Nathan Bowen and Professor Murray Boren, Composer-in-Residence
As a student composer, I have one basic goal in mind: get as much experience writing for as many different instruments as possible. In assessing what would be most beneficial to my growth as a young composer, it became clear that writing a long piece for a large ensemble would be the right project. I proposed to write a ten minute piece for full orchestra.
Having never written a piece that even exceeded 5 minutes in duration, I knew that this project would surely take me out of my comfort zone. Composing music on such a large scale forced me to approach the piece differently than I had with other shorter or “smaller” pieces—works that are short in duration and use few instruments. For instance, it had been my tendency to start writing from bar one and see where the music would take me. Often times this approach resulted in an unorganized structure. But with my new parameters of deciding the length beforehand, I knew a free-lance approach would quickly become problematic. It was suggested to me that before I dive in to writing notes, I should make a general outline or sketch of how much time I should allot for each section, and should choose thematic materials that would be used for each of those sections. One professor told me that planning to write a piece was like planning to build a house. Before working on moldings or designing exactly where the kitchen sink is going to go, it might be important to decide where the kitchen is going to be first.
Another area with which I had little experience pertained to the shear size of the ensemble: the more instruments one uses, the more choices one has to make. For example, an artist with a pallet of 3 colors has different considerations and concerns than if he had a pallet of 40 different colors. I had to choose not only which colors to use overall (meaning which instruments I wanted and how many), but also which colors I would combine. I decided to organize the instruments I chose by making five groups of five instruments. In each group, I wanted to include an instrument from each “family”—e.g. one woodwind, one string instrument, one percussion instrument, one brass instrument, etc. A problem arose in not having five basic families in traditional orchestration—there are only four. Rather than give up my criterion of five instruments per group, I decided to make each group consist of one instrument per family plus an additional instrument from one of the families (e.g. two woodwinds, one string instrument, one percussion instrument, one brass instrument). The idea was to treat each group as one sound source, so if I had five sound sources, then it would be like a painter choosing to paint his picture using five newly-created colors that were the products of mixing lots of standard colors. As I worked out the process, the number of choices no longer became intimidating, but I felt like I had a pallet that was workable.
Deciding what the piece was to be about was another tough choice. Though this organizational process had been very helpful, I still hadn’t decided what image I was going to create with my big canvas and new colors. Having spent a good deal of time in this organizational process, I did not leave myself a lot of time to consider what the piece was a demonstration of. After careful and quick consideration I determined that it would be best if I added a voice and text. This way, I could give myself a direction through words. Since a basic thematic material in the music itself was a palindrome (i.e. something that is the same backwards or forwards), I determined that using a palindrome in the text would not only remain within context, but it provided a forum for me to give this piece a spiritual meaning. I chose to use the words “I am” as my text, but changed the words around to “am I” at various points in the music. The result was a message of self-discovery of potential. The Lord’s name is “I AM”, which I interpret as being a statement of power and self-awareness of that power. If I were to ask myself “am I”, I would be doubting my abilities or perhaps wondering if I have any power at all. If one realizes their own potential, he can eventually see that he “is”. In completing this project, I found that in writing for an orchestra, “I am” capable of becoming a good composer.
Granted things did not turn out perfectly. In terms of time, there were a couple sections that I do not feel are complete. The overall structure is a five-part rondo form, with the beginning and ending sections consisting of the same basic material. I made the form out to be a palindrome as well, but I feel the final section should be longer in the context of the duration of the first section. I feel that some of the inner sections consisted of one or two long phrases, and they could stand to have more phrases with perhaps not so much length. Also, I originally intended to use the scholarship money to pay performers and to get a professional recording, but the project ended up taking so much time that I needed to use the money to replace the money I would have earned during the time I spent working on this project. Fortunately, several performers graciously gave their time to rehearse the piece and perform it at my senior recital. The recording turned out well, and the performance was very good. Overall, I am happy with the results, and I feel that this project taught me a lot about orchestration, organizing a long piece, and most importantly it taught me that planning can make a great difference in writing better music.