Tomorrow, Sunday up in Luleå in northern Sweden, Trio Nastela will premiere the brand-new rhapsody I composed for them earlier this autumn. I wish I could be there to witness my music come to life, but regretfully I can’t be there in person, as I am busy on stage in Sundsvall, more than 500 kilometres away.
It is certainly a privilege – but a hard-earned one, I want to stress – to have multiple engagements like this, tugging you in multiple directions. At the same time, it is nonetheless a shame to miss out on the metaphorical birth of my composition. (I am, after all, of the opinion that the music itself is not so much in the notated score but in the living, acoustic performance of it. A topic for a further blog post, perhaps.)
Coinciding with the premiere of my Rhapsody for oboe, bassoon and piano, this and the following two blog posts in November will go into detail about its inception and construction.
This first post in the series is more of an essay, summarising my composition process which started as early as June 2025, but begun in earnest in August, with most of the work taking place in little over three weeks. In the next posts, I will go over the work on a more structural level with corresponding examples from both the Rhapsody and the original opera, and finally give an even closer look into the composition process, how the piece developed.
Jump to section:
Conception
All along, my idea was to re-use musical material from The Loving Mother; I was too fond of the music in the opera to simply let it fall into obscurity it after its short inaugural run. Back in June, I thought to follow the musical form of the opera in this new piece, like a kind of instrumental retelling or remake. That, however, would take a lot of time and effort and perhaps would not turn out very well.
I ended up scrapping most of my first sketches from June, all but an early transcription of the opera’s second scene. When I returned to the piece in August, I decided to begin with the music from scene 2 (possibly influenced in the back of my head by the fact that it was the first music I composed when I worked on the opera back in 2024).
The languid, melancholic melodies in the beginning of the second scene felt like a natural fit for the expressiveness of the oboe and the bassoon, and I liked the idea of a soft, tentative opening to the piece.
Early Progress
The Loving Mother’s second scene depicts the mother going to see her midwife – a deceptively calm meeting that ends up taking a horrific turn. I ended up using much of the early part of scene 2 in the Rhapsody. I started out simply distributing the two vocal parts between the oboe and bassoon and more or less copying over the piano reduction from the rehearsal. I then iterated on that material, developing the two wind parts further from the simpler, lyric-bound melodies in the opera.
Already at this early stage, I felt confident in my decision to use The Loving Mother as a starting point and as a well to draw from, rather than following its structure to the letter like a rulebook or a template.
When I compose music, I mostly follow my intuition rather than plan ahead in advance or start out with a sketched-out form or structure. Instead, I regularly go back and iterate as I move ahead with the piece, reworking the existing music as it becomes necessary after I have added to it, or if I realise that some things don’t work as I had intended.
I also knew right from the start that I wanted to include the opening dialogue between the mother and her mother, the grandmother, in the piece.
Early on while working on The Loving Mother, my wonderful librettist Tora and I developed a fairly rich backstory about the mother’s difficult childhood and strained adult relationship to her own mother. This, in turn, affected her relationship to her newborn child. However, we had to cut most of that out of the script, leaving it as implicit exformation, to borrow a term from Danish author Tor Nørretranders.
The carefree, puttering music from the start of scene 1 balanced the piece’s slow start really well. Even more so than the second scene music, the scene 1 melodies really benefited from an “irreverent” treatment, freeing them from the constraints of syllabic structures and lyrical consistency.
Making the Most Out of It
The piano part required special attention. In a few cases, such as the music from scene 2, I could use the rehearsal score as a starting-off point to refine and develop, but I had to write most of the piano part in the Rhapsody from scratch.
I would describe myself as a mere hack pianist and I struggle to write good, idiomatic piano parts. That said, it is a true point of pride that I have on occasion been praised by pianists for some of my piano writing. (I suppose that proves that hard work and effort really pay off!) I was determined to make the Rhapsody as rewarding as possible for the pianist to play, so I put particular effort into that.
While I had abandoned the idea to follow the opera’s structure, I still wanted to include musical excerpts from throughout the opera. In other words, the only part left to mine for precious stones was the third scene. That took more effort than I had anticipated. I had wished to include a little of everything – in particular: the tense initial dialogue between the mother and grandmother, the psychiatrist’s sudden and (hopefully) unexpected rug-pull reveal, and of course the final quartet building up to the big climax.
I ended up using three other, short quotes from scene 3. The grandmother trying to calm her desperate daughter (the mother) and lull her to sleep; shortly after, the father and grandmother trying to de-escalate the situation as the increasingly hysterical mother is becoming a danger to herself and to them; also, the mother’s brief window of clarity in her psychosis, reaching out to the grandmother as a beacon in a quagmire of anxiety.
I focussed on the grandmother’s quote and the tenderness in her music that I wanted to convey in the opera. This was also an excellent spot in the composition to give the pianist a break, putting the spotlight solely on the two winds. Making good use of the three players entails idiomatic part-writing and varied combinations of the three instruments as well as remembering that they don’t all have to play at the same time, all the time.
Unlike software instruments in a notation programme or audio workstation, living musicians need a bit of relief every now and then. It is both a kindness to the musicians to let them rest as well as added variation to the music to have duets or even solo sections. Three instruments can be combined in many ways, giving us composers lots of opportunities to make the music even more interesting for the listeners – as well as the performers.
Finishing Touches
At this point, I also started showing the piece to a few of my close friends. Funnily enough, they all gave basically the same feedback: The piece is fantastic, but the beginning is way too abrupt, like something is missing.
I admit that I had sort of forgotten about the beginning of the piece. I had become so accustomed to beginning immediately with the music from scene 2 that I had stopped reflecting on it. But they were right, of course – the piece needed a proper introduction. Not as a conscious choice, but I still wrote the introduction according to the American design principle KISS (“keep it simple, stupid”): gradually develop the material up to the start of the scene 2 music. I also planted some hints to the music from scene 1 and gave every instrument room to present itself.
Transitions and endings are two elements of compositions that I can be a little bit careless with, not spending enough time on them to get the proportions right. I already knew back when I worked on the part quoting scene 1 that I wanted to return to this music to end the entire piece with. Here, I needed to transition from the gentle and intimate scene 3 music back to the jovial and energetic music from scene 1.
Back in the first scene 1 section, I stayed fairly close to the original music, although in a more elaborated form as I described before. This second time around, I used the material even more freely. I added more ornaments to the originally very simple melodies, moved the principal melody between instruments in the middle of phrases, and generally treated this section more as a variation on the opera’s music than an arrangement of it.
While working on this fourth and final section of the piece, my plan was to build to a satisfying high-energy ending propelled by the energy in the musical material. As I got closer to what would otherwise be that ending, I changed my mind. Going out with a bang felt a little trite, a little too formulaic. (Of course, the more high-brow parts of the art music scene might call most of my music trite and formulaic, but I digress.)
Instead, I used that build-up as a trick. The fourth section does reach a climactic point, but instead of fireworks that burn out in seconds, it launches a hang glider that enjoys the view from up there while gently returning to the ground – a musical soft landing, in other words.
As I wrote earlier, I know I have a tendency to gloss over certain parts of compositions, even important ones like endings. I spent time over a couple of days working out the ending, getting its length and structure right. Looking back, it could definitely have been even longer than it ended up without getting too long. I don’t think it is too short, though. Returning to the hang glider analogy, you want enough time to enjoy the view and the descent; if you simply slumped back down after launch, you would feel disappointed and short-changed.
What’s In a Name
I had planned to get most of the work on this piece done during the summer, but when that didn’t happen, I instead found myself juggling composition work on the Rhapsody and Kristina från Duvemåla rehearsals – the latter quickly demanding lots of attention and focus that I couldn’t dedicate to composing.
Despite the reality of things not going according to plan, I am quite happy with how my Rhapsody for oboe, bassoon and piano turned out. I fretted over what to name the piece over the last week or so of working on it. I considered giving it a name that either hints at or explicitly refers to the name of opera, The Loving Mother (originally “Den ömma modern” in Swedish). I decided against such a name since it might only confuse potential performers that in all likelihood will have never heard of it, and because this piece should be able to stand on its own.
A ‘rhapsody’ according to Merriam-Webster is a “musical composition of irregular form having an improvisatory character”. The fairly extensive, generously referenced Wikipedia article describes it as a “one-movement work that is episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour, and tonality”.
Or, to quote Trio Nastela’s own programme presentation (my translation): “A piano trio with oboe and bassoon is a sister ensemble to that with violin and cello, but one that oddly enough only has a fraction of the amount of original repertoire. We want to change this by commissioning the rebellious and musically extroverted David Saulesco as well as performing transcriptions of Beethoven and Chausson […]”
Who, me?