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.

Sketching and Sibelius

Recent improvements in notation software have brought about some interesting phenomena. There was a brief item on Steve Hicken’s site Listen, where he mentioned that in the course of revising a piece, he found himself composing right in Finale, as opposed to sketching on paper. This is something I’ve been doing for a few years, although in my case using Sibelius, and I thought the process might be interesting to some readers.

Sketching without paper certainly takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it, given the amount of time saved. In Sibelius, I typically start with just a few staves and just sketch away. One nice thing is that you can decide what certain milestones in the piece will be, and put them in all at once, knowing that you can always insert as many bars as needed in between them. It helps the process knowing that here’s x material, and here’s y material, and I can just add measures as needed to make a transition.

If you’re writing for a film, or you’re concerned with timing for other reasons, it’s also handy to show the time code in your sketch, putting in empty measures between sections that are finished to make sure the timing is right.

When it’s time to flesh it out, I may just start adding instruments, and copying material from the sketch staves into their appropriate instrumental lines, or if it’s a larger ensemble, I may copy from the sketch into the real score in a different document. Sibelius makes copying and pasting very easy with its filters feature. For example, if you want to only copy the bottom note from a line consisting of block chords, you can do that.

In the former scenario, where you just build the sketch into the final work, the sad side effect is that there is no history of the creation of the piece unless you’re very disciplined about saving backups at various stages. I’m not very disciplined. I would like to see a future version of Sibelius incorporate some kind of version control system that stores the whole history of a file, and even lets you roll back to an earlier version if desired.

I’m glad I’m just old enough to have been trained in a world where handwriting on paper was the only option. I hope younger composers will continue to receive that training. But, not having to deal with paper makes composing much easier and more fun. I dare say that I would not have been able to accept my current project — 3 months to do a 15-minute piece — if it weren’t for Sibelius.