Two quick things before I get back to work:

Rumor has reached me that our conductor, upon receiving the first 30 measures of IV. Lento, swore oaths. I may have written uplayable stuff. Oh well.

Back at the beginning of this unbegun symphony, there’s a bedrock motif I have in mind for the first movement. It’s important that the symphony start with this bedrock motif. This morning, I’ve been playing with some major key versions of the agitato theme for the ending, and it suddenly occurred to me that the bedrock motif fits beautifully over the major agitato theme, meaning I can wind up the symphony by overlaying the original theme over the end in some glorious finale.

Mere coincidence? I think not.

Back to work.

All right, here it is.

I like the last bit before the double bar, where the strings pluck the diminished seventh chord and it heads into the major section. I’m not sure I like the transition. I think we need one more gasp of the tympani there. I’ll play with it to see.

I’d really like to hear it more cleanly and more humanly played. I might know what to do with it.

Tonight I will have to work very hard to get IV. Lento to the double-bar, i.e., the transition into the G major portion of the movement so we can begin working towards its glorious ending. In preparation for this, I pulled up the file and listened to the whole thing this morning.

I hate it. It’s not compelling, it doesn’t sound inevitable, it sounds contrived, and of course the computer’s inability to sculpt any kind of sensitive performance makes it sound even worse.

That’s the loathing. The fear is that I can’t fix it. Is it a matter of orchestration? Do I just need to reassign what’s being played to some different combination of instruments? Or do I need to reconfigure the phrases themselves? Am I stuck in the same motives and need to find a fresher way to explore them? It just sounds stodgy right now.

Then there is the fact that Stephen has asked to see a score this weekend. There’s no way I can have the movement completed by then, of course, so that’s part of the panic and disappointment. The other part is the idea of letting someone who actually knows what’s what look at it. He’s already said he likes what he’s heard, but still…

Time’s wingéd chariot, and all that, eh, wot?

Maybe I’ll feel differently tonight.

I think you’re going to be pleased, if not astonished. I know I am both.

You know I am a true Lichtenbergian* because this passage is really masterful, and yet I stopped before fully fleshing it out. Well, it’s bedtime, and I have a long weekend ahead of me. I can mess with it all day on Saturday while ignoring the GHP parent orientation video. Anyway, it’s all just clicking in the notes at this point.

The slow part coming out of the brass choir, right at the start, still sounds idiotic. There’s a gap where there should be a dying note. Oh, well, hear it under lights. **

I know you’ve heard it before, but here forthwith is the next section of IV. Lento.

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* No, I haven’t heard from Noah, and no, I don’t have access to lichtenbergian.org. I understand he is very busy with some stuff that actually makes him money, but tomorrow will be two weeks from when the domain name went live. It’s getting to be a little too Lichtenbergian. Just hold those thoughts. That what your waste book is for.

** Honest to God, I was working on this passage tonight and glanced over at the pile of papers on the right and was shocked to see the piano score for “Dream Land.” I had completely forgotten the progress I had been making on Day in the Moonlight. Too late now, I’m on a roll. Plus, Stephen wants the score next weekend.

All right, I think I’ve got it. I sequestered the heavy section into its own file, for future use. Then, and follow this carefully, I took the original opening (this one, up until the first brass choir) and added it after the brass choir in the current version, adding some woodwinds for flavor. In other words, it’s sort of the opening of this movement, but stripped down, without the scurrying violins.

Then, and this is the new part, I brought back the violins in their nervous 32nd triplet runs, and under that comes the English horn with a weirdly beautiful version of the agitato motif, very slow.

I think what’s going to happen is that the strings will pick up the agitato motif in a higher key, mutating it closer to its final form, and then it will struggle to stay alive, gasping for breath, until it just dies away.

From that death will arise the main theme in G major, solo violin, as you can hear at the end of the above clip.

No mp3 from tonight’s work. I want to get all the bits right first. But I am on the right track.

Here you go, Jeff, notes scribbled on the back of a daily Dilbert calendar sheet shortly before going to bed, worthy of George Lichtenberg himself.

First, sixteenth notes, topped by the motif, with the note tense, light strings.

Also: use agitato theme as the dying out end of the 1st section, then pick up violin solo, use Sonatina agitato [treatment, later,] to lead into current heavy section, after it stops, huge tenuto/pickup to total Rachmaninov.

There. Everybody happy?

So maybe I’ll have better luck tonight in getting the opening section to the double bar.

So I was going to work on IV. Lento tonight, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I wanted either to replace the heavy bit from two days ago or to interpolate a softer, tenser segment. But I couldn’t write the first note. It was very weird.

In true Lichtenbergian fashion, I fell back on III. Allegro gracioso, and at least for that I came up with a decent phrase. Here’s the bare bones sketch.

I forged ahead this morning, and I like it all except the very end of it. It’s not pesante enough. I had it all harmonized, but stripped almost all of that out and left it unison, and I’ve dropped everything down at least an octave.

Perhaps if I moved all the lower bass notes up an octave so that all the notes are no more than one octave apart…

Anyway, after I resolve that issue, then there’s one more slow bit before we hit the G major fabulousness. I may repeat some variant of the opening, or I may play it with strings only, very atonal and astringent. I’ll have to fiddle with it.

Here’s the new section. It starts where the opening left off.

In other news, Vampira is dead. I only read about it this morning in this week’s Time magazine, and I don’t know why I didn’t hear about it last week. I clearly missed checking Metafilter that day.