Tall Grass Motion Blur

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A sketch + demo of a new piece for chamber ensemble.

Above is a photo of the hand-drawn score, but I plan to scan it and do some digital editing and tweaking to it. The audio demo is just made from samples, I’m hoping that real musicians will lend it some life & subtlety.

I’ve really enjoyed making this - it was another interesting experience of the power of media to change how one writes. After having felt tied down using Sibelius recently when creating ensemble scores, it was really fun to do a “handmade” one. I felt really free to structure things in a way that made sense to me & my way of thinking about music, but wouldn’t be accommodated by conventional notation. I scribbled some ideas down at the piano, then played with those ideas on the computer for a while but continued to use paper to record the developments of ideas. It went through a few pencil drafts before the ink version in the photo.

I have tried to make it visually sensical, but it probably will need instructions and explanations.

So in this piece there’s basically 2 separate textures happening simultaneously at 2 unrelated tempos. I think of it as a landscape rushing by a train window - long grass, fenceposts, and trees rush by close to the window too fast for you to focus on them, and mountains in the distance move slowly and gracefully across the frame. The percussion, piano, marimba & violin 1 are like the grass - weaving a complex and fast texture that’s quite difficult to follow but not overpowering. The 2nd violin, viola and cello are more like the distant mountains, playing a slow and simple melody at a totally unrelated tempo. 

My hope is that the ears will tend to focus on the more accessible melody in the strings, and allow the faster stuff to rush by in a textural cloud. If you try to focus and follow the faster lines, the energy is too frantic and unpredictable, but by pulling the focus from them I feel like they become more of a rushing blur, and the piece keeps a sense of calm despite the frantic rhythms.

In the slow strings component, the first statement of the theme is played in octaves, the second in stacked 9ths, then stacked 10ths, etc, with only a few little deviations here & there for the sake of a more pleasing harmony. The faster components shift & morph from one figure to the next (shown in the score by curved arrows).

The whole thing is stuck in Lydian mode… I’ve been trying to deny it but I just love it too much. For a long time I’ve felt really sheepish about using emo-esque chord progressions like vi - IV and such, because it just seems too easy & obvious. But I guess now my feeling is that in terms of musical innovation, its best to pick one battle at a time. If I’m trying to make things rhythmically and texturally interesting, it’s probably ok to use sugary harmony that we’ve all heard before. I don’t know. I hope the gods of modernism don’t strike me down, but I like the way this piece sounds, so I’m gonna let my Lydian shine on.