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I originally set out to write something very simple for amateur orchestras—Symphony #2 is mostly in the keys of C and G; it doesn’t modulate much; it is in four parts and only four parts, no divisi sections. But I was having so much fun I got carried away. And so some parts are simple, some not so much. I wrote it entirely on the computer on my Finale orchestration program, without recourse to an instrument. Which is a strange and perhaps awkward way of going about it. But I think it would have been an entirely different work had I composed it on the piano.
My plan was to write Popular Classical Music for Everyday People—the kind of music that audiences actually go to classical concerts to hear, rather than what cultural arbiters say is cool and is not—something radical, so to speak, a regular, tonal, formal, common-practice piece of Classical music instead of something theoretical, au courant, or over-intellectualized. In other words, I tried nothing more ambitious than to write singing, singable melodies, rich harmonies, and driving rhythms. Such an objective is radical, I would submit, because, in a time when all rules are broken, what rules are there left to break? The only one left I can see is the rule against rules.
To a cursory listening, the music of this album no doubt will sound classically Classical, or perhaps a little early Romantic. But no Classical composer would write exactly this way. Their sensibilities and backgrounds are too different from mine. I actually think of this album as rock ‘n’ roll for orchestra using classical conventions.
Allegro
Technically, the introduction is in an Allegretto tempo, which then revs up into Allegro at the entrance of Theme I, and so I should have labeled the movement “Allegretto-Allegro.” But I didn’t. 95% of it is Allegro, so I don’t think the omission all that grievous. This is the only movement of Symphony #2 that is in sonata form. There is a little Bach in there, a little Vivaldi, a little Beatles, not to forget a chord change stolen from Dolly Parton.
Largo
I made up my own three-part form for this movement. Only after I wrote it did I notice that it constituted a kind of fantasia on the themes of repetition and non-repetition. The first section is thoroughly through-composed: nothing repeats. The middle section is a chaconne. The same chords repeat over and over, (although they are differently voiced with each iteration). The rhythm of the middle section proceeds in an unvaryingly repetitive pattern of sixteenth-note melody against quarter-note accompaniment (at least for the first twenty bars, after which counterpoint breaks up the steady rhythmic pattern). The third section repeats the opening through-composed part in which nothing repeats, followed by a short coda whose melody repeats a single note. Unless I write another one, I want this movement to be my requiem. Mortality lay heavy on my mind through the dark winter in which I composed it.
Marcia Moderato
There is a festival every year in Salento, Apulia, called Notte della Taranta, “The Night of the Tarantula,” featuring Pizzica, a popular folk genre of dance and music related to the Tarantella. This area of Italy has a large, ancient population of ethnic Greeks, and some Pizzica is sung in Griko, a southern Italian dialect of Greek. In this movement I overlap Pizzica folk melodies, variations on them, and original melodies in the style, steadily building to climax. This is an arrangement for string orchestra, but it is best accompanied in the listener’s imagination by a dancer with a tambourine thumping out every beat in that insistent 6/8 time.
Presto
This movement is a rondo. The form is a mirror form, themes following one another in sequence to the center and then repeating in reverse order coming out. Sometimes the meter sounds like it is switching from duple to triple. But the whole thing is in 3/4 time. Another thing I only realized in retrospect. I don’t even understand how I did it. The final iteration of Theme I is in half-time: each phrase is twice as long as in the original. I also seem to remember taking a section from the first movement, changing it from major to minor, and re-writing it so completely for the fourth movement that I can’t figure out which section it was. Now only God knows, I guess.
Sonata for Orchestra
Unlike Symphony #2, which is for strings, this sonata is for full orchestra. It was a long time in coming. I wrote the two themes at one period in my life, worked out the development, recapitulation and coda years later, and committed it to computer orchestration more years later. That was a regular fun extravaganza. I was using the cheapest orchestration program I could find. You pays for what you gets. Halfway through the project, the program suddenly squashes all the measures together on the screen, and I can’t figure out how to un-squash them for love nor money. I am sure I’ve lost half a year’s work. After a month of hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing, I finally figured out how to fool the computer into thinking I wasn’t doing what I was doing. (Is it not ever so?). My relief was boundless. There is a slide-show video on YouTube where I use great Romantic paintings to visually reflect the emotions suggested by this work. Yes, Theme I uses an idea from Mozart. And someone told me that Theme II is Mahler-esque, but I have not been able to discover which work it resembles. On the other hand, hidden in the development is a deliberate quote from Milton Nasciamento. The long coda is more Beatles than Beethoven, although the florid improvisation-esque ornamental passages with their dueling woodwinds hark back (at least to my mind) to the early classical practice of the improvisational cadenza.
Ted Silar 