Sacrifice

Sometimes it is necessary to discard perfectly good material. The piece grows, the goalpost moves around, and not every good idea survives. This is something I learned gradually, even after I was a student. Sometimes it’s just a held bass note that makes sense in a piano sketch, but turns out to just be mud when you orchestrate it. Sometimes it’s the original idea that an entire piece was supposed to be based on.

I’ve had to do this frequently in the past, and the piece has always come out better for it. It’s particularly common in musical theater, and I’ve often had to fight over this with collaborators who find it hard to let go.

In my earlier description of Letter To Hungary, I described it as a four-movement piece, but since then I’ve been working toward building one large movement. One reason for thinking of discrete movements was my concern that my material was not well enough unified to hold together as one movement. Meanwhile, most of my material is now fleshed out enough that I can see it as one movement, but there will have to be a sacrifice.

The second movement referred to in that earlier post, the one described as “playful and macabre” and reminding me of Bernard Herrmann, needs to be taken out of the game, unfortunately. It just doesn’t fit into the emotional narrative that has evolved. I do like it, though, so I’ll probably hang on to it, and perhaps rework it for the violin sonata that I put aside for this project. I’m still not ruling out dividing the piece into movements, but I’ll still be leaving this material out of the piece.

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