Tag, music composition

05 APR

Safely grazing sheep….

Richard Knight Blog classical music, Composer, music, music composition, music education 0 No Comment

Being the youngest sibling from a musical family, I had the great good fortune to hear music-making at home every day when young. I've often pondered on which pieces from those days continue to influence me today. Last year I consciously returned to one of them … the second movement from Handel's Suite in G major HWV441 … as the starting point for the 9th set of my Songs without Words project which is dedicated to my eldest sister, whom I remember playing the piece. (Click on the link HERE to see this set of piano pieces.) To the best of my knowledge, I am yet to lean on early memories of my mother's party piece at the piano - Leander Fisher's 'The Robin's Return' - but that's not to say it hasn't had its subconscious influence… One of my stronger childhood musical memories is of another sister and my brother playing Henry Geehl's piano duet arrangements of three movements from the Bach cantatas. Whilst 'Jesu, Joy of man's desiring' (as it is more usually known) may be the best known of these, my memories are haunted by the second: 'Sheep may safely graze' (Schafe können sicher weiden'). Looking back, I think this is where my appetite for rich harmonic progression was born. Constructed in a ternary sandwich form, the opening section conveys a calm pastoral scene in Bb major, underlined by the tonic pedal at the start of the introduction. The first phrase of the chorale melody gently takes us to the sunshine of the dominant, and the next phrase briefly visits the woolly warmth of the subdominant; but for these passing inflections, however, the opening section is a reliably diatonic staple diet - almost like grass. It is the middle section where my nostalgic memories of harmonic adventure courtesy of my siblings lie. It is often true that we only know something by experience of its opposite. Safe-grazing is all very well for us sheep, but Bach 'shows' us a less placid, untroubled world in this passage. Almost immediately we are rounded up and taken into the darker world of the relative minor; but that does not suffice for Bach - two bars later he takes into the more sorrowful C minor. But this tonal route map is only a dry headline. The wonder is the harmonic mastery with which this journey is steered with all the cunning of the wisest of sheepdogs. As early as the second beat of the section (b.21³) the we feel the gravitational pull of G minor with a chord of VIIb - the inevitable tonal destination is only confirmed a bar later. Thus apprenticed in the minor side, the subsequent route to C minor is wonderfully prolonged: its shadow is felt as early as b.22⁴ but its confirmatory cadence is only reached at b.26³. How is this achieved? Through assured use of subtle chord inversions: V⁷d, Ib, VIIb, Ib, V⁷b, Ic, IIb, V⁷d and Ib, each delaying the unequivocal perfect cadence. Complementing this harmonic mastery is a melodic contour that is magnificently expressive - mostly high in register, incorporating an expectant rising sequence (b.23-24) and having the widest leap of the piece so far: a swooning diminished 7^th that - with Ab and B - can only belong to C minor. It is easy to think that momentum in music - a highly desirable quality in many instances - depends on rhythm: one only has to think of the driving rhythms on snare drum and xylophone (among other instruments) in the development section of the opening movement to Shostakovich's 5th Symphony with its insistent anapaest pattern (though, of course, Bach got there first in the opening movement of the 3rd Brandenburg Concerto!). However, harmony too can create momentum: Bach signposts the next harmonic or tonal destination and we are captured by the music's desire to move in that direction. To my mind, the best is yet to come. From C minor, after a ritornello passage, the middle section continues and carries the music to another minor key - D minor (relative of the dominant) and onwards back to G minor before, via descending sequence (to balance the earlier rising sequence) to close the middle section in F major, ready - through a dominant-tonic resolution - for the da capo return to Bb major. And here again, progression of harmony drives the music on, and the masterstroke is the sleight of hand in b.31 where we sense a brightening of the tonal weather as the E natural leads us into F major at b.32¹, but the return to major tonality (and safe grazing) is fleeting: by b.32² we sense an immediate coldness of D minor. The sheep are once more bleating. With a deft touch, Bach points the moment with an octave leap in the melody, quite literally a moment of heightened tension: The cantata from which this movement is taken, 'Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd, BWV208, was written by Bach for the 31st birthday of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels on 23 Feburary 1713. Recording this extraordinary movement today in 2020's strange world of Coronavirus lockdown, linked by modern-day technology to a violinist 150 miles away in Liverpool, how fantastic it is that Johann Sebastian's sublime harmonic creativity of 307 years ago can speak to us of safe grazing set against a dark backdrop. And how grateful am I for those early musical experiences of hearing my siblings play such great music! Thank you.

20 JUN

Parallel Lives

Richard Knight Blog classical music, composing, composition, Male voice choir, music composition, music education 3 No Comment

Among those teachers to whom I owe gratitude is the late Ken Naylor. His teaching career was largely at the Leys, Cambridge, where he taught for 27 years, but the autumn of his career was spent at Christ's Hospital where he was manager of the Arts Centre. This was a terrific boon to the Music Department: Ken was a superb additional organist to the community, but he was also a wonderful arranger. I understand that he provided the fledgling King's Singers with some of their early arrangements; it was the elaborate, many-voiced arrangement of 'Lullaby of Broadway' which became a favourite with our close harmony Male Voice Choir (a curiously named ensemble in - as it was then - an all boys school!). I was very fortunate to have Ken teaching me the History of Music when I was in Year 12 (or the 'Deputy Grecians' as we were known in C.H. lingo). It was only when life had moved on and I was into my career that I first came across Ken's wonderful tune 'Coe Fen' which he wrote to John Mason's hymn 'How shall I sing that majesty?'. Choosing Eb major and triple time is always a good start for a hymn tune, but Ken was on top form the day he wrote this tune: the way the highest note of each phrase creeps ever higher until the top Eb at the start of line 7 (after an exquisitely prolonged last note of line 6) is masterly, and there aren't many hymn tunes that start their second half on a half diminished 7th! The finest hymn singing I have ever heard was by Downside School at the memorial service for their Christ Hospital educated Director of Music, Chris Tambling: Coe Fen in truly monumental guise, and a wonderful tribute to a special man. Now that composing has become my own career, I was asked to work on a hymn for communal singing during a local church event. With this occasion and Coe Fen in mind, it seemed to me that the one thing that Ken Naylor's great hymn tune lacked was a thrilling descant. So I set to work. http://www.coefen.org/ It was only on completing my attempt and sharing it with other Coe Fen admirers that I discovered that Ken had written a descant to his tune. Had I known this, I would not have trodden upon such hallowed ground: it seems like disrespect, even at this distance down the years. I requested that the master's own descant be scanned and sent to me. At least there was some affirmation: like my descant, Ken had started his in bar 2, imitating the congregational tune one bar later at a higher pitch; but then, shock! I realised that Ken had committed one of those grave sins of good part-writing: on beats 2 and 3 he had his descant moving in parallel octaves with the bass line! Perplexed, and - if I'm being honest - a little smug, I shared this discovery with a musical colleague. A day later he returned to the topic and gently pointed out that in my descant beats 2 and 3 moved in parallel 5ths with the congregational tune. Time for a quick revision and a portion of humble pie… Download score here - How shall I sing that majesty

18 FEB

How to Compose – Part 1 – The Blank Canvas

Richard Knight Blog classical music, composition, music composition, Stage Music 5 No Comment

The Blank Canvas

An analogy

If you were about to get creative in a visual way by painting a picture, you would at this point be looking at a blank canvas: a two-dimensional empty space. It is highly likely that you would spend some time contemplating the empty space: its dimensions, its orientation, and its emptiness. Onto this canvas you would begin to imagine the picture you are going to paint: whether it is to be figurative or abstract, whether it is going to have strong or blurred outlines, which colours you are going to need. You would also start thinking about the process you were going to need to follow: which parts of the project would be best to put in place first, which colour paints you are going to need to have ready, which brushes and other apparatus will be required. We have a turn of phrase for this, we say things like ‘I can see in my mind’s eye…’ In your mind’s eye you advance your picture far beyond a simple sketch of outline; you have a clear perception of what you are aiming for with your new painting. This image, which is known only to you until the painting is completed, can be inspired by a wide range of different things:

A desire to capture in art something you can see: a view, object or person
A fascination with some specific shape: stripes, geometric designs or flowing patterns
An interest in a particular colour or contrast of colours
An experiment with some aspect of painting technique or technical aspect of the artist’s materials
A wish to make an artistic statement with an image, maybe something political or the expression of a particular mood you are feeling
An intention to deliberately mimic a particular work or the style of another artist in order to improve your own artistic understanding and facility
A commission from a patron that you have accepted in order to earn money

As you start to bring your painting into being, the image in your mind’s eye will guide your progress; simultaneously, your progress – which you actually see with your real eyes – will cause the image in your mind’s eye to become modified somewhat as the project develops. This evolving of both the imagined painting and the real painting will continue, with your mind’s eye leading the way, until you conclude that the painting is finished. So how does composing music relate to this? In many ways the process is similar. The music we create fills a space, only you can’t see the space; this is because the space that music fills is silence. It is relatively simple to appreciate the space of the artist’s ‘blank canvas’: you can gain a very accurate impression of it in a very brief glance. Whatever other things around about catch our eye – other paintings, pots of paint, the paraphernalia of the artist’s studio – the empty space of the blank canvas will stand out. This is not the case with the composer’s pre-composing blank space. In order to get an accurate estimation of, say, a 3-minute silence, you have to hear silence for 3 minutes. You will not feel how long a 3-minute silence is in a 10-second quick listen (the aural equivalent of a glance), neither will 3 minutes of silence be apparent to you in a room where lots of noises are to be heard. So the best starting point for the composer is to have silence and to listen to it – just like the artist will look at the empty space of the canvas. And in that silence to imagine the way music might be created and shaped to fill that empty space. The silence is your blank canvas. In short, you need to imagine with your mind’s ears… And because you need to be imagining how you are going to fill your blank canvas – the silence – you need to do your imagining in silence. This could be in a silent room at home; it can sometimes work to take yourself outside into a quiet space (the countryside, for instance: this worked for Beethoven). In my next blog you will see just how important this period of silence can be ...

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Tag, music composition

Safely grazing sheep….

Parallel Lives

How to Compose – Part 1 – The Blank Canvas

The Blank Canvas