EPISODE 4 - Walking Patch, more on birdsong and Day in a Spring Meadow

In this episode, I present a simple tune that I've just written, develop my birdsong idea further and introduce (in some detail) the outline of a new piece to be called Day in A Spring Meadow.

All unfinished as usual ... !

Website information + fade in Suite in D

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to episode four. This week I've got three exciting new developments to talk about. I've had a really good week uh in terms of my musical composition. The first thing is Walking Patch. The second is Transcribing Bird Song, really a development of what I talked about in the previous episode. And thirdly, and most exciting of all, my new composition, which is called Day in a Spring Meadow. So let's get started. Walking Patch. Patch is our seven-year-old Border Collie. We first met him when he was a few weeks old and he very quickly became a member of our family. I could spend a whole episode talking about the delights and challenges of owning a border collie, but that's not what I'm here for today. About a week ago, I took Patch out for his short evening walk around the neighbourhood. As we walked, I realized that a melody was running around my head. It happens from time to time, and I have no idea where those tunes come from. Usually I lose them very quickly, but this time I acted fast. I pulled up my mobile and started the voice recorder app. Then I sang the tune into the phone. It's just 26 seconds long. As soon as we got home, I sat down with my laptop and notated the melody into Muse Score, and an hour later I'd added a very simple harmony in a form of one triad, one chord per bar. It's a not a terribly exciting tune, but as far as I know, it really did come out of my head, and that's a really great feeling. So here it is. But I am sure that I'm gonna keep working on it. I'd like a more interesting harmony, and maybe I can extend it too. I'll let you know. Transcribing bird song. Over a coffee in Scarecrow, which is my favourite local cafe, I analyzed the calls of five birds. I noted down the notes that they sang and the patterns and rhythms associated with their song. So far, I've done this for the Robin, the Chifchaff, the Linnet, the Skylark, and the invading rose ringed parakeet. What surprised me was how structured some of the songs are, their rapid repeated notes and trills, sudden accents and even sounds that sound like harmonies or overlapping voices. There are about another ten or fifteen local species I'd like to analyse over the coming weeks, all of them songbirds, such as the blackbird, the wren, the song thrush, the dunnock, and several others. I also want to add in a few birds that aren't really part of the Dawn Chorus, I think, but they're definitely part of the local soundscape. So one of those is a Canada goose, some of the others are a jackdaw, a mallard, a wood pigeon, and a woodpecker. While they're not exactly songbirds, they're still very much part of the sonic landscape around here. I'll let you know how this develops, and this also relates to my third topic, which is day in a spring meadow. So, day in a spring meadow. This is quite a long, detailed section in which I'm going to describe how my idea evolved and what the structure of this piece of music will be. I hope it's of interest. It's certainly more detail than I've shared on any previous podcast so far. In episode one, I introduced my very unfinished Sweet N D, and I played most of what I'd written so far. Also as a reminder, a little bit of that music, the opening, is actually what I use as my music to introduce the podcast. Yesterday, with the bird song idea still in my head, I began thinking about what the whole piece of music might actually become, and I think I've got a beginning of a structure now. I'd like to create an opening, a new opening to this piece, in fact, beginning with sunrise, which I think would work really well with the harp using rising arpeggios and glissandos. Then I'd like to add in a layer of bird song, initially the Robin and the Blackbird, and then the rest of the morning chorus joining in, while the sunrise harp continues underneath with some quiet, rhythmic textures representing breeze moving through the trees. My idea for that would be perhaps to use a snare drum with a very light brush. So the sunrise and wind motifs would gradually fade and the morning chorus would take over the pace, climaxing with the skylark, which strikes me as one of the most dramatic singers. After that, I'm imagining a transition or maybe a new section into a spring meadow scene with sounds representing flowers, bees and butterflies moving in and out of the landscape. So section one is early morning and section two is life in the meadow itself, the morning in the meadow, if you like. Then a third section with an approaching afternoon storm, and a fourth for dusk and end of day. So now what about key signature? Well, my first thought was this is kind of a pastoral piece of music, and in my mind, pastoral music somehow belongs in F major. So I began wondering whether I should shift my key towards D minor, the relative minor of F major, so that that means they both share the same key signature of one flat. And that, it seems to me, would let me move between D minor and F major very easily to reflect different moods in the landscape. So the sunrise, for example, might begin in D minor and then shift into F major as the light reaches the meadow. I've settled on the working title as Day in a Spring Meadow, and I've decided to begin again from a blank sheet because I really want that sunrise harp opening, and the current opening of the suite D in D doesn't really feel right for that anymore. So in the last couple of days, I've begun sketching out a rough structure. At first I thought about something kind of like the four movement structure of the Peer Gint Suite, but I think this piece will probably work better as one continuous musical journey rather than four separate movements. That brought to mind one of my favourite pieces of classical music, which is Cacheturian's Adagio from Spartacus, which is also known to people of my age anyway, as the theme from the Onidin line. That adagio is about ten minutes long, and taking inspiration from that, I've sketched out a rough timeline for my day in the spring meadow. So I'm imagining a piece of music about ten minutes in duration. It would open with the Dawnheart melody and glissandos, and about one minute in the bird song would begin. The bird song would swell into a climax around two and a half minutes, and the music would then burst into part two, meadow life. Meadow life is about flowers, bees, butterflies, perhaps a bubbling brook, and maybe even a distant tractor somewhere beyond the meadow. Around five minutes in, the storm would begin to emerge slowly from the distance, gradually taking over the pace and atmosphere of the music and building towards a crashing crescendo around six and a half minutes. Then the storm would gradually fade with hints of the peaceful meadow returning, maybe reprising some of the earlier themes, but in altered ways, altered forms. And around eight minutes in, dusk would begin to approach. The music gradually would slow and soften towards sunset. Maybe the harp would return for the final moments, along with the distant echoes of bird song, maybe in a minor key now, leading towards a quiet ending. So that kind of hasn't is an outline of the music. The next thing I want to think about is the thematic structure. So do I create one strong theme that goes through the entire piece? Maybe the same melody or variations of the same melody could represent sunrise, the meadow scene, and then become overwhelmed in the storm and then resolve at dusk. Or maybe I should think about introducing a separate key theme for each of those sections. I don't know the answer to that yet. That's definitely unfinished at the moment. The last thing I've done this week is I created an initial score in Muse Score, and I've used so far the following instruments. The piccolo for bird song, a flute for main themes and probably birdsong, the oboe because I like the oboe. A clarinet, maybe an E flat clarinet for bird song, a bassoon for just supporting lower bass notes and orchestral support. A Glockenspiel which I think could be used for birdsong and maybe for meadow textures. A snare drum for rhythmic support, a triangle, I'm not sure why, but seems like a nice idea. A tambourine, which I think could fit well with wind and certainly with the storm, a harp, which of course is there for my sunrise theme, and then violins and cellos, because you gotta have strings. I decided that brass was probably too harsh for most of this piece, although I might find a reason to add something later, maybe a trumpet or a trombone, maybe for the storm sequence, but for now that's what I'm going with. I also thought about time signature. I settled on a 6-8 time signature, although that might vary through the piece. I thought that maybe 4-4 was a bit too much like a march. Most of the music I've written has been in 4-4, and I think I want to get away from that. I thought about 3-4, but I'm not sure that that really provides any um enough um room for invention, I suppose. I'm not quite sure. But I I do like 6-8. I can do different things with the rhythms with that, I think. I also um very much like 5-4. You can blame Tchaikovsky for that. Um if you don't know, it's um in one of the movements of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique. Um so I'd love to do some 5-4 writing, maybe in the storm section, or maybe I'll have to wait until I start writing some other piece of music. So I've written a few opening bars of this, opening with the harp, uh just a a beginning, really, certainly not set in stone. And here's what I've got so far. So I've got a long way to go, but for the first time, I feel like I can actually see the shape of the piece beginning to emerge. But in my head, thinking about this the last few days, I feel like I need to push on with this. And the challenge I think I have is how to transition from, for example, what you just listened to in as an initial statement, a theme if you like. I don't know if it's quite a theme, but that's the idea. There's certainly some kind of melody, and it's knowing with a even quite a small orchestral group, if that's what I I could describe it as, you know, how to transition from one to another, how to introduce a new theme, a new instrument, uh, do you do I repeat what I've done, what I've done musically? Do I echo it in another instrument? Do I add harmony? What do I do? And that's partly just a composer's choice. But also, of course, I want in the end it to be an interesting piece of music to listen to. And of course, I want it to go some way to delivering my concept of the spring meadow of the four phases from sunrise to dust. So that's where I am, and I'll be back next week with an update on my progress. Thanks for listening.