I rarely plan ahead when composing. A handful of times, I have started out by making a diagram, however rough, of the structure of the piece, or even made one early on. It’s quite interesting, though, to look back on a piece and break down the result of the choices I made during the composition process.
As promised, this is the second of three posts about my Rhapsody for oboe, bassoon and piano composed for Trio Nastela and premiered by them last month in Luleå. In this post, I will present an analysis of its structure and how its musical content corresponds to my opera The Loving Mother, from which I took the musical material used in the rhapsody.
I am currently in an intensive Bach period, as tends to happen when you are involved in some way in church music. I sang Bach’s Christmas Oratorio last Sunday with the Härnösand Cathedral Choir and Per Brudsten at Härnösand Cathedral, and I sang it again tonight with the Erik Westberg Vocal Ensemble at Tonhallen in Sundsvall.
Johann Sebastian Bach re-used plenty of extant music from his own oeuvre when he assembled (sic!) the magnificent six-part Weihnachtsoratorium, including repurposing entire songs only with new lyrics (that fit within the same metre). Among composers old and new, I am in other words in no way unique in employing this compositional tactic.
The entire Rhapsody for oboe, bassoon and piano is based on or inspired directly by music from my opera Den ömma modern (The Loving Mother). As I described in my earlier post, I decided early on that I wanted to include material from all three scenes in the opera, although not necessarily in the same order.
Instead of making a plan first, I started out sort of on instinct with adapting the music from scene 2 – probably because that was the very first thing I composed when working on the opera back in 2024 – followed with music from scene 1 because I thought it made for the best contrast to scene 2, and then I basically only had scene 3 left to include.
Simplifying the rhapsody’s conception like this might make it sound more trivial and careless than it was. In fact, while I didn’t fret for days over minute decisions, I still made deliberate choices about which quotes from the opera would fit well together in this new and different, but still coherent, setting.
Look at this diagram of the structure of Rhapsody. It shows – proportionally! – how the piece is divided into four main sections as well as a prelude and postlude. It also details which bars in Rhapsody correspond to which bars in The Loving Mother, as well as the various key changes throughout the piece. The latter two are also colour-coded, with flat keys in blue and sharp keys in pink, and the three opera scenes in green, yellow and red, respectively. The bar numbers written in bold text are sections where the rhapsody follows the opera’s corresponding music closely.
Whereas it was a deliberate choice to split Rhapsody up into separate sections, each drawing from the music of a certain scene, one very interesting detail that emerged as I compiled this diagram is the shifting between flat and sharp keys. After a long stretch in D minor the music is “raised” to F minor, which then modulates dramatically down a major third to the 6th scale degree of F minor, D-flat minor a major third below, but enharmonically respelled as C-sharp minor – the first sharp key – which then serves as a minor dominant to F-sharp major in the beginning of section 2.
What follows is a surprising pattern of moving between sharp and flat keys, the last two being particularly notable as the music goes from B minor – the 2nd sharp minor key – to B-flat major – the 2nd flat major key – and then all the way to B major – the 5th sharp major key! – settling in sharp key territory until the end. (The major third drop brings to mind the dramatic opening motif from Gladys Knight’s absolutely brilliant Bond theme License to Kill.)
There is also a mirrored pattern in how the prelude is mostly based on music from scene 2 in the opera but also contains a snippet from scene 1, and the rhapsody’s section 4 is mostly based on scene 1 but also contains a snippet from scene 3. In the postlude, I deliberately wanted to call back to previously included quotes from all three scenes.
From scene 2, I drew from the starting dialogue between the Midwife and the Mother (bars 209–236) as well as the two-bar ostinato that bridges the first and second scenes (bars 207–208).
From scene 1, I primarily drew from the starting dialogue between the Mother and Grandmother (bars 7–18, 36–44 and 61–66) but also a lullaby-like melody that the Mother sings to the baby (bars 141–148), which I later turn into a very different motif.
From scene 3, I drew from the Mother’s desperate plea for help from the Grandmother (bars 334–340) and the Grandmother comforting the Mother (bars 341–346) and lulling the Mother to sleep with a melody inspired by a well-known Swedish hymn (bars 347–350). I also drew from later in scene 3 where the Father and Grandmother beg the hysterical Mother to calm down (bars 374–379) as well as, towards the end of Rhapsody, the beginning of the dramatic quartet (bars 401–408) that closes the entire opera.
In the next post, I will show some examples of how the Rhapsody took shape over the month-long primary composition period, particularly how I returned to some sections and revised and/or expanded them.
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