Hi! Welcome to the first video of my series called Aspects of Musical Composition.
On each video, I will explain several details about my works,
such as the process by which I developed their structure,
the techniques involved in their creation,
the source of inspiration and how I used it as a means of organising my ideas,
the shaping of those ideas in relation to the instrumentation, and many more.
These videos are aimed at young composers
and people interested in the compositional process.
I doubt that more experienced composers will find anything new in them,
especially in the area of compositional techniques.
My music certainly doesn't fit into the category of “experimental” music
and I'm not a composer with an interest in breaking the boundaries
of musical art form or defying the limits of musical perception.
I wouldn't say I'm a traditional composer either,
but I'm definitely one with a deep interest in musical discourse,
discernible structure, thematic development and emotional content.
Nevertheless, I hope everyone, including experienced composers,
will find these videos interesting and inspiring and that, ultimately,
I might be helping others to find their own approach
to the difficult task of composing
or to better understand the process by which music is written.
This first video is dedicated to one of my most recent works,
a duo for flute and guitar with the Italian title “Il giardino della casa”,
which translates into English as “The home garden”.
The work is inspired by photographs that my father has taken over the years
at our home garden and it's the result of a commission
by Peruvian composer and flutist Daniel Cueto
and Romanian guitarist Mircea Gogoncea.
It was premiered on July 12, 2016
at the second edition of the “Encounters of Peruvian Musicians”,
organised by the Philharmonic Society of Lima,
at Auditorio Santa Ursula, Lima, Peru.
If you haven't heard the piece, I'd recommend you to do so
by following the link in the description of this video
and then come back here.
Let's start with the superstructure.
Il giardino is divided into three movements with the following titles:
“Fiori, sogno impressionista” –
which means, Flowers, impressionist dream –,
“Fogliame, giungla in miniatura” –
Foliage, miniature jungle –
and “Uccelli, i piccoli visitatori” –
Birds, the little visitors.
The reason for all the titles being in Italian
is that my family is of Italian origin
and Italian is my father's second – or perhaps first – language.
And since the work is dedicated to him,
it made a lot of sense to name the piece and all three movements in Italian.
I had already had the idea of composing a piece
inspired by my father's photographs,
way before Daniel and Mircea contacted me,
but I initially thought I would write a piece for a small ensemble, not a duo.
The choice of dividing the piece in three movements is rather simple.
You see, at our garden, my father takes photographs of basically three things:
flowers, leaves and birds.
Internally, each movement has a three-part structure
where the third section is always a repetition of the first one
with some minor variations.
As I'm always looking for coherence and symmetry in my compositions –
and I'm sure this applies to most composers, not just me –
and since this was a piece in three movements,
designed be performed by two musicians,
it made a lot of sense to have a three-part structure for each movement,
constructed with two elements;
thus forming a kind of fractal pattern, so to speak
Now, there's a third element in the piece,
one that cannot be heard, but only seen:
the photographs.
Presenting the piece with a projection of them creates a richer experience for the audience.
Of course, a projection of the photographs while the piece is being performed
is not mandatory but I request in the score that this should be done whenever possible
and the score includes a one-line staff below the guitar
to precisely indicate when each slide should be changed.
I prefer to leave the technicalities of this request to the players themselves.
They could ask a third person to control the projection
or one of them could change the slides using a MIDI pedal.
At the premiere of the piece, I changed the photographs myself
from a computer behind the curtain and it worked pretty well
Now, let's talk about the music itself.
In recent years I've developed some interest for a music analysis tool
known as “Set Theory” and its applications in music composition.
Many of the concepts of this theory where initially proposed
by American composer and theorist Howard Hanson in the 60's
and then further extended in the 70's by Allen Forte in his book
“The Structure of Atonal Music”.
Almost at the same time, composer Elliott Carter developed a similar system
with the aim of being a tool for his compositional process –
although instead of set, he used the word chord –
which Nicholas Hopkins and John F. Link edited in 2002 under the title
“Elliott Carter Harmony Book”.
I would prefer not turn this video into a class about Set Theory.
Just explaining all the concepts involved would require several videos, indeed.
However, for the sake of clarity, I must briefly explain what Set Theory is about
so forgive me if I take a couple of minutes for that before we delve into the piece.
Set Theory in music uses many of the concepts of its counterpart in math,
which you might recall from your high school years.
A set is a collection of items – in this case, pitches –
and several operations can be performed between them,
such as union, intersection, cartesian product, etc.
Don't panic! I won't bother you with a lot of mathematical terminology and equations!
Besides, I don't need to in order to explain to you how I composed Il giardino.
So, you might be thinking: "Set Theory! How does one use that in order to compose?"
Well, there are several ways, some pretty basic and other extremely complex.
Fortunately for you – and also for me –
Il giardino was written only using the fundamental concepts of Set Theory.
First, let me further explain what a set is in the application of Set Theory to music.
As I said before, a set is simply a collection of pitches, any number of them, even one.
You are already familiar with this idea, although you have been using the names
chords and scales instead of sets.
The major scale is a set of cardinal 7.
Cardinal is a term used to define the number of elements in a set.
Therefore, a minor triad is a set of cardinal 3
and a seventh chord, a set of cardinal 4.
If you consider only the “Universe” of 12 pitches in tonal music,
the total number of combinations with those 12 pitches
in sets of different cardinals, from 1 to 12, is a huge number –
known in math as factorial (the product of 1 x 2 x 3 and so on until 12).
However, in music, that number can be considerably reduced,
because the order of the pitches is irrelevant.
Take for example the major chord of C.
It doesn't matter if you change the order of the pitches that conform it,
it is still the major chord of C.
So all repetitions are cancelled and the final list holds 206 entries
instead of 764,121,600 entries.
How lucky we are!
Another operation that reduces the number of entries
is listing sets which are inversions of each other under the same entry.
For example, a major chord is an inversion of a minor chord.
You might have never thought of them in this way but follow me for a second.
You can construct a minor chord by jumping up a minor third and then a major third.
Now, if you write a minor third downwards followed by a major third,
you end up with – voila! – a major chord.
But still, I haven't told you yet how to use Set Theory to compose music.
The fact is that, you already know that because composers
have been using sets to write music for centuries.
Think of any piece that uses only major and minor chords.
From the perspective of Set Theory applied to the aspect of harmony,
it is a piece composed with only one set,
set 3-11 in Forte's catalog
(11 because it's listed as the 11th set of cardinal 3).
From another perspective, of course, a twelve-tone piece also makes use of just one set
but here I must mention that Set Theory was devised as a tool for obtaining conclusions
out of the analysis of short-duration differentiated components in atonal music.
A twelve-tone row not only uses all the pitches available
(let's leave microtonal music outside this discussion),
it requires them to be used all the time
and because the set cannot be transposed –
because any transposition would render the same set again –
no significant conclusion can be obtained from its analysis from the perspective of Set Theory.
Finally, after this long preamble about Set Theory,
we can now move on to “Il giardino della casa”.
In the preparation stages of the work, I decided I would use three sets of cardinal 5 to write it,
one for each movement.
Why cardinal 5? Simple.
For one part, several sets of cardinal 3 and 4 occur in tonal music
and the ones that don't are either too close to them in the way they sound
or so far that I felt made them unsuitable for the kind of music I wanted to write for this commission.
You might be asking yourself:
"Why does he want to avoid the sound of tonal chords?"
Well, simply because I want to.
There's little I feel I can say with tonal harmony –
unless I'm writing film music, of course –
so for no other reason than pure personal taste,
I prefer the more interesting, richer world of atonality.
Of course, sets of higher cardinals contain intervals that may be arranged
as tonal triads and tetrachords but the presence of these can be better camouflaged.
Now, because the guitar has 6 strings, there's no point in using sets of cardinal 7.
A seven-note chord could be formed by adding the flute but, because of the tuning of the guitar,
this wouldn't be possible for any transposition of the set.
For this same reason, sets of cardinal 6 are ruled out: because of the difficulty of producing
all the notes of the set for any transposition at any given register.
Therefore, the solution is to use sets of cardinal 5.
The problem I just described still occurs but rarely.
So, I took Carter's book and played every set of cardinal 5 as a chord and also as a scale
and chose for each movement the one that I felt would better depict (in my mind)
the subject in question:
flowers, foliage and birds.
In the first movement, I used the set 5-9, a set with three whole steps
(yes, a tritone)
followed by a minor third.
The first three notes are, of course, part of a whole-tone scale
so if you improvise with the set for a while you will certainly associate
the way it sounds with music by so called Impressionist composers.
Therefore, I decided to use the word “impressionista” to acknowledge this resemblance.
Now, there is little interest derived from using just one transposition of a set in a single piece,
unless of course you're writing minimalistic music, and even so that would't work for too long.
Just like a song uses major and minor chords transposed to several fundamentals
to introduce harmonic variety and contrast,
an atonal piece composed with only one set requires at least a few transpositions of that set
in order to develop a rich harmonic experience.
And speaking of harmony, there is no rule that says that all the elements in the set
must be presented at the same time.
This opens the possibility of using subsets –
another concept of Set Theory –
of any cardinal,
a process that further enriches the harmony of the piece
as it provides ways of escaping the monotony produced by using only a single harmonic construct
throughout a whole composition.
And what about function? What about the concept of dominant and tonic chords?
How do you write a piece without function?
Well, there's no easy answer for that, I'm afraid.
You simply do.
Just as there are no instructions or recipes you could follow to paint an abstract work,
there are also no similar things you could use to compose an atonal piece.
However, there are a couple of concepts that might be useful.
The first one is a concept I remember having heard from many teachers
although I have never been able to find it in any harmony book
and it's called “strong and weak steps”.
(I don't know if there is a terminology for this in English so I'm translating directly from Spanish.)
A weak step is merely a harmonic change that maintains notes of the previous chord –
in Set Theory, this would be called invariance.
The more notes you keep, the weaker the step, until you reach the extreme: all notes are maintained.
Now, before you say this doesn't make any sense, remember that reordering the notes within a chord
may change the way it sounds, even if it's a very subtle change,
so indeed a weak step could be produced by using the same transposition;
I'll elaborate more on this in a moment.
On the other extreme, a change of all the notes produces a strong step.
Tonal music makes extensive use of this concept.
Just think of it.
Playing a C major chord followed by an A minor chord
produces a very different effect than playing the same chord followed by a B minor chord.
The first case is a weak step in which the notes C and E are kept,
thus producing very little sensation of movement in comparison with the second case,
in which all the notes change,
producing the impression of a drastic movement.
It's all about contrast!
Writing music with this concept is then a matter of deciding what kind of effect one needs.
In other words, when the present transposition of the set has been used for long enough
(according to one's personal taste and intuition)
then the next transposition is chosen with regard to the level of contrast one requires
(another decision related to personal taste and intuition, of course).
The second concept is one that I have briefly mentioned above:
that chords sound different if you change the disposition of the notes within them,
especially if you change the bottom note.
In “Il giardino della casa”, as in every work I've written,
I constantly apply these two concepts.
Whenever I want the music to produce a tender, soft impression,
I keep as many notes as possible and/or make very spaced changes of the note in the bottom voice.
Whenever I want a drastic movement forward –
of course, there can't be backward movements in music –,
I change several notes (or all of them),
and/or constantly change the note in the bottom voice.
Let me show you a short passage of the first movement.
Here, I've marked the transpositions of the set
by indicating the note from where each is constructed
(don't think of them as fundamentals,
there's no such concept in atonal music).
As you can see, I'm constantly changing the transposition of the set, but for the most part,
notes are maintained from one transposition to the next one.
I have coloured them here so that you can easily spot them.
Let's hear how that sounds...
Now, let me show you a few examples of strong steps.
The second movement makes use of the set 5-36,
a succession of a whole step, a half step, a minor third and again a whole step.
It sounds very different from set 5-9 and perhaps a little bit like a minor scale,
because of the first two intervals.
In this movement, transposition changes don't occur so often, lasting two bars for the most part,
but the concepts I described before are equally present.
Here I also introduced some very interesting playing techniques for the flute:
aeolian sounds (which might be interpreted as a way of suggesting the wind...
indeed, it is)
and slap tongue,
a percussive type of sound that I used to emphasise the imitation between the two instruments.
The guitar also plays muted sounds which in the context of classical guitar
is known by the Italian term “pizzicato”.
Finally, for the third movement I chose the set 5-34:
a half step followed by a whole step, a major third and then a half step.
If you play it, you will surely hear a resemblance with the last part of an ascending major scale
in which the final note is the tonic.
The musical ideas in the movement are pretty straightforward.
Both instruments are obviously suggesting the singing of birds
and, compared to the other two movements, this one has a more lively character.
There's also the presence of very classical contrapuntal imitation between them,
like a two-voice invention,
and the first two sections of the movement are repeated entirely,
much in the way of Sonata form,
and then followed by a conclusion that sounds a bit like a coda.
I could go on, explaining more details about the piece,
but I think I have covered the most important ones.
Besides, this video is already too long because of the explanation about Set Theory.
The good part is that, in the next videos, I won't have to explain that again
and I will be able to concentrate more in other aspects of the compositional process.
Thank you very much for listening to this video
and don't forget to subscribe.
Until next time.
