Week 4: The End is Nigh.. Oh Crap It's Today?!

Well here we are.  It seemed just like yesterday that I had the gall to try and put guitar in the symphony.  An idea of many that was tinkered with, rehabilitated, dropped altogether, or other.  25 days later and 24 minutes of music written, it's safe to say it was a prolific span of time.  

Day 1

This week I worked on my third and final movement.  I wanted to focus on dissipating all the tension that was wound up in the previous pieces with rich voicings akin to those found in the prelude.  But I also wanted the sound to be more resolute, which means going against my ingrained instinct developed over years of guitar and the first three songs in the symphony: using plain triads over spiced up 7th chords.  

I was reading through a couple sections of Tchaikovsky's A Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony and he reminded me that the strongest harmony derives from triads, which are chords made up of the root, the third, and the fifth of its diatonic scale.  These notes are crucial in defining the emotion of the chord whether its major or minor, diminished or augmented.  They are simple yet powerful, so I structured my harmony around this idea.  

Day 2

It took three days for this song to fully come together and I was surprised by the speed by which it was constructed even though I shouldn't have been.  From the very beginning I always knew this would be the destination, it was the journey to it that I struggled with.  Additionally, all the building blocks I needed already existed in the previous movements, I just had to give them a new context. And since I did not plan for how fast I would complete the writing phase, that meant I could move on to mixing. 

Day 3

Mixing is the optimization of everything that's been written.  All the instruments should be balanced in volume and in frequency so that they are heard at the proper cues.  My goal with the mix is to make it sound like it's being recorded in a live orchestra chamber. This means applying the right touch of reverb, panning, and EQ to create space and ambience without muddying the natural textures of the instruments.  (Correlated photo below).  I would make even more adjustments but there's a senior trip I gotta attend to.

To restate my initial goals one last time:

    1) To write four musical pieces that act as one cohesive symphony.

    2) To be deliberate with my musical choices to gain an understanding of the roles each instrument has to play.

    3) To focus more on the emotional reaction of the music rather than what would be flashy.

For the first goal, I am strongly confident that each piece ebbs and flows from one to the next in a cohesive manner and telling a complete story in the process.  

For the second goal, I have developed my writing process to be less sporadic and more honed with the constant repeating question of: by doing x what am I adding, and by removing y what am I taking away. Cause and effect.

For the third goal, I do think that there is an emotional throughline that spans all the pieces.  And in terms of resisting the urge to be flashy, well, sometimes I can't help myself.

Would I recommend this senior project to another student? It depends on what they hope to get out of it.  I wanted to test myself after over a year of writing original orchestral compositions to see if I could accomplish an ambitious musical project.  If a future student is interesting in composing, then I would say be prepared, you'll never have an empty day.  

My final creative decision is what to title the symphony.  How do I sum up all the musical ideas in one or two words? Well the prelude was layered with dense harmony meant to signify a sort of rest and ease.  But the next two movements stripped that away and it takes until the very end to retrieve that harmony once more.  So the answer is obvious.

Without much further ado, I hereby present Symphony No. 1 in D Minor "Reclamation".

Note: Mixed with headphones in mind.

Prelude

Movement 1: Disarray

Movement 2: Anger

Movement 3: Apotheosis