Befejeztem!

So, as of yesterday, Letter To Hungary is now out the door, delivered electronically to a printing store in Budapest. (See, I keep telling people: the internet is good for some things.)

Turns out, generating parts using Sibelius 4 has not been the Hamptons clambake I’d anticipated based on the hype. (Don’t get me wrong; I loooove Sibelius.) Also, the piece is so busy that for the first time ever, I’ve had to deliver a set of parts without a solution for every pageturn problem. I’m not an orchestral player or a professional copyist, so I simply couldn’t figure out how to get it done. Tips and tricks are welcome here.

Here’s a first pass at some brief program notes.

You want it when?

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re under the gun. I’ve always said that I prefer to work on projects where there’s a concrete deadline, and I’m sure most composers feel this way. But, there are deadlines, and there are deadlines. Because of the way concerts are scheduled, at least in the U.S., a typical timeline for an orchestral commission is roughly a year, maybe nine months or so. A film score project can be as little as a month or six weeks (or less? I’m not really sure.)

As it happens, my current project is not for an American orchestra, but a European one. Because concerts aren’t necessarily scheduled so far in advance there, the orchestra I’m working with had the flexibility to put together a very interesting program in very little time. I was contacted at the end of July about writing this 15-minute piece that will go up in the middle of November. At first it seemed like an untenably tight timeline, but this opportunity is special for both personal and professional reasons, and turning it down was simply out of the question.

Here’s what I’ve learned: tight deadline good; “comfortable” deadline bad.

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.

Folk elements in Letter to Hungary

Letter to Hungary draws inspiration from Hungarian folk music, which I’ve studied and loved this music since my time living in Budapest in the early 1990′s.

Using a folksong anthology that I’ve had since those days, I found a song that’s appropriate, both in what the text conveys and in that it bears some of the lovely intervals and modal shifts typically found in these folksongs.

Details on the Budapest concert

Since the beginning of August, I’ve been working on a new piece for the Hungarian Chamber Symphony Orchestra. It will be a fifteen-minute piece for strings, and the title is Letter to Hungary. With this concert, the HCSO is launching their “American Composers’ Podium”, a series of concerts and hopefully other events that will help promote the work of American composers among Hungarian audiences.

The concert will take place on November 18th at the Italian Institute in Budapest. Other composers featured will be Malcolm Hawkins and Sara Doncaster. You can read full details on the American Composers Podium on the HCSO’s stunning new web site .

More on the First Movement

This is a follow-up to the last entry about the HCSO piece (still untitled). I outlined what the overall structure of the piece as it looked about a week ago, but there was little detail on each of the movements.

Last week, I really only had about 12 bars for the opening of the slow first movement, but now it’s nearly complete, and will be more than 5 minutes long. The result is a mainly contemplative opening movement that builds into a wild cs�rd�s (a fast Hungarian dance), and then recedes back to reprise the main slow theme of the beginning.

As described in the earlier entry, the movement opens with a pentatonic melody played by the two violin sections divided in five parts in the form of a homophonic choral. This original tune is interlocked with the opening phrase of the Mad�rka, mad�rka tune, which never manages to proceed beyond that. The interplay develops into a more contrapuntal texture with a few tense moments, giving way to a new theme.

The new theme is is an E minor tune with a slow, pulsating accompaniment. This is actually a tune I made up about a year ago, when I thought it would be fun write a Hungarian folksong. (I don’t know how convinced the Hungarian audience will be, but I like it.) The tempo increases and builds up to boot-slappin’ fast dance. I’m trying to imitate the string playing in Hungarian folk band music, but also trying not to sweat it too much; authenticity is not one of my goals. The E minor tune returns in the final movement in a major variation that is somewhat less Hungarian, but probably more interesting.

Yet to be worked out is the transition back to the contemplative opening chorale, which ends the movement.

Anatomy of an unfinished piece

Well, I’d promised myself that September 1st would be when I stop sketching and start fleshing out and orchestrating the HCSO piece. I was hoping to have an end-to-end sketch of the whole piece to work from by now. I almost do. Good enough, I guess.

The big outstanding question for me at the moment is whether this is a multi-movement work or just one big movement. I’m leaning toward four movements, some played attacca. The material isn’t quite unified enough to to hold one movement together. I have to come up with names for the movements, though, which is a bit of a drag.

Here’s what I seem to be working with now:

New Chamber Orchestra Commission

Toward the beginning of August, I was invited by the Hungarian Chamber Symphony Orchestra to compose a new work for string orchestra to be performed in November 2005. This is for a special program of American repertoire called the “American Composers’ Podium”.