Project overview
To what extent can a piece of music reflect the turbulence and fragmentary quality of our internal lives or of the external world?
If the work can do this, can it also stay a satisfactory musical whole?
If it does not seem whole, will it be a formal failure, or instead a provocative, new kind of expression?
My proposed new piece seeks to address these issues by pushing a musical form built out of fragments to its limits. The fragments will sound as such because of the way the sections of the music stop and start, how continuous flow will suddenly be ruptured. This will also go to the heart of the play of extremes in the harmonic language, and in the use of stylistic contrast too.
I also wish to address the issue of musical time in the piece, and in particular how our perception of time in music may be affected by orchestral texture and instrumental layering - as much as by how one event follows another. In particular I want to investigate if it is possible to evoke the perception of more that one kind of time simultaneously. An analogy to this may be seen in the way our memories can appear to us to contain more than one image from different times in our pasts (as well as our present) at the same time.
Such exploration has a perceptive aspect, and a formal one too. But there is also a vital expressive side. I see much of my music as a dialogue between the 'passionate' and the 'contemplative'. An explicit focus on different kinds (and degrees) of musical time, their juxtaposition and their layering, will develop an understanding of how these 'poles' may best and most powerfully be evoked through music. Further I will seek to uncover how this temporal-expressive question interlocks with orchestral sound. I see antecedents for this in the work of Mahler - the opening of his first symphony is a powerful example. Equally I see the orchestral music of Thomas Ades as occasionally exploring such a field, the end of his recent Tevot is one such example. But neither's music puts an explicit focus on the issue as I propose.
As well as my piece shining its expressive and formal light on the subjects it contains, I wish further to reflect on how I am making the piece - in the act of composition, and not only after it. To that end I will write a regular blog from the stages of pre-composition to the completion of the piece, in which I will detail my workings: elaboration of materials, testing of ideas, development of form, thinking about the relationship of intuition and rational construction and so forth.
The language here will necessarily be technical at times, but I aim too to write in such a way that an interested general reader will be drawn deeply into my musical world.
