I composed Notes in a Notebook, my little piece for two violins and violoncello, back in early January. The Weber Quartet premiered it two weeks ago, yesterday. I have been wanting to discuss it here on my blog ever since, and finally had the chance to sit down to write about it.
Writing “Notes…” only took a few days. Admittedly, though, that is not entirely true; I had been planning out the piece in my head for at least a week before I actually sat down to work on it. This type of process often works well for me: first, mulling over the general structure and working out some ideas, and only when I start to have a picture of the music in my head do I begin putting down notes.
In this case, I already had decided on basing the new piece on an earlier composition of mine: Books on a Bookshelf, a septet that premiered with great success back in 2021. The septet consists of six movements, each inspired by a book that I particularly enjoy, and which can be performed in any order. In a similar way, but on a much larger scale, I based the Rhapsody for oboe, bassoon and piano I composed last year for Trio Nastela on my short story opera, The Loving Mother. If you’re interested in deep dives on my compositional process, you should go back and read my substantial, three-part walkthrough of how I wrote that piece.
The scale of this commission from the Weber Quartet wasn’t a good fit for repurposing the open form of the original, but I still wanted to include at least a little bit of music from each of the six movements. The only real difficulty I pictured in advance of adapting the older music was wanting to reduce a texture of more than three parts. Still, potentially a stimulating challenge, and possibly even a welcome step in repurposing the material in a way that would make it feel fresh again and not just like a simple rehash.
The structure of Notes in a Notebook
The repeated unison tritone fall which opens the piece is the only wholly original musical idea in “Notes…”, although it arguably fits in quite well with the mostly tonally anarchic themes and motifs lifted from the septet. The hectic sixteenth ostinato introduced by the first violin in bar 4 and the unison melody in bars 14–16 both come from the movement “Allegro agitato” in the septet, and make up the basis for the first part of “Notes…”, together with the tritone fall.
The free-tonal but very romantic melody played by the two violins in bars 41–46 (which is actually made up of three different twelve-tone series!) comes from the movement “Andante risoluto”. The violoncello then takes the lead in bar 47 with a less tonally opaque theme from the movement “Alla marcia”, from which the violins’ sixteenth swells also comes. One detail I am particularly pleased with how it turned out is the melodic line initiated by the violins in bars 51–52 (also from the movement “Alla marcia”) and taken over by the cello on the subito piano B note in bar 53 and onward. The effect came out just as well as I hoped it would.
The middle section of the piece continues with a small motif from the movement “Adagio cantabile e maestoso”, played in octaves by the second violin in bar 64 (actually starting on the upbeat, not pictured here), then taken up by both violins moving into bar 65. The cello’s anxious rising motif in bars 66–68 is assembled from parts of several ideas from the movement “Alla marcia”. The unison melody in 70–71 also comes from the same movement.
As the middle section draws to a close, the motif from “Adagio cantabile e maestoso” reappears a few times together with an allusion to the opening tritone fall and the second violin’s tremolo figure, which first appears here in bars 77–78 and comes from the movement “Adagio religioso”.
The final section of “Notes…” is largely a rearrangement of the end of the septet’s movement “Agitato – Andante – Giocoso”. Adapting this music well did indeed turn out to be the most challenging bit of composing this piece, as I had imagined. The original music from the septet is scored for the entire ensemble, but it is also mostly doubling for textural colour and volume. Still, it took a fair bit of puzzling to get it right. Here is an excerpt from the end of “Agitato – Andante – Giocoso” in the septet. Bars 87–94 from the septet correspond with bars 89–97 in “Notes…”:
I decided to reuse the motif from “Adagio cantabile e maestoso” here as well, such as in bars 111 (with upbeat) and 113–115; in the latter case, I fused it with a part of the cello’s line as seen earlier, in bar 95. And once more, moving the thematic material between the violins and the cello – this time in bars 117–118 – turned out simple but effective, and in addition gives the cellist a brief reprieve from the curse of the eighth-note ostinato.
The build-up starting in bar 121 (with upbeat) in “Notes…” has another parallel in the septet; compare with bars 103–104 in the original:
In the original, the build-up leads up to an end of the movement on a unison C. That, however, felt like an unsatisfying way to end “Notes…”, so I instead opted to repeat the staggered motif from bars 89–92:
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And now, for the penultimate time, here are the past week’s etudes! I almost cannot believe I will soon have written 31 different etudes using the etude game I constructed a month ago.