that I felt didn’t work in an effort to see if they were necessary and so forth. Ultimately, I think time away is the right idea.
I sat down yesterday and listened to what was there of the score and remained dissatisfied. Last night, I got up in the middle of the night with an I’d like to try out on it. First, create a version of the score that is simply the two parts and then two blank staves underneath – to make the composing over easier. Then consider the structure – making it more codified in a form of Introit, Sostenuto and Dance. Reinstate some of the introit figures which I always felt worked well as a beginning. Redo the middle section in order to create the thing that I felt I could never get from the ensemble – sustained pitches. Rewrite it so that it is a sustaining section in beautiful harmonies. The final dance section can be just that. Perhaps three movements instead of one? Or else divide the one movement into three movements with mock tuning and instrument arguments – in this way the performance becomes a part of the piece. Perhaps this will save the piece – the other option is to create a series of ephemeral moments – jumping in in the heat of action perhaps. I think I’ll try the first now and if that doesn’t work, try the second later.

Composing Today

A full day of work on the guitar/mandolin piece. I was exploring more the concept of translation today – how can we make it work with a musical experience. Sure, with a physical experience I can take the essence of it and morph it into a structure or concept. With this piece, I want to reflect on the blind man of Urumqi playing his erhu down the street. The idea translates to the ensemble here in the concept of blindness – the surroundings may change but he will still remain walking the changing streets of China and playing the beggar’s fiddle, one of the oldest instruments in the country. To create the blindness, I retuned the guitar and mandolin to create an instrument that is the same physically (the alleys and anes that he walks) but that has a different existence – the pitches here are different though the streets are the same – to mix several metaphors simultaneously. Let’s go further and reflect on a musical experience, to translate the musical experience I can reflect on what works for me in the piece musically and then do something with those to create something new based on the musical parameters of something else. In this case, I’m not particularly interested in the musical parameters – he plays a relatively simple pentatonic song, with the addition of one grace note and a slide. It is his feeling that is what is interesting. Instead, I’ve decided to transcribe the gestures of the player – he has six positions on the instrument, plus the open string, that he moves between depending on the note he’s playing. I mapped this geography onto the instruments I’m writing for and from there chose little figures duplicating the rhythm – so the players here are playing his song on their new instruments, or at least the gestures of his song.
I’ve been playing around with the piece for a few hours today and have about a minute and a half of music – very rhythmic making full use of the open strings. I still don’t have much sense of the piece. The erhu player plays a song that is ABA, with the first and last phrases essentially duplicating each other. Perhaps I should simply map this structure onto the guitar/mandolin piece, which would mean that I have an A section and need to simply develop a B section and another A section and the piece is finished except for the crazy remapping of it back onto the guitar/mandolin. We’ll see where it goes.
In other news, I’ve found that the best way for me to hear it fully is to save it as a midi version on one track – this keeps similar sounds and the quarter-tones, which I’ve beenhaving a hell of a time getting on my nasty-looking four-staff finale version.

Composing Today

23 September 2008
A little history: about a year ago I received an email out of the blue from the Duo Ahlert and Schwab asking if I would write a piece for their mandolin guitar duo. It seems these folk are the foremost mandolin-guitar duo in Europe and like modern music and especially American composers. I wrote back and said I’d write something small by Christmas of this year. I’ve finally come to embrace the idea of writing this piece – on the one hand I have no performances scheduled and any performance is a good one especially if it gets me to write a new piece. I began to think about the instruments and realized that I could actually get some serious harmonies out of these two fretted instruments especially if I retuned the strings. So I began exploring the retuning possibilities of the instruments.
If we begin with the guitar, one problem I encountered was no matter how I tweaked the tuning I still ended up with that awful fourth-laden sonority that defines the guitar. I realize now that the problem was result of the fact that I was approaching the tuning from the wrong direction – I was trying to get the most quarter-tones I could get out of the combination of the instrument rather than rethinking the instrument completely. So today, I began trying to rethink the pitch continuum of the guitar. Guitars are normally tuned E-A-D-G-B-E which is a two octave span; 24 semitones or 48 quarter tones. I thought that what I should do to the guitar is divided this space up evenly. Thus the five intervals between pitches would be divided into the 48 quarter tones which obviously is uneven. So if I expand the space to 50 – I could tune in equal 10 quarter tones orfive semi-tones or P4 which sounds like the guitar. Instead I shrunk the space and tuned it in equal 9/4 tones: E – Aqb – C# - Fq – A# - Dq – this actually changes the sound of the instrument.
For the mandolin we usually tune in fifths like the violin: G-D-A-E. Instead I thought to again retune the space. My choices were equal 15/4 or 13/4 intervals. 13/4 intervals tend to sound a hell of a lot like tritones, but 15/4 intervals have their own special sound and that’s what I’ve currently chosen: Gqb – D – Aq – F. The other thought that comes to me now is to tune the mandolin like the guitar – thus with a smaller interval between strings 2 and 3, something like: G-Eb-Ab-E or something with quarter-tones, perhaps I’ll experiment with that as well.
I was talking with Carla about the poetic concept for the piece and the image that kept coming back to me was of a blind man we saw in Urumqi. He was being led around by his wife and was playing the erhu, she held a bucket to collect coins; most people gave. What is striking about this image in the context of the retuning of the guitar is that for this man, and for the blind, he could have been walking this path for fifty years playing his erhu. His path remained the same, but the environment around him changed – thus for the guitar and mandolin players we have a similar thing – they are strumming their strings but the instrument is different – the environment of sound is different though the fingerings and strummings are the same.
I realize also in retuning these instruments that we have then three separate pitch worlds possible: the tempered world; the quarter-tone world and the fusion of the two. Perhaps I can work something out whereby the environment moves from one to another. We’ll see.
Today I composed out some rhythmic sections that may make it into the final work – likely toward the end. We’ll see about that as well.