I am working on this series to help bring attention to authorship in classical music. I believe that original authenticity in authorship is paramount in a all fields. With music, however, we are often more concerned with the aural product than the authors nuanced efforts and that can make classical music less tangible, especially, to younger audiences. I believe we can change the idea that classical music are tunes toward a view that they are an aural journey that is similar to that of a book. By understanding the magic behind the music and the elements of musicality and how they operate we can explore how uniquely different each composer’s decisions alter the experience of these elements in order to make entirely different effects and impacts on the listener. By addressing the concepts in sound structuring, I hope, we can make music more tangible to a greater audience. This series is one way to have people consider many aspects of their experience in context of the creative process of the composing itself.
This is the first in the series of how a symphonic work is composed. This free floating universe represents the potential of sound timbres that can be imagined within the creative brain before writing has begun. Each combination can be pulled out, added to, spun around and considered at anytime.
This is the second piece in the series on how to compose a symphonic work is about the next stage – gathering the elements for a structure. I often explain this stage as the same as research paper weekend from hell. I say this in jest, however the analogy is appropriate. The beginning of any major culling of thought processes, whether for the written word or music is often a grand gathering of all tangental and possible ideas which then must be edited down. This process often elicit an internal fight; a wrangling that stimulates a messy mental process. During this process composers, writers or artists must determine, what stays, and what goes, what the voicing will be, what the poignancy will be and far more.The third work in the series, is on how a melody is created; what is the melody’s DNA, what stays and goes with each idea, what instruments works best, how does it get aloft, how will it be written. The orchestration of a melody is never a simple process and neither is the creation of one. As with the other works, each area represents a different aspect of the composing thought process.In this series, this would technically be the third. If the second is on the creative wrangling of the work and what will be used, this work represents the final phrasings, sounds and moments that no matter what, will be in the work. Consider them as index cards. Each staff area is the shape of the seemingly perfect moments that the composer does not want changed. These phrasings and sounds will be in the piece no matter what and everything after this will buttress these moments. They are full of potential and fully rearrangeable. The logic from front the back has not been determined, the order is up in the air, the harmonies are, perhaps, not even considered, but this is the magic that everything else will structure around.This is a MRI – like cross section of the entire sting section, busily being bowed. The work is about the imagining of the human effort of the sounds that will be generated. They are the mass of individuals who also are within a school of fish, some work together, while others are in another grouping and yet they are all one.Melodic Rhythm by Britt Conley. Each line illustrates a different melodic gate (where the physics of propulsion meets proportion), structured for different instruments. They are laid out in recital style.This work is still in progress. It represents how a composer arranges the string instruments for the climax of the work. Of course this doesn’t represent all works, just how some works and some composers arrange and how climax works both in sound and in perception, in terms of our own neuro-templating or rather how our brains perceive. Composers can utilize many effects and illicit certain aesthetic responses from the listener by sending them on particular experiential journeys that a caused by certain aspects of sound shapes and their impacts on our brain. Each area represents a different function toward bringing an amassing climax to our aural experience.
