Halbierte Abbildung in Progress Part 2

A considerable amount of time has elapsed since I began work on this. I began in the last week of November and here this piece and I are in the first week of January and I am not yet done. I was stuck for an ending and in my search found that the ending was two movements away.

It is now a symphony. Not a terribly long one. The first movement is just over 35 minutes. The second, scored for brass alone, is almost seven and the last movement is presently about 22 minutes long and will go on for something like ten more minutes. If I were to get exhaustive in the development the piece could go on for more than an hour and a half, but I’ve chosen only to hit the highlights, as it were, and chop down the machinery to only the most interesting and potent material.

That said, there is a certain amount of fabric that is repeated, at times with only slight variation. I’m not sure why this happens. And it always amazes me that I, the creator, am ignorant of aspects of my creation. This very thing that I have written has mystery. Mystery I do not comprehend.

A composer directs a fluid. The music flows, following a course that is quite natural, a fate innate, inherent to it own tissues, dictated by its own internal forces. The music’s journey is governed by its specific logic to a fateful state of equilibrium. Once the machination of the material…the engine, is built and started…the vehicle of the composition caries it to its logical conclusion. I may nudge it here and there along the way but only to steer it away from stagnant waters, sudden deaths, fragmented or staid harmonies and other dramatic mortal pitfalls. I direct it slightly for its health.

I compose a lot of symphonies and was looking forward to writing something that wasn’t another symphony…but the material demanded a full development and it is a certain type of vanity to deny material its natural tendency.