Old lady dies (see other post)

[Richard Barrett]

may i ask a question that fascinates me? how do composers choose their ouput; not the means used to create, but the judgement to release the work as draft or complete .... no techniques involved surely? is it a some combination of listening, aesthetics and i have done enough etc .... the sense of what works as art, what is right about a piece is critical to the artist?

Speaking for myself, Calum, I almost always decide first on "global" parameters, starting with the overall duration of a composition and gradually focusing on the details with increasing precision (which doesn't of course exclude simultaneously approaching the work from the opposite direction, having a precise idea of some small detail or constellation of details and thinking about what their structural context could be), so it's always quite clear to me when something is finished, maybe in a similar way in this regard to working on architecture. I very rarely go back and change things subsequently, except when some (usually little) thing turns out to be miscalculated in terms of playability or balance etc. A "completed" work is a document of a particular stage in one's life and thinking; I prefer to move on to something else than to go back and tinker with it in the hope of improving it - for me, life is too short for that.

Having said that: in 2005 I decided I was somewhat burned out by several years of intensive compositional activity and not to compose anything new for a while. What I did instead (while keeping the wolf from the door by doing translations) was to complete a piece which had for deadline-missing reasons to be sent out and performed in incomplete form (according to my structural plan) back in 1990, which involved composing a missing section of several minutes in the middle, and also to return to another supposedly complete piece from 1987 and rewriting and extending it as I "ought" to have composed it at the time if I'd had the experience of the succeeding eighteen years. There are a couple of other scores from the 1980s which are awaiting similar treatment; but there's always so much to do, and so little time, and the hourglass is always emptying in the background...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

...thank you Richard; as a psychologst i wonder if the decision to conclude is perhaps a less technical choice and a more personal one ... [putting contextual issues like deadlines to the back if that is possible], there is some sense of that is what i meant, what i set out to do along with the odd surprise on the way ...

[Richard Barrett]

as a psychologst i wonder if the decision to conclude is perhaps a less technical choice and a more personal one

"Technical choices" are made for personal reasons of course - the reason for approaching things in this kind of way (usually) is that it facilitates making the music that's envisioned, which involves indeed framing "what I set out to do" in such a way as to encourage new discoveries and surprises along the way... so that the fulfilment of the process (always contingent and provisional in any case, as indeed are performance and listening) in itself embraces an expansion of the possibilities that seemed to be present and latent at the outset. In other words not so much a "development of one's material" but an exploration of them; and this is where the function and potential of systematic compositional procedures are located.

[Serial_Apologist]

"Technical choices" are made for personal reasons of course - the reason for approaching things in this kind of way (usually) is that it facilitates making the music that's envisioned, which involves indeed framing "what I set out to do" in such a way as to encourage new discoveries and surprises along the way... so that the fulfilment of the process (always contingent and provisional in any case, as indeed are performance and listening) in itself embraces an expansion of the possibilities that seemed to be present and latent at the outset. In other words not so much a "development of one's material" but an exploration of them; and this is where the function and potential of systematic compositional procedures are located.

Thanks very much for these replies, Richard. Thinking of those who have written on this forum bemoaning the paucity new members, I can't help thinking how many are missing out on the enormous benefits afforded by insights of this kind.

Thinking as I was before reading them about Hindemith's later efforts in tidying up early works such as the 1922 song cycle "Das Marienleben", suggests to me that the whole business of justification can never be evinced in general terms. Bearing Varese's withdrawal of most of his pre-"Ameriques" output in mind, to me it is nonetheless a pity when composers do not leave undone what they may later feel ought to have been done, given that it can help followers in getting a grip by tracing back to a stage at which where the ccomposer is "coming from" is more easily understood. One would have so loved to have known what Boulez's "Notations" sounded like, back in 1945 (?) !!!

[Richard Barrett]

Thank you S_A for your kind words. I thought I might be getting a bit convoluted there, and I don't think there are many on this forum who'd be interested in such matters (though if there were they probably wouldn't be looking at this thread... )

Varese's withdrawal of most of his pre-"Ameriques"

I always thought those scores were accidentally lost or destroyed...

[eighthobstruction]

Seeing as this seems to be a thread where you can say what you like/lead it as you wish/where you will....I'm going say

....I can be pretty savage....

....couldn't say it on Boston thread....now I'm forfilled Aaaaaaaaaaah.....that's better....perhaps I can find a score that will soothe this savage breast....

[Serial_Apologist]

Seeing as this seems to be a thread where you can say what you like/lead it as you wish/where you will....I'm going say

....I can be pretty savage....

....couldn't say it on Boston thread....now I'm forfilled Aaaaaaaaaaah.....that's better....perhaps I can find a score that will soothe this savage breast....

Varese's "Ameriques", maybe. No, on second thoughts...

[Richard Tarleton]

Thank you S_A for your kind words. I thought I might be getting a bit convoluted there, and I don't think there are many on this forum who'd be interested in such matters (though if there were they probably wouldn't be looking at this thread... )

And thank you from me, feeling thoroughly ashamed of my flippant earlier post. You never stop learning on these boards.

[ahinton]

I always thought those scores were accidentally lost or destroyed...

They were; as far as I know, almost everything pre-Amériques was lost except the song Un grand sommeil noir of 1906 which has survived (and which is recorded on the Chailly complete works CDs) and the symphonic poem Bourgogne from the following year which was premièred in 1911 in Berlin (after some encouragement from (Richard Strauss) and which also survived until, apparently, the composer destroyed the score very late in life. It would obviously have been fascinating to know more of what Varèse wrote in the years before he left for US.

[Serial_Apologist]

Un grand sommeil noir of 1906

A marked Roussel influence I detected in that song, even though the presenter cited Debussy. It was broadcast a year or so ago. I hear echoes of "Le Martyr", "Le Sacre" and the Five Orchestral Pieces Op 16 in "Ameriques", but beyond that work Varese's voice was wholly his - it would have been interesting to have discovered how these influences entered Varese's music; maybe someone will discover a long-lost score of "Bourgogne".

[ahinton]

A marked Roussel influence I detected in that song, even though the presenter cited Debussy. It was broadcast a year or so ago. I hear echoes of "Le Martyr", "Le Sacre" and the Five Orchestral Pieces Op 16 in "Ameriques", but beyond that work Varese's voice was wholly his - it would have been interesting to have discovered how these influences entered Varese's music; maybe someone will discover a long-lost score of "Bourgogne".

Ah, if only! I suppose that, given that it did receive at least one performance, there could be the slimmest of chances that the orchestral material might still be around somewhere. Interesting that you mention Roussel, with whom Varèse studied. There's an almost direct and intriguing crib from Le Sacre at one point in Amériques; there's another strong, albeit very brief, similarity between a passage in Amériques and Sorabji's Fifth Piano Concerto, although Varèse could not have known that work as it predates it by only a year or two and its score was not published until Amériques was complete (and it didn't receive its first performance until 2003!). Could Varèse have heard the Op. 16 pieces before writing Amériques? Possibly.

[Serial_Apologist]

Ah, if only! I suppose that, given that it did receive at least one performance, there could be the slimmest of chances that the orchestral material might still be around somewhere. Interesting that you mention Roussel, with whom Varèse studied. There's an almost direct and intriguing crib from Le Sacre at one point in Amériques; there's another strong, albeit very brief, similarity between a passage in Amériques and Sorabji's Fifth Piano Concerto, although Varèse could not have known that work as it predates it by only a year or two and its score was not published until Amériques was complete (and it didn't receive its first performance until 2003!). Could Varèse have heard the Op. 16 pieces before writing Amériques? Possibly.

And an almost direct quote from "Peripatie" from Op 16.

One could almost start a thread on possible... plagiarisms would be a bit strong maybe... I'm resisting the temptation!

[Tapiola]

And an almost direct quote from "Peripatie" from Op 16.

One could almost start a thread on possible... plagiarisms would be a bit strong maybe... I'm resisting the temptation!

If memory serves, there is another Stravinsky crib/borrowing/allusion in Arcana: the rising three-note repeated figure (the first three notes of a minor scale) at the start of the Infernal Dance from The Firebird.

[ahinton]

If memory serves, there is another Stravinsky crib/borrowing/allusion in Arcana: the rising three-note repeated figure (the first three notes of a minor scale) at the start of the Infernal Dance from The Firebird.

Indeed there is - but then one could say that this might also have been "cribbed" from Mahler 6, in which the first subject of the first, second and last movements (on the basis of scherzo second) are somehow nailed down to those first three notes of the minor scale - and then the first three notes of "Alma's theme" and the first three of the slow movement are likewise just variants of this inescapability from the first three notes of a scale...

[Richard Barrett]

If memory serves, there is another Stravinsky crib/borrowing/allusion in Arcana

Arcana owes a lot more than three notes to Stravinsky in fact (and not only Stravinsky); I find it a bit strange that after the series of searingly original pieces Hyperprism, Octandre and Intégrales he went back to a relatively conventional style for Arcana. I like it a lot all the same, but I can't dispel the feeling that it could have gone a lot further.