"Conceptual" Music: Embryonic Music, Forever Uncomposed

[Karl Henning]

  School concerts can be very interesting from the view of a microtonalist!

Hah!

[Luke]

As anyone who has read my thread, and especially the last few pages of it (which chart months and years of failed hopes and dreams    ) I've got a whole catalogue of these uncomposed works. I hesitate to describe them because in many cases I still intend to compose them. Titles include White Modulations and Man In His Cosmic Loneliness (Brianites, prick up your ears!). I can safely mention one which was to be called Attis - it was to be a kind of virtual flute concerto, written as if for 'real' instruments but without regard for what is physically possible, and played back through the dubious magic of MIDI - because I have no wish to finish that one.

In case I never get to write it IRL I have 'used' one of them - called ...green hills, far away... - in the book I'm currently writing, whose main character is a composer called Edward Arundel. 'Arundel' has a whole back catalogue of compositions which I specifically invented for the book, though, among which are a couple I might try my hand at myself, too, including one which would be called A Catalogue of Bird's. The magnum opus he is writing when the book starts, though, is not one I have any plans to attempt myself, and is in a way the most conceptual of them all. He keeps the piano he was given by his ex-wife in the forest outside his house, and he improvises/composes on it every day as a kind of diary (the improvisations then worked up into symphonic form). The instrument gradually decomposes until it rots into nothingness, and therefore the music he composes becomes a kind of record of the death of the love which haunts him... (I'm aware of Ross Bolleter and WARPS, but I don't think the idea in my book comes directly from there - I've always loved the idea of a piano in decay...)

[jochanaan]

...In case I never get to write it IRL I have 'used' one of them - called ...green hills, far away... - in the book I'm currently writing, whose main character is a composer called Edward Arundel. 'Arundel' has a whole back catalogue of compositions which I specifically invented for the book, though, among which are a couple I might try my hand at myself, too, including one which would be called A Catalogue of Bird's....

Arundel?  Wasn't that the last name of an associate of Sir Thomas Beecham?

[Luke]

I hadn't heard of that. Googling 'Thomas Beecham Arundel' doesn't turn up anything, but you might be right. My Arundel is an English composer living in Scotland (on Skye, in fact), and the name was chosen just to subtly suggest his 'southernness' (Arundel  being a very English town with a very English castle in the south of England).

[Cato]

Arundel?  Wasn't that the last name of an associate of Sir Thomas Beecham?

There is a reference to the Earl of Arundel, but I cannot find a thing about Beecham knowing somebody by that name:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_of_Arundel

[Karl Henning]

Arundel's Dirndl

[Cato]

Arundel's Dirndl

Sounds like a title for bagpipes and oom-pa-pa band!   

Perhaps it would be better to keep that idea at the "conceptual" level!  0:)

[Karl Henning]

Och! Aye!

[Cato]

I just placed this on the Penderecki topic:

(Richard Whitehouse, in Naxos' program booklet, noted that "though a 'No. 6' had been fully worked out in concept, it had not yet been written." Penderecki completed his Eighth Symphony in 2005, but at that time, the Sixth had still not appeared.)

The comment and the discussion of the religious aspects of the Seventh Symphony reminded me of another work which I had planned and even had a few parts sketched out: Baumdom or Cathedral of Trees.

The idea was a liturgy for forest animals, with a squirrel as a chattering, chanting priest, a chorus of birds, and assorted soloists.  The liturgy was in Latin with texts by the composer.  The vocal  lines were - so to speak - eccentric.  (Alvin and Company were not involved!      )

Orchestration included a choir of flutes from bass flute to piccolo, choir of clarinets bass to Eb, marimbas, xylophones, 2 pianos, strings, and 5 celestas and tubular bells.

[Maestro267]

An idea I keep going back to from time to time is to write an Earth movement for The Planets. It keeps expanding to become a suite in its own right. Thankfully, Holst gave me plenty of orchestra to play with.

[Cato]

An idea I keep going back to from time to time is to write an Earth movement for The Planets. It keeps expanding to become a suite in its own right. Thankfully, Holst gave me plenty of orchestra to play with.

I believe somebody has written a Pluto movement.

https://www.youtube.com/v/N_v8G0fo4Ws

[Maestro267]

I believe somebody has written a Pluto movement.

Yes. I have a recording of The Planets including Colin Matthews' "Pluto, the Renewer".

[starrynight]

It is a difficult thing to open one's soul.  Yet, this is absolutely necessary, not only to compose well, but to perform well.  I open my heart every time I get up to play; physical nakedness is relatively easy! But what I find is that the more I open up, the more others respond.

All music is perhaps a tension and play between that opening up and the closing up of the restrictions of style/convention/genre, and maybe that is inevitable. 

[Cato]

All music is perhaps a tension and play between that opening up and the closing up of the restrictions of style/convention/genre, and maybe that is inevitable.

Yes, those elements are certainly present, or can be.   That the form is a way to open and close off the expression of the (un)conscious is also a possibility. 

Before I planned the work described above  (Cathedral of Trees), I had seen two rows of tall trees whose branches had entwined above a street and practically formed Gothic arches.  The idea of a "liturgy" sung by forest animals struck me as a wild yet enchanting possibility.  "Play" was certainly involved and "tension" existed from the roots of the idea, i.e. that people might find such a work a mockery of religious cantatas or Masses.

Tension in how to handle  things could easily have filtered its way into the music itself. 

[jochanaan]

All music is perhaps a tension and play between that opening up and the closing up of the restrictions of style/convention/genre, and maybe that is inevitable.

Limitations are inherent in music (at least in this space-time continuum): limits of vocal and instrumental ranges including dynamic ranges, of attention span from audiences, of whatever form you choose to use, and of many other factors.  But within those limitations it is possible to fill up the "space" available; not necessarily as merely showing what you can do (although there's nothing wrong with that), but in focusing all one's physical, mental and spiritual energies into the performance and/or composition.