Two weeks ago, I posted the game sheet to my “etude game” here on my blog along with the first etude. I challenged myself to compose one short etude every day throughout March, and here at the halfway point I am 16 for 16!
I have felt rather liberated, on some level, to have the dice decide the framework for me for each of the etudes. (If you have no idea what any of this is, or you need a refresher, you can take a look at the game sheet here.) Thus far, though, I have only one time rolled a 3 for instrument family – which happened last week – so I have only gotten to write for string instruments once. Although I did choose some string instruments on March 7th when I rolled a 6, which is player’s choice.
I am getting a little bored of writing for only woodwind, mallet or brass instruments, but on the other hand, that makes it even more of an exercise, to push myself to write something different – again – for this ensemble that I am getting bored of. It gives me regular opportunities to think of new ways to write and ideas to emulate in this arbitrarily constrained little format.
Most of what I end up writing is of course nothing to write home about. But, as I wrote both in that first post two weeks ago and once again in last week’s post, that is not the point. The point is to just write something, whatever it may be, without preconceptions or implicit demands on quality or standards, or having to deliver anything, really.
That said, I believe I have come across a few gold nuggets over the past couple of weeks that I might return to later on and develop properly in a substantial composition. That is also, in my opinion, part of the beauty of a method like this: putting yourself in a situation where you need to be a bit inventive. Equally important, though, is to simply have fun with it. I haven’t yet felt totally put off of writing an etude, but if I ever do, I have the option to just put down a few long notes and call it quits after a few minutes. That’s fine – it should be unpretentious and undemanding.
Shifting now to my more overtly professional composing – yesterday in Härnösand, the Weber Quartet premiered my most recent composition: Notes in a Notebook for string trio, which I composed for the ensemble back in January. The perhaps peculiar-sounding title is a reference to an older work, Books on a Bookshelf, a six-movement septet where each movement is inspired by a book that is of some particular importance to me. (If you are reminded of Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, you are not wrong.)
The new piece for string trio is so named because I picked fragments from “Books…” and repurposed them as building-blocks in this new musical context. It was both a fun exercise and very rewarding at the first rehearsal already hearing how the new piece sounded pretty much exactly how I had pictured it. One clear difference between the two is that “Books…” is an almost programmatic piece, in how each of the six movements was so clearly inspired by a book, while “Notes…” on the other hand is essentially a piece of absolute music, with no extramusical element.
I have had the pleasure of working with the Weber Quartet before, as well as with the quartet’s two violinists separately on many occasions. To have such fine musicians and wonderful people as ambassadors for your music is truly a blessing.
And finally, for the second time this month, here are the past week’s seven etudes.