Composition Process Diary Comin' Right Atcha Composed for the Absolute Ensemble, June-August 2002 Matthew Hindson

Preliminary Thoughts and Ideas Title: Idea for the title came previously with a conversation with Chris Latham, who is the promotions manager at Boosey and Hawkes Australia. He called a sampler CD Coming Right Atchya in order to convey some of the sense of the music 'coming' right out to the listener. This is something that I have been interested in for a long time. It also seemed to fit the idea of the piece being written for the Absolute Ensemble: - loud volume, therefore music coming out at the audience - energetic conductor and selection of music that they play The title of the piece has its own rhythm and pitch shape:

(Motive A). I decided that this would be one of two main motives in the piece. As a foil to this, the other motive would be based on the following pattern:

(Motive B) I met the conductor (Kristjan Jaarvi) last November (2001) whilst in Adelaide. He conveyed to me how he likes the group to approach their concerts a la a rock group rather than necessarily a classical chamber group. This again led to some initial ideas of perhaps using popular idioms within a classically structured work. Mind you, I may have done it anyway.

Preliminary Listening * Absolute Ensemble CDs, such as Absolution and Absolute Mix. This helped me get a sense of their playing. Was very impressed with their virtuosity, in particular the violinist and trombonist. Thought about perhaps featuring some of these performers as soloists in some way since they are so good. Kristjan Jaarvi also encouraged me to write a piece that was really James Brown. As I didnt know any of Browns music, I thought that this was an interesting proposition, but didnt know quite how to take it!
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* James Brown pieces, such as Funky Drummer and Sex Machine. Points noted from this listening included: brass punctuations, generally in rhythmic unison repetition bar-to-bar riffs and/or patterns overlaid amongst different instruments percussion/kit rhythmic patterns funk rhythms (I wondered if these could be overlaid with some of the rhythmic patterns esp. those derived from dance music that I have found to be useful over the years).

* Other funk CDs such as those by groups such as Funkadelic and Tower of Power. However the James Brown influence seemed much more in line with what I was thinking, as it was much more straightforward. These other CDs were a reaction to James Browns music in themselves (so it seemed to me). I preferred to go back to the source. Other pieces that I heard before and during writing this piece included: - Brett Dean Pastoral Symphony: a work completely different to my music in just about every respect, but which was extremely effective. Lots of overlapping layers everywhere. I wondered if I could use a similar technique at any stage in Comin Right Atcha. Mussorghsky arr. Julian Yu: Pictures at an Exhibition: some very interesting textural and orchestrational techniques, though they didnt seem suitable for this piece. John Williams On the Conveyor Belt: Someone said that this sounded just like my music I didnt think so, but was interested anyway by ideas such as sequences and moto perpetuo. -Bruckner Scherzo from Symphony No. 7: Whilst from a different period of music, this music was very impressive in terms of its clarity. There were many lines of music going on, yet everything could be so clearly heard and worked extremely well together. This clarity of expression was something that I hoped would be present in much of Comin Right Atcha.

Composition Process The writing of Comin Right Atcha (CRA) took place in a number of stages. I either worked by hand, or more usually, using a computer. Firstly, I wrote the development section of the piece. Then I wrote the beginning, then the end. These were not by any means finished versions. After this, I went through and swapped and changed different sections of the piece, as well as going through and polishing. Finally, I re-entered the entire piece into the computer software Finale, and created a score and parts.

1 Development section
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First I wrote out the motives on a blank piece of paper, just to get a sense of their shape. I then considered what developments I could subject these motives to. Here are some examples:

Motive A:

or

When inverted (put upside down) or retrograded (put back-to-front), the result is the same:

(inverted or retrograde) Interval Expansion (increasing the distance (intervals) between the notes):

The opposite to this is interval contraction:

The contracted intervals were initially most interesting, and I decided that they may form some part of the middle of the piece. So I began working from the middle of the piece, outwards. e.g.

This motive was further developed in terms of adding other parts around it.

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To create polyrhythmic patterns, I created numerical patterns from the shape of Motive A. i.e. if a note is high in pitch, it gets a certain number. These numbers were then used to create rhythmic patterns. My aim in this was to create a chaotic, overlapping texture, that may be funky. I didnt know if it would work, in any case, I tried and came up with the following result.

The stabbing referred to above relates to the brass interjections found in funk music, but as if they were really compressed and all happening simultaneously. Whether this actually happened or not is another question but the effect was interesting (if slightly chaotic). This, and its subsequent developments, were contrasted by less busy, more straightforward sections, based upon other material derived from Motive A.

I worked on further developing these ideas and similar derivations quite a bit. This involved creating and manipulating material on a sequencer called Logic Audio. My way of working in this is that notes are either played in or entered into the sequencer, then manipulated in various ways, including in large blocks:

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and piano roll notation:

This also helps relate to the graphical representations of motivic developments as outlined above. The sequencer is very good at some things, less so at others. For example, it can play better in time than real players can, and so its very easy for extraordinarily difficult rhythms etc. to be created. It is not good at creating dynamics without much effort. There were many other developmental techniques used in this section. For example, I came up with a series of slower chords in the woodwind and brass parts, the melodies of which were based upon augmented versions of inverted Motive A and the shape of Motive B (i.e. the rhythms were made much much longer, meaning that their character could change from fast and staccato to more legato and extended). Contrasting material was placed over and around this material to maintain interest, and also to create a reference to the original motives, themselves. The idea of a bassoon solo was also formulated after talking to Anna Yerbury, Musica Vivas Education Coordinator who plays bassoon. The bassoon is somewhat of a neglected instrument, and so I imagined a section where the bassoonist goes off with a totally wild and self-indulgent, ridiculously-virtuosic solo. This could be ended by a sudden percussive bang, or some other stabbing figure, indicating hey, stop that!

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The structure of the development section was important in that it needed to maintain a sense of flow with all of these small sections placed next to each other. I represented it in graphical form.

I stuck to this plan to a large extent though not exclusively. The instruments get higher leading to a high, repetitive fff figure, for example, was cut from the piece later in the compositional process. During the course of the composition I continually revisited sections that had been written. It takes a long time to get things right but on the other hand, the consideration of whether a section works or doesnt work can change from day to day. Some further refinements included adding more space and silences into the piece to create a balance between loud and soft material, and revising some of the rhythmic and cross-rhythmic relationships so that they could be heard more easily.

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*** It was a bit strange working on the development section of the piece before working on the beginning! However, at the same time I was coming up with ideas for other parts of the piece, e.g. I had the idea of very opening the work with a hi-hat solo, in which the player could improvise:

I was also continually referring to a hand-written text by Martin Highland that outlined some typical patterns used by drummers. This text also indicated that there is a very strong tradition of improvising amongst drum-kit players. With regards to this, I also discussed kit writing with Philip South, a Sydney-based percussionist. He pointed out some notational conventions and also some interesting different drum grooves. A section where the percussion was not playing formed one of the first explorations of the juxtaposition of Motives A and B. In this section, the violin had a repeated-note pattern. Statements of Motives A and B were placed on top of this, rather obviously.

I had no idea where this section would fall in the piece, and in fact tested it in different places.

Other considerations and decisions arrived at during this time include: that I shouldnt worry too much about making the piece too much like funk probably what I already have in terms of initial starting points is sufficient; that I should mix and match different styles/moods etc. as necessary; that I should perhaps try to feature each instrument in a solo capacity at some point; that the instrumental palette that I am working with: clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, piano, drum kit, violin, double bass plus amplification - is fairly limited as compared to say, an orchestra, so I need to be creative with regards to things such as instrumental doublings and combinations; that the piece should be structurally tight since Im aiming for a 10 minute time frame; that I may be able to further consider humorous elements, such as the bassoon solo already mentioned, but also that I need to be extremely careful as to what the focus of the piece should be, and whether any humorous elements enhance the work as a whole.

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2. Opening sections of the work I have already stated the idea of beginning the work with a hi-hat solo of reasonable length. The pattern stated in the above section is intended to allude to some of the funk origins of the piece. I considered long and hard over whether to have other instruments playing something over the top of this, and one idea was to have instruments enter one at a time, to create the effect of coming right at you:

However in the end I decided that a straight hi-hat solo would probably be fine as it is. You can get away with certain things at the very beginning of a piece, and in the hands of a good player, it could actually sound very virtuosic and stunning with a single instrument (hi-hat). I did try to create some structures using this pattern, and in fact placed one of them at the end of the piece. The structure of the opening two minutes or so started to develop, as the diagram below illustrates.

These structural deliberations did take a lot of time, but of course even more time was spent in actually creating the notes for the players to play. I decided that the opening material of the
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piece should create a fairly vibrant and happy atmosphere, underpinned by a moving bass riff working in a similar way to a bass guitar part in a funk song. Once the bass part and the drum kit parts were created, the process of adding material based upon developments of the motives was much easier. I also decided to create interlocking parts, much in the same way that the parts may interlock in a funk piece. They were all based somehow around the unit of the semiquaver. Rhythmic consistency at the opening I felt helped to create a groove of sorts, and in addition, contrasted markedly to some of the rhythmic complexity of the development section. There seems little point in introducing rhythmic complexity if there are few areas of rhythmic transparency to compare it to. Another consideration was the mood of the piece, and how intense I wanted to make it. I chose to have the work not as tutti-focussed as a work such as Speed, but rather, through a process of building up to places of high intensity. For example, after the bass enters, the violin enters playing Motive A, then a short interjection, then the piano joins in, then another interjection, then the clarinet and muted trumpet, another interjection etc. This meant that not all instruments are playing all the time. There is a bit of space in the music, though the work is still at a fast tempo, crotchet = 144. The number of interjections in this passage are also deliberate. I was conscious of not letting the music get a real buildup, but rather, be interrupted all the time. In addition, I have stayed away in places from a straightforward four-bar structure. Sometimes the interjections utilize time signatures and rhythmic constructions that are irregular. The length and timing of such musical fragments required much musical deliberation some of them I still find rather annoying in terms of breaking the flow of the music. This may or may not be successful in performance I cant really make a final decision until the work is performed by real musicians. In the end, the opening 1/3rd of the piece contains a number of smaller sub-sections. Some of these were recycled and re-fashioned from discarded material that was originally intended for the development section. Similarly, some of the ideas that were created for the opening of the piece were instead placed towards the end of the piece. Computers are good for helping to work out such structural matters since an entire block of music can be dragged into an entirely different context with very little effort. At the same time as working out the structure of this opening section, I was trying to divine a possible structure for the entire piece, as the following diagram illustrates:

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I was aware that the piece should have a clear and discernable structure. For me, this meant discrete sections, though for other composers (such as Brett Dean in his Pastoral Symphony) it may be a more fluid process overall. This required much thinking and in fact did not really become clear until the piece was just about finished. 3. Final third of work

It is always exciting as a composer when items like large-scale structures become more clear over time, and when you know that they are going to work. As the overall shape became more evident in my mind, the process of placing it onto paper was again utilised, as the following diagram illustrates.

This quite illegible diagram nevertheless demonstrates that the piece is constructed in discrete sections. It is particularly relevant in terms of my trying to work out the final third of the work, and what sort of shape it would take. In terms of working out what material was going to be in this third section, I knew that to a large extent, it would be derived from sections of music already heard, particularly in the first part of the piece. Sections were copied across and then altered, for example through modulation, to make them sound a little more fresh and new. When I was coming up with the final part, the following things were foremost in my mind: - that I should always remember to have Motives A and/or B obvious in many places, as these are the motives that the entire work has been built upon; - that repetition of previously heard material is important and indeed desirable. If something is introduced, its great to hear it again later; - that I should think about tightening up the piece as a whole the final section in the piece should not drag on and on; - that each section should try to lead somehow into the next section, or if not, it should be a deliberate jolt. Creating balance in the work as a whole was again a large concern at this point in time. It is not easy to create the balance between light and shade, fast and slow, energy and repose over an entire piece. Another point is that computers dont really give a good realisation when it comes to things like instrumental timbre and colour in solos. There is the temptation to put too much into a work because it may sound boring on the computer, whereas with acoustic
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instruments, the ability of a performer to create subtleties of rhythm and timbre can more than make up for this. The very end of the work came quite easily. I intended that the work be given a bit of a bang at its conclusion, to counterweight its 11 minutes duration. An increase in tempo would help to create this, as would a modulation to a slightly higher key (for a few bars), as well as a sudden closing gesture.

4.

Revision and Re-Entering

The next stage of the compositional process was that of polishing and refining the piece within the sequencing application. This involved again moving sections of music around and testing out whether they were indeed in the correct context. After this, the process was to print out each little section of music from within the sequencing application. There are two reasons for this: firstly, because the output from sequencing applications such as Logic or Cubase is not of a high enough standard for ensembles of a professional calibre. Secondly, it gives me a chance to go through the piece very carefully and re-evaluate each particular section of music with regards to the instruments that are playing it, especially when it comes to writing music that is: 1. unplayable from a technical point of view (e.g. accidentally putting chords into a clarinet part and forgetting to take them out); 2. out of an instruments range (due to a transposition that may have gone awry); 3. unidiomatic The final process is proofreading the score that has been printed out from Finale, and when the appropriate corrections have been applied, printing out the parts for each individual performer. It indeed is quite a long process to write a 10-12 minute piece for an ensemble such as the Absolute Ensemble. However, Im sure that it is going to be worth it when I hear them perform it!

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