Anatomy of an unfinished piece

Posted on Sep 1, 2005 | 0 comments
Filed under: Current Work, Letter to Hungary

Well, I’d promised myself that September 1st would be when I stop sketching and start fleshing out and orchestrating the HCSO piece. I was hoping to have an end-to-end sketch of the whole piece to work from by now. I almost do. Good enough, I guess.

The big outstanding question for me at the moment is whether this is a multi-movement work or just one big movement. I’m leaning toward four movements, some played attacca. The material isn’t quite unified enough to to hold one movement together. I have to come up with names for the movements, though, which is a bit of a drag.

Here’s what I seem to be working with now: (All details described here are subject to change.)

Movement I:

Muted violins, divisi in 5 parts across both sections play a homophonic chorale-like setting of the opening melody. The melody is original, but it’s use of descending fourths and some ‘short-long’ rhythms suggests Hungarian music (to anyone familiar with Hungarian music).

Movement II:

A playful and slightly macabre theme reminds me a bit of Bernard Herrmann. Plus, an off-beat walking bass that I will be accused of ripping off from Leonard Bernstein. Whatever… it’s effective. The second theme is a slow, meandering melody accompanied by some nervous, stacatto sul ponticello figures, which are a sort of fragmented inversion of the first theme. This theme begins with a rising fourth, as does the melody at the beginning of Movement I. The Mad