Benjamin Sabey and Dr. David Sargent, Music

As a young, aspiring composer, writing for the orchestra has always been a desirable but intimidating goal. I knew that my first attempt would be fraught with obstacles and challenges. The first of these was one of purely logistical nature: the lack of orchestra that might play my piece. There aren’t many good orchestras lined up at my door waiting for me to write for them (yet). Thankfully, the Office of Research and Creative Activities provided an answer. With the grant that I received from ORCA I planned to hire good student instrumentalists and create my own orchestra. Thus, having fairly easily secured the means of producing an orchestra, I was free to focus on the challenge of actually writing a piece for it.

As soon as I did so, I realized that the real difficulty in writing for the orchestra was in the making of many decisions. What should the piece be about? What methods and styles of composition might I use? How should I use each instrument? What method of notation should I use? How should I treat rhythm and harmony? How can I be innovative and interesting? I came to realize that writing music is nothing more than making a staggeringly long series of decisions. Furthermore, because I felt so strongly about the end result but there was no clear-cut “right and wrong,” I struggled.

My first step was to answer the question of what the piece should be about. This was an especially difficult phase because I had the nagging feeling that my first orchestra piece should represent the pure essence of my “unique aesthetic.” Trying to determine what my unique aesthetic was prevented me from making much progress for several weeks. In the end I conceded to myself that my aesthetic was still evolving and that quintessential expressions of it would have to wait until much later. Unfortunately, I tend to go through this particularly agonizing process every time I start a new piece. If I could ever eliminate it from my mode of operation, I would be a much better and faster composer. At length I settled on the idea of a piece about nature, a forest to be more precise. I have been interested lately in the idea of music as an analogy for nature. In nature there are some things that happen at a fixed rate and time, such as the orbits of celestial bodies. There are also things that appear to happen more randomly and wildly but which often seem to be in reaction to things happening slowly and predictably. For example, the random, wild movements of leaves blowing in the wind are reactions to larger weather patterns that are, in turn, reactions to the rotation and tilt of the earth. I decided that I wanted to try to incorporate all of these concepts into the piece, particularly the idea of reaction.

With an clear idea of what the piece should be about, I was ready to answer the next question: how am I going to do it? As I pondered this, I soon became confronted with what has been aptly referred to as “the abyss of freedom.” This phrase describes the endless ocean of possibilities open to the composer of modern music. Since the turn of the twentieth century every age-old, revered and protected principle and concept about how to write music has been questioned, challenged and, ultimately, made to stand on its head. As a result many standard guides and methods for composers have also been lost. This absence of convention not only challenges listeners with perceived dissonance and unintelligibility but composers as well. A composer who lived in the time of Mozart would have had to make only a very few decisions before he or she could begin writing a new piece. He or she had a limited number of clearly defined forms and styles to choose from (i.e. the sonata, minuet, aria, etc.). Each had an array of predetermined characteristics such as tempo, meter, key, length and harmonic vocabulary. In addition, there was basically one method of notation. Each instrument could only be played in a very particular manner. Radical innovations in orchestration would have been unthinkable. As a composer in the twenty-first century, writing in a much more “liberated” time, I struggled for months just to decide on the method of notion that I should use. Because my original idea was to attempt to portray the natural forces and random reactions at work in a forest, I knew that I wanted the notation to be free and ambiguous in a certain sense to allow for some improvisation from the players. To facilitate this, I decided that most of the piece should be without time signature and that, in most cases, the conductor should not conduct in the traditional sense by giving a clear beat pattern to follow. Consequently, I became faced with the challenge of how to keep so many instruments more or less together. I, eventually, settled on a method in which certain players would have parts written out in a more traditional sense and other players would have small “cells” of music that they would play only if they heard certain cues. These cues would be purposely embedded in the traditionally notated parts. In this way I could create something analogous to the reaction of the leaves and branches of a forest to a gust of wind rushing through it, or the reaction of the surface of a pool of water to a falling object. Since I wanted to create a “wild” environment, I also decided that precise pitch notation was largely unnecessary. I, therefore, decided after much experimentation, to use three different kinds of staffs. I used the normal staff with five lines, and a staff with only one line (this staff is familiar to percussionists). This one line staff was meant to indicate that a player produce sounds with out pitch or melody. For example, the violins might have this kind of staff when I simply want them to tap the body of their instruments with their fingers. A third kind of staff has three lines, the top, middle and lower of the five. This staff would indicate that the player was to play the approximate outline of the melody at the approximate pitches suggested.

Whether all of these decisions and many others will produce a viable, interesting orchestra piece remains to be seen. At the time of this writing, I am within a week of finishing the score and one important decision still remains to be made: the title of the piece. Those interested in the final results of this decision and the thousands of others that I have made will have to attend the world premier on November 2nd, 2001, in the Madsen Recital Hall at 7:30pm.