Horn Concerto – Why Write a Concerto?

I’m currently completing a BA Composition course at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. The main project for the final year of this degree was to compose a work for a symphony orchestra. As part of this project I must produce, in addition to the finished work, a 2,000 word commentary about the work itself. This series of blog posts will consist of extracts from this commentary, and related thoughts.

“Compose a work for symphony orchestra”: This, in many ways, is quite a loose brief; even within the term “symphony orchestra”, there is plenty of room to modify and customize the precise instrumentation. To even further complicate the issue, the choice of style and genre was entirely up to the student. This is typically one of the more difficult questions a composer must consider before beginning to compose a work. However, I had thought about what kind of piece I wanted to write for a quite a long time, and so the answer was ready: I decided to write a concerto

The concerto genre is, and has long been, the genre of orchestral music I find it easiest to engage with. I’m not sure what the reason for this is, though it may be because I’ve always had an attraction to highly soloistic music; as a teenager I listened to lots of jazz (Miles Davis being one of my heroes), and later to progressive rock and various genres of extreme metal. Not only do all these styles that demand a high level of technical proficiency from musicians, they also frequently feature instrumental solos. The concerto is possibly the only type of music that uses the full powers of the symphony orchestra but also allows deep exploration of the kind of virtuosic and soloistic playing that so interests me in the solos of rock and jazz music. (The primary difference here is that the solos of jazz music are typically improvised, whereas my composition would be strictly notated as is the norm in orchestral music – the conditions of musical creation are different, but in many respects the outcome is the same.)

The chance to work closely with a soloist also excited me for two reasons: having worked with other artists to create works before, I found the collaborative process to be a rewarding experience, and I also expected that it would be an unparalleled opportunity to learn about the idiosyncrasies of the solo instrument from someone with an in-depth knowledge. A successful concerto must make some allowances for the weaknesses of the instrument and exploit its strengths – the most efficient way to learn this is through communication with a good player.

 I chose the French Horn as the solo instrument for a number of reasons, both artistic and practical. Though the horn was my first choice, I did consider a number of other possibilities, including the viola and the oboe. All of these are instruments I enjoy writing for and am interested in exploring further. Ultimately, practicalities played a role in why I chose the horn over the other instruments; any of the oboists or violists were extremely busy, and thus I thought they would possibly be unable to take on a wholly new, and possibly very difficult, contemporary work. However, I knew a very good horn player, recently graduated from a performance degree, who was willing and interested to work with me in creating a concerto.

A number of things attracted me to the horn as an instrument – it’s got a huge range, extending from the pedal notes below the bottom of the bass clef to the top of treble clef. It has a variety of timbral possibilities, and is also capable of producing ‘natural’ or ‘untempered’ pitches – pitches tuned according to the harmonic spectrum of a fundamental note, rather than adjusted to fit equal temperament. In the course of sketching passages of horn music for this work, the instrument’s vast range is definitely the quality I exploit the most . I use the entire array of available registers, from the lowest to highest pitch regions that the horn can produce.

I listened to several horn concertos, and a number of other horn compositions, in preparation for this work. My intention was not to find an explicit model or template to base my concerto on, but rather to get a feel of what was idiomatic for the instrument. Mozart’s four horn concertos and Strauss’ two are all pieces I greatly admire, and I listened to them several times in this research period. More contemporary works that I examined and enjoyed included the concertos by Knussen and Hindemith, Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (particularly for the untempered natural horn introduction), and Ligeti’s Horn Trio and Hamburg Concerto (which features several natural horns, all using different crooks and playing in a variety of different tunings, for a dense microtonal effect).

I did not stick to the formal plan of the concerto, as was used in the classical era; a sonata form, with the theme first appearing in the orchestra before being reintroduced in the solo instrument (though I did use sonata form as a rough guideline to the structure of the first movement). The cadenza, which in classical concertos takes place at the end of the first movement (though since the Romantic era it can appear nearly anywhere in the work), is expanded into its own movement and takes a number of elements from recitative-style music. The third movement, a scherzo, is a short and energetic piece, with a theme that draws on a favoured motif of Mahler’s.

Culture File Interview

Sebastian Adams, and Robert Coleman and I are being interviewed tonight on Culture File about being a young composer in Ireland, Dublin’s contemporary music scene, and tomorrow night’s Kirkos launch concert!

6.40 pm on Lyric FM! It can be streamed here.

Overdue Album Reviews #1 – The Hunter

I make no real effort to stay on top of what’s current in music – I rarely listen to the radio, and I don’t know what bands are hot. This isn’t me parading my hipness by “not listening to overproduced corporate pop, man“; I’m equally ignorant of indie hipster bands and up-and-coming pop singers. And it’s not that I don’t like popular music either. I just find it takes too much damn effort to keep abreast of what’s happening in all of the scenes, far more effort than it’s worth expending to find music I really enjoy.

Unfortunately, this weak excuse doesn’t even apply when it comes to today’s blog post. Mastodon has been one of my favourite bands for years now, ever since 2004′s astonishing second album Leviathan. I’ve seen them two or three times, and one of them was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. So the fact that I’m using this post to review their most recent album, The Hunter, four whole months after its release, cannot be excused by my lack of hip. There are several other albums by equally cherished groups that have been out for months now. Expect further entries in the “Overdue Album Reviews” series – I doubt this is a problem I’ll ever get on top of, so as long as bands I love keep releasing albums, expect me to keep getting them months after everyone else has gotten over it already.

Onwards to the review!

The Hunter comes in a pretty box – though I miss the art style of the previous albums (all by the same artist), the front cover features a quite disturbing depiction of a mythical, multi-jawed beast. Something about it makes me think of Picasso’s Guernica. This album is also a departure from their previous albums because it doesn’t correspond to one of the classical elements.  Each of their earlier records is in some way inspired by or based upon fire, water, earth, or ether. They have yet to release an album that represents air, and it’s a little disappointing to the completionist in me that The Hunter doesn’t finish off the cycle; of course, this doesn’t take away from the quality of the music itself and Mastodon have to be allowed to write the album they want to write.

So what of the music? As I write this, I’ve listened through the album fully once, and I’m about halfway through my second listen. I’ve always found Mastodon’s albums require a bit of getting used to; it took me a while to warm to Leviathan, and their last release Crack the Skye was considered by many to be a difficult listen and a huge departure from their typical sound. Not so with The Hunter.  The opening track, “Black Tongue”, is if anything a more traditional heavy metal track than Mastodon tend to release. Solid riff, good vocals, and from the middle of the song onwards we have some classic heavy metal guitar harmonies. “Curl of the Burl” is a bit closer to  the familiar Mastodon sound. “Blasteroid”, Stargasm” and “Octopus Has No Friends” are interesting; some the riffs have a jolly, almost folksy, new flavour.

It’s around this point on my first listen that I look at the liner notes and see the album was produced bt Mike Elizondo, a name previously familiar to me as the session bassist on Dr. Dre’s album 2001, probably my favourite rap album. Mind somewhat blown!

From “All the Heavy Lifting” on, the album gets more proggy. Ethereal guitars soar over riffs and Brann Dailor’s typically virtuoso drumming. These songs have a little bit more of the 70′s influence, but don’t compromise on the heaviness. The mood changes surprisingly with the tenth track, “Creature Lives.” After a creepy intro of demonic laughter and swelling synths, this is practically a pop song; its melody and harmonies could nearly come right out of the charts, but with a prog twist. The following track “Spectrelight” resets the heaviness meter, and how! This track calls right back to the ferocity and energy of Leviathan; Iron Tusk in particular comes to mind. I am astonished that Spectrelight hasn’t been taken as a band name!

The final two tracks on the album continue in much the same fashion – Mastodon flirt with that typical prog-metal sound that so many bands have nowadays (to the point of it becoming a cliché, surely antithetical to progressive music, but that’s a topic for another blog post) but always do it tastefully and with enough individuality to pull it off.

In short, this is a very accessible album. Where Crack the Skye was impenetrable but ultimately rewarding, The Hunter is easy to listen to but complex enough to keep you interested. Anyone seeking genuinely interesting prog metal that doesn’t hold back when brutality is required should definitely try out this album. But of course, you probably bought it four months ago.

Playing the Bass

For Christmas last year, I got a bass guitar, a lovely sunburst finishVintage model. What with a busy college schedule, and needing to get cables and other equipment before I could really start playing, I only really got my teeth into this summer, and have practiced a lot over the last few weeks particularly. It’s been an interesting experience – I already to play two other instruments, both of which I’ve played for a long time. Though I’m by no means at professional level on either of them, I’ve been competent and proficient with them both for many years. Starting the whole process of learning my way around a new instrument has been at times frustrating, and at other times rewarding. It’s difficult to pick up the instrument, look at the sheet music for a piece you know well, and be completely unable to find the notes. On the other hand, I’ve long believed that learning an instrument gives you a unique way of thinking about music – and with each new instrument you learn, you add a new dimension to your capacity for musical thought. This has certainly been the case for learning the bass – I’ve developed a new method of thinking my way around the notes. Spending time with the lower register of songs has also been beneficial to me compositionally, as I find I’m writing more interesting parts in the bass registers my own music.

The primary reason I took up bass is that I really wanted to be able to play more pop and rock music. While I play keyboards already, some of the styles of music I wanted to pursue weren’t particularly suited to keyboards, and I knew plenty of guitarists but not very many bassists. Though I don’t agree with the common notion that the bass is an inferior guitar – it’s a distinct instrument with a very distinct style of playing – it’s probably true that a lot of bass repertoire is more accessible than guitar repertoire. This way, I’d be able to start playing music with people faster. I also have had a great love for the instrument for a long while – from the first time I really listened to Flea I’ve had an appreciation for the bass as a distinct and important part of rock music.

Ligeti – a composer and a role model.

Several years ago, in the later stages of secondary school, I had little knowledge of contemporary music. I was familiar with it, in broad and vague sense; I knew about minimalism and I had listened to some Schoenberg, but other than that I was largely ignorant of the art music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I wasn’t uninterested exactly – I was fascinated by reading about these topics, and friends of mine who were doing music degrees often got asked about modern composers. But for the most part my attention was diverted elsewhere -  I was trying to get better on piano and clarinet, I was listening to rock music, there was a brief spell in a funk band, and of course I had school and the leaving cert to contend with. The elements that attracted me to contemporary music – exotic musical sounds, technical difficulty, anything that made for a difficult but rewarding listen – I could also get from progressive metal or jazz.  And it was hard to know where to begin. Though the internet has undoubtedly made it easier for audiences to engage with and discover new music, it’s one hundred times easier again for almost every other genre.

One the suggestion of one of my friends, I decided to give Ligeti a listen. Not knowing where else to begin , I went to YouTube, put the name into the search box and, after skimming the results, chose what seem like a good option: this video.

I’m not going to sensationalize it and say I was instantly blown away. But I really liked it, and it grabbed my attention in a way that no other contemporary works had at that point. It was surprisingly accessible: it was energetic, it had a clear shape, it was understandable. It was metal.

On Genre

I am very particular about how I organise my music collection. My CDs are arranged alphabetically, for simplicity’s sake, though as an added bonus I like how I end up with John Field side-by-side with John Frusciante; but whenever I put music on a laptop or mp3 player, I spend a great deal of time making sure the details are correct – I double-check track listings, make sure that the artist’s name is spelled right, and most importantly I make sure the genre is correct.

You see, I really like genres.

I understand the problems people have with them, to an extent. I know that, in some cases there is very little difference between certain genres; yet at other times, bands with wildly different sounds may all legitimately be given the same label.

To say that music is just music is absurd – it ignores the wealth of diversity within music and within different styles of music. Critics of genre-classification often falsely accuse people who like genres of attempting to pin everything down, as if music appreciation was taxonomy. But that’s not the case – I think that if a number of bands or composers share common qualities, then why not use some kind of name to identify music that has those qualities? It makes discussing music so much easier.

The downside of this is that if genre is a convenient label for discussing music, it also makes it much easier for audiences to judge music unfairly. We are all guilty of this – dismissing an artist on the basis of their style, rather than on the music itself. Genres do facilitate this kind of lazy thinking, but I don’t think they’re responsible for it.

This is as good a post as any to plug one of my favourite websites – www.radiotuna.com, a list of free, online radio stations, organized by genre. This was a great delight to me when I discovered it. It’s a neat compromise between choosing what kind of thing to listen to on an mp3 player and hearing new music on the radio, it satisfies my genre obsession, and it’s a great way to educate yourself on unfamiliar genres. I’ll happily admit that some of the genres they list were completely unfamiliar to me (I still can’t quite figure out what defines the subsets of reggae known as “lover’s rock” and “soca”), and I was surprised by the absence of some subgenres (they don’t have a category for “folk metal”), but overall I found it to be a comprehensive list.

When it comes to classical music, it’s a different story again. That name itself has many different meanings – do we label all “Western Art Music” as classical, or do we split it up into its various eras Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern? And the word genre itself has a different meaning –it refers to a type of work rather than the work’s style. A single composer may have music for piano and voice, an orchestral work, a suite for string trio, and an opera. They could all use similar material and be written in the composer’s highly personal and recognisable style, yet in this context they would all be considered different genres. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll tend to organize by era – and it’s much easier for someone else to browse my collection this way.

Ultimately, I think that genres are a useful tool. Understanding what distinguishes different styles of music from one another, even if those distinctions are fine, helps me as a listener appreciate the subtle elements that contribute to creating great music.

As always, thoughts, questions and criticisms are welcome in the comments section.

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The Disintegration of Tonality

Preface: As I said in my first post, some of the content on this blog will be taken from college essays I have written. This post is an essay I wrote for my thrid year Music History module. For this reason, this text is heavily referenced- if anyone knows of a neat way to insert footnotes in WordPress, let me know!

By the end of the nineteenth century, as the Romantic era began to draw to a close, it was becoming apparent that the traditional system of tonality was no longer sufficient for composers’ expressive needs. In a remarkable mere handful of years at the beginning of the twentieth century, composers increasingly abandoned the tonal language in favour of new systems and modes of musical expression. This disintegration was fully realized by the German composer Arnold Schoenberg, who declared the “emancipation of the dissonance” and is considered to be the first truly atonal composer.

Before Schoenberg

Before Schoenberg, however, we have a few examples of compositions which seemed to be attempting to do without the common-practice tonal system. In works such as his late Bagatelle sans tonalité (1885), Liszt was beginning to experiment with tonal ambiguity. This complex piece for solo piano is tonal in the sense that it is still based upon and rooted in a system of tonal relationships; however, it has no true tonal centre and is far more chromatic in its harmonic language than other works of its generation, foreshadowing the ‘true’ atonality to arise decades later. The famous “Tristan” chord from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1859) could be seen as another starting point for the demise of tonality. This chord, which “has been viewed… as a ‘crisis’ in Romantic harmony”(1), was considered daring and innovative in its day.

By the last decade of the century, composers were experimenting with bitonality, or the composition of works in two different keys, such as Strauss in the famous tone-poem Also Sprach Zarathustra (1892), which is written both in C major and B major throughout. The two conflicting tonal centres are the basis for the drama of the piece, and while the piece may still be described as tonal with relation to these two centres, the fact that Strauss chose to use this technique and that the finale does not resolve to either C or B, shows that traditional tonality was unable to accommodate Strauss’ artistic vision. The Russian Nationalist composers, due to their largely self-taught and individual approach to composition, also were notable for working outside the limits of established tonal language and “had developed unorthodox harmonic techniques which preserve tonality as an organizing principle while modifying significantly the classical tonality of Western European traditions.”(2)

Another interesting example is the American composer Charles Ives. As a child, Ives’ music training included teaching him to sing in quarter tones, and he was also encouraged to sing in one key while accompanying himself in another (3,4). This shows a remarkable foresight in realizing the limitations of the tonal system, and the latter is a particularly useful technique for understanding bitonality.

All these examples make it clear that, at the start of the twentieth century, certain musicians felt that the common-practice tonality was becoming an outdated language.

Dancing About Architecture

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”

- Variously attributed; extremely quotable; and utterly, utterly wrong.

In this blog I intend to talk about music; this will cover all aspects of music that interests me, across the popular and classical genres, and with topics ranging from simple reviews and opinion pieces to more academic writing. Of course, I’m a composer, and so I’ll also be using this blog to promote my own music and Irish contemporary music generally.

To get the ball rolling and get some content up on the site, over the coming weeks I’ll be uploading some college essays on topics I find interesting as well as fresh material. I hope that this will be of some interest to readers, and don’t hesitate to leave comments; I see this as another way to learn about music just as much as a platform for me to talk about my own interests.

Bill McGrath is a Dublin-based composer, currently undertaking a BA Composition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music under Kevin O’Connell and Jonathan Nangle.