I'm in unfamiliar territory, using a foreign music vocabulary, and the harder I fought against it, the worse it seemed. I knew I had to find something that would tie into the familiar and give me something on which I could build.
My first order was eliminating the voice. It was causing too many problems, including pitch location and the fact that I had originally only written a few lines of text to go with this music. I replaced it with an english horn, both for its sound and to pair with the clarinet. After a few attempts at starting something completely new, I realised I was better off salvaging some of the material that I've already written and presenting it in a new way. I had become just too attached to the chorale that I couldn't let it go. However, instead of being opening material, it is now the climax and end of the piece. I decided to take the first half the fourteen bar section and turn it into a kind of passacaglia. This allowed me to have a "form" and material to fall back on, but it was already different than your typical ground: seven measures long, in duple meter and with interludes between repetitions rather than a continuous approach.
Now the ideas were starting to flow more freely. I had something to tie the piece together. My idea was to interweave the instruments over the double bass during the ground, never having them all together, until the final chorale. I wanted a sense of everyone trying to come together, but never quite making it, one voice dropping out just as another enters. Unfortunately, as I discovered today in class, it lead to too much confusion. I have the basis for what I want, but now it needs more coherence. There is really only one section where there is a focus on one instrument (e.horn), so now I have to go back and tweak, creating different levels (not just through dynamics).
Speaking of which, the score is pretty much bare at this point in terms of phrase markings, dynamics, etc. I sketched everything out by hand this time, and then entered it into the software, and didn't have time to make those notations before giving the performers the music. Not an excuse, but something I need to fix. I mostly know where it's going, but it still needs to be done. I'm still on bad terms with music notation software. If there's one thing I've learned in the years of using it, it's that it stifles creativity and only complicates the task. I finally see that I have to write things out by hand first if I want to keep things flowing.
So, major points to focus on:
-dynamics, notation, phrase marks, etc.
-fleshing out the piano (it's pretty scarce right now, and could be used in a lot of places for colouristic effects and reinforcing the double bass)
-coherence in each part and through the parts
I'm also thinking about using a white noise machine as another kind of ground. I'll have to wait until a rehearsal before I know if it will work or not, but I think it could. Using a kind of "surf" noise that creates a secondary, uncontrollable ebb and flow to the music.
