This work was begun in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially it was to be an exercise in fugue writing, but I soon became captivated by the expressiveness of the counterpoint and shaped it into a long, one-movement polyphonic fantasia. The first version was for string orchestra only (Op. 2a), though with distinct "choirs" and an embedded string quartet as well. My original aim was to try to write a piece in a Classical idiom that has been largely abandoned after Beethoven, as a sort of homage to the Age of Reason. Even the harmonic language is essentially Classical (unlike in my String Quartet), though with a tendency to modulate continually a la Carl Nielsen, and even a couple of bitonal passages. The first version ended with a feeling of defiance or maybe stoic triumph.
After preparing a version for a full (but Classically-sized) orchestra, I began to feel that the material and colouring were too dark for the piece to end in a blaze of defiance. I have now tried six different endings in all, and this is still very much a work in progress. A few (including the one I'm presenting here) end in a mood of resignation, though one was decidedly grim (posted elsewhere). The main technical problem in the music is that the Coda strives for C major against a tendency for that key to work as the dominant of F minor. Many Baroque-era works end with a similar cadence (and Nielsen used a form of it in his Commotio), but the tendency to move to the subdominant minor is usually not so strong in those works. In this piece, I'm convinced that the cadence cannot be the end because of this - some kind of postlude is needed, but it has to be much shorter than the rest of the Coda. The current version ends in C after a brief, chromatically descending passage based on earlier material.
Since posting it on the previous board, I made several tweaks to the rest of the work as well, especially expanding the timpani part. I do believe that part is likely unplayable without an assistant to manage the frequent retunings.
A rendering made with NotePerformer 4 is attached, along with the raw Sibelius score.
Playing time: about 27.5 minutes. If you only want to hear the Coda, it begins at about 24:50.
Edit: I made a couple of small changes to the postlude, to make the transition back to C less jarring. The ending chord is also now an open fifth.
Edit: I added an extra bar of timpani roll (on low G) to the postlude, as breathing space after the intensity of the main part of the Coda, and also to bring the work "full circle" back to the opening. Unless someone can convince me that something else needs to be changed, I think this will be "it" for now, i.e. tentatively final version, if that makes sense. My musical language has moved on from that of this piece, and I need to start working on something new.
Edit: I'm withdrawing all previous renderings. The renderings and score below are of the most current version, made with NotePerformer 4 under Dorico, and are pretty final, I think - the only issue I still have is with the final chord, which is written to die away to ppppp but clearly does not, at least by any reasonable concept of ppppp. I suspect the problem is the dynamic power law that Dorico uses to map notated dynamics to actual velocities, which makes very little difference between pp and ppppp. I should adjust it, but that would affect everything and I would need to recreate these audio files, two of them spliced together in Audacity from multiple individual playbacks. So I am leaving these here as provisionally final, in case a new member runs across this thread and wants to hear the piece.
Audio: Fuga I; Interludio I; Fuga II
Audio: Interludio II; Evoluzione
Replies
I had a listen to the first fugue and rather enjoyed its solemnity and seriousness. I particularly like your dissonances which at times remind me of Bartok and sometimes Shostakovitch. I haven't kept up with your playback woes but as far as this rendering goes, I miss ambience and space which would give the whole a more cohesive and polished sound. Regardless, nicely done re the composing.
Thanks for listening and for your comments! Could you elaborate on the lack of "ambience and space" that you mention? I'm not familiar enough yet with Dorico to know how to control performance ambience, but I certainly don't hear any lack of reverb in this rendering - btw that's something I always try to limit when possible, in order to be able to do clickless splicing of parts of movements at points where everything goes quiet (in order to reject parts of renderings that have obvious flaws, a continuing problem with NP). As far as "space", my preferred seating arrangement for the work is "antiphonal" and there are plenty of back-and-forth calls between sections of the orchestra throughout the piece, but I'm guessing you meant something else.
Having heard the many incarnations of this work throughout its development, I have a lot of feeling listening to this latest version. In no particular order:
The timpani part seems significantly more busy this time round. I'm not sure what to make of this; in parts it did certainly add to the atmosphere, but in my completely subjective opinion, I would have preferred a more austere approach to the timpani scoring. The frequent appearance of the timpani line I feel deprives it of maximal emotional impact when it does appear. Now don't take this to heart, this is totally just my opinion, but I would have reserved the timpani figures to a few select passages where they would mark moments of special emotional impact. But that's just my totally subjective and probably biased opinion.
As always, I enjoyed the high register climactic passages in AA and IIRC CC (sorry, should have jotted this down while listening instead of relying on my failing memory...). These have been my favorite moments since the earliest versions of this piece.
The new version of GG caught me by surprise. It adds a particularly grim, almost violent, shattering feeling that wasn't there in previous versions. I'm not yet sure what to make of it... it's certainly quite different from the introspective, subdued feeling in previous versions. But OTOH perhaps it does bring to the forefront a more direct terror that in previous versions was only hinted at. A dark side that previously wasn't viewed directly. Quite interesting.
The slowed tempo in the passage leading up to the coda is also an interesting twist. I think it does in some way bring home the feeling that the inevitable conclusion is approaching, and that this is the final buildup. I think this is quite effective in terms of emotional impact.
Now the new conclusion: I like this version of the original final chord (m.762 onwards) quite a lot: strong, yet subdued, conclusive-sounding yet with reservations. Quite beautifully scored IMO. As for the new appendix after this, I still haven't decided what to think of it yet. Unlike previous attempts at extending the final chord, I feel this time you've hit upon something that sounds like it could work. The reiteration of the opening theme and the sparse scoring brings a more pessimistic ending than before, but IMO it does fit quite well. The closing chord with open 5ths is also suitably ambiguous (though the natural harmonics would tend to bend this sound in favor of the major chord, even if the 3rd is not explicitly stated).
That last bar, though, left me totally confused. IMO the piece should have just ended in that open 5th chord; the last note, an accented one, no less, felt like it negated the reserved, ambiguous ending that preceded it. If it were up to me, I'd just leave the ending a bar before and just omit the last bar. But of course, this is just totally subjective opinion from some random nobody online, so feel free to ignore it and follow your composer's sense instead.
P.S. something probably totally irrelevant: the score format was quite hard to follow because the large number of staves meant that they show up in microscopic font whenever I try to fit the entire page on my screen. It would have been nice if you had combined staves or used more compact spacing between them. But I understand that this is merely the default output and that it would take far too much time and effort to compress the score, when you really want to be focusing on the music itself.
Thanks for listening, HS, and for your comments.
You're right that I've given the timpanist gradually more and more to do as my view of the piece darkened. The way I think of it, the timpanist is a sort of actor who plays three roles: it gently accentuates some of the more mournful passages; in three places in the score, it sounds a steady funereal tread; and it acts as a dark, disruptive force in passages leading up to certain climaxes, rather like the snare drum in Nielsen's 5th. I think you're objecting to the third role, which is fine - but it's there for a different reason than emotional impact. At times I almost think of the piece as a concerto for timpani and orchestra!
I did tweak the ritards at the final climax, but I made no real changes to the passage preceding the Coda (which begins at JJ in the posted score). The only significantly slowed down transition is leading into Fuga III at letter Y. That is NOT a change on my part - that's how that molto rall. was always written and coded: it is supposed to slow to half speed (crotchet = 27), and then the old quaver becomes the new crotchet at letter Y. I don't think Sibelius played it back correctly; Dorico does.
Are you objecting to the final, detached chord with pizzicato strings and winds only? Not sure why that drew any particular attention. It's basically the culmination of the last dieaway. I added it to impart a cold and final quality, as if to say: nothing can follow this.
And yeah, the engraving is pretty raw in the posted score. I have little effective control over the spacing of staves in Sibelius, unfortunately - every change I make to the spacing has consequences elsewhere in the score - usually resulting in collisions that have to be resolved. I don't yet have a PDF from Dorico and I'm not too familiar with the software yet (VERY different user interface from Sibelius), but I'm optimistic that I can create a more readable score "soon" using Dorico. (I say "soon" because I'm up against the start of the new semester, and I have no idea when I'm going to be able to delve more into this, much less compose anything new.)
Oh yeah, I should have added - because Dorico treats each "flow" as a separate span of music, the rehearsal letters are going to change. They reset to A at the beginning of each flow. Maybe there's a setting to make the letter sequence continuous across flows, but I haven't run across it yet.
Interesting, I think my objection to the busy timpani part was more along the funeral tread parts. Maybe because I didn't hear it as a funeral tread, so it sounded a bit extraneous. I actually liked the disruptive force parts; GG in particular stood out as a powerful disruptive force that shook up my previous perception of the piece. As for the piece being a concerto for timpani and orchestra, I'm not so sure; I think its string orchestra roots still hold strong; some parts would probably have to be rewritten to make it work better as such a concerto.
As for the ritards, I wasn't aware that Sibelius played it back wrongly. In which case I have totally missed this part of the score previously. It definitely works very well.
Yeah, that final detached chord bothers me quite a bit. I understand what you mean by giving it a final, conclusive quality, but somehow it feels a bit extraneous. I feel like after that open 5ths chord, the piece had already come to a firm conclusion, and nothing more needs to be said. But of course, this is just my subjective opinion, you should do what you feel best represents your intentions.
As for rehearsal letters changing, I don't think that's a problem. I remember the various passages by sound, not be letters. :D (Can't even remember my own rehearsal marks in my own works if my life depended on it. But certainly can tell one passage from another!)
Oh, I didn't literally mean that it was a concerto, it just leans that way in my mind. It certainly is NOT a timpani concerto, but the timpanist is in some ways the most important single player in the piece even so.
I'm not sure exactly what Sibelius does there, in the transition to Fuga III, but after hearing Dorico, I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually slow all the way down to 27 as notated (hidden metronome marking). You didn't miss anything before, I just wasn't diligent enough about making sure Sib was playing back what was written.
I actually added that funeral tread over a year ago, originally to justify its appearance in an earlier version of the epilogue (which you didn't like ;)). Of course I can't ensure that everyone hears it the same way, but that's how I feel it. It appears before BB, DD, and KK.
The only thing new about the eruption at GG is the orchestration: before it was only horns, now it's trombones as well, but now I launch it with a fff pizzicato chord in the strings and added the timpani. It's not so much a disruptive force here as a wakeup call: after rising from the ashes and singing Alleluia (at FF), now we need to find a real solution to the disruptive tendencies from the Evoluzione. Note the Risoluto marking on the passage from GG to HH. The real disruptive force parts, to my ears, are before letter R, and before letter W.. After HH the timpani tries to disrupt the tentative triumph of grace and hope that wins through just before letter II (soaring string writing), but is actually forced to contribute to it. And then, of course the funeral tread returns in the Coda.
The last chord is still an open 5th. It's the exact same chord except that the timpani is silent, the violins do not play, and the other strings are pizzicato. The alternative is just to let the long-held chord fade into silence, and that just feels incomplete to me.
just on rehearsal marks -- there is still not an option to the best of my knowledge (despite a few requests about this) to automatically continue the sequence across flows. However, if you go to Properties for the rehearsal mark, you can then reset the index tab for the first rehearsal mark in each flow to the equivalent number for the corresponding letter you have reached. For instance say flow 1 has A-D and you want the first rehearsal mark in the next flow to be E instead of going back to A> Simply change the index from the default of 1 to 5 which is the 5th latter of the alphabet or E. Repeat this reset for the first rehearsal mark in each subsequent flow -- all the remaining ones within the flow will be correct. Sounds fiddly but it's only a few seconds work per flow really
Thanks David - actually it sounds pretty trivial. I've done that sort of thing before with auto-numbered lists in MS Word and PowerPoint, it's not a big deal.
I won't be around much until at least Thanksgiving and wanted to leave what I expect to be the final version of this piece, modulo some uncertainty about how to realize the final die-away. It's in the OP as I'm withdrawing all previous endings and renderings. @HS Teoh, I did excise the final detached chord in favor of making the strings fade out earlier than the winds in the long-held open fifth. It doesn't quite work as I intended (some discussion in the OP), but I've no time now to work more on it.
NotePerformer uses CC11 as its primary dynamic controller (unlike most libraries which clearly distinguish between tonal dynamics and absolute volume) which does fade to zero if you simply drag the dynamics line down to as low as you want in the key editor. In the unlikely event that doesn't fix it, pls attach the score and I'll check it out. Incidentally, I don't have permission to see your score so I expect it's the same for everyone. Should be shared for access by all.
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