At the beginning of SpireSpire, Christian told me that this project would take me new and unexpected places, and that I should let it go where it takes me rather than try to force it to go the way I expect. This past week really reminded me how true that is, especially for something as capricious as musical composition. What's surprised me about this project so far, however, isn't the difficulty of the endeavor, but rather how much easier it's become to think of ideas! I've come up with probably a half-dozen different themes over the past week or so-- I know it doesn't sound like much, but considering that I've had months go by without even one new idea, it's extremely exciting. Many of them have been for a project unrelated to my SpireSpire goal (a set of art songs based on Emily Dickinson poems I'm planning on including in my composition portfolio when I apply to colleges),  but I definitely have a few that would be beautiful in one of the chamber pieces or even-- gasp!-- the symphony. For me, these early stages of composition are a lot more passive than you'd expect. In a lot of ways, it's almost like fishing: either the ideas are "biting" or they aren't, and there's very little I can do to influence that except for making sure I'm ready to write them down when they decide to show up. This can be tricky at times when I'm not around a piano (I don't have perfect pitch); as a result, most of my notebooks for school have at least one page covered in hastily scribbled rhythms and intervals where I've tried to write down an idea in case it disappears before I can get to an instrument to figure it out. Once I can actually sit down with staff paper and a piano it's a much more active process, of course... but those first preliminary ideas are so important, and I'm insanely excited about how many I've got ready to use now.

In other news, I"ve gotten lots of work done on transcribing the Mozart quartet! I finished the Adagio earlier this week, and I've gotten a good start on the Fugue; overall, I'd say I'm probably halfway through the quartet. It's taught me a lot about composition, but it's pretty labor-intensive. I'm starting to think that I should focus on transcribing one movement of a symphony rather than a whole four-movement piece, though... as helpful as this process is, it's taken me several weeks to get through a 10-minute piece; I shudder to think how much time I'll spend on something with three times the instruments that's over an hour long, not to mention doing a third piece besides. I'd like to put the focus back on composition rather than just transcription (although with all the practice I've gotten, I'm pretty sure I could be a darn good music copyist if all else fails... do they still have those?). I got a great orchestration textbook from the library I'm reading through, so that should help my orchestration skills too. 

We're almost a month into SpireSpire, and I haven't posted any compositions here yet. I don't have much that's available to post-- up until this year or so I've barely finished anything decent-- but here's a piece I wrote last year, performed by one of the choirs at my school (these are mostly sophomores and juniors-- aren't they amazing?). Enjoy!


[Click through to Patricia's Stream to see the video!]

I cannot remember a time in my life that didn't have a soundtrack, some sort of music that shaped and informed it. My parents both grew up singing in choir, and as a result some of my earliest memories are of my mom and dad singing songs from musicals: Edelweiss, Lida Rose, My Favorite Things. (I distinctly remember realizing, years later, that every song my parents ever sang to me was directly lifted from either The Sound of Music or The Music Man, which explained both why I knew all the words to these musicals I hadn't seen before and why nobody else in my kindergarten class had known what "Edelweiss" meant.) Noting my complete lack of ability and interest in sports, my mother promptly signed me up for all the arts clubs a little girl could find: drawing classes, piano lessons, theater camps, ballet. I did them all with gusto. I didn't know what I liked doing best, but I knew I loved being on stage. 


Soon I discovered the radio, first listening to the usual Radio Disney fare all my friends knew and eventually settling on, of all things, classic rock. Thus I spent an embarrassingly large chunk of my formative years as that kid on the playground trying to explain to the other kids why the Beatles were so much better than Jesse McCartney (something no one should ever have to explain... really). As I grew older, I listened to whatever I could get my hands on: jazz, punk, movie soundtracks, folk music. I picked up the bass in fifth grade; I didn't know why, but it felt right. It was heavy and slow and played about five notes per piece, and I didn't care one bit. Around the same time, I found a book of blank staff paper and started writing down anything and everything that came to mind. I started a lot of projects I never finished and a few that I did (fortunately, these are lost to the ages... they were embarrassingly bad). It never even occurred to me that composing was something real people did for a living. I knew I wanted art in my future, but I still didn't know exactly how.

I was in eighth grade when I first got hooked on classical music. My orchestra teacher had our class play a middle school string arrangement of the Rite of Spring (ambitious, I know). I was in awe-- I had never heard anything like it before! My friends from orchestra class and I sought out recordings of the real thing and lots of other pieces, playing and listening as much as we could. Our orchestra teacher told us about a summer camp called Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, and so that summer several of us headed off to Michigan with our instruments in tow, unsure of what to expect but excited nonetheless. 

Through some stroke of incredible luck, I managed to audition into the top orchestra. We sat in our assigned seats (third chair! Out of SIX basses! I was walking on air), and the conductor promptly announced that we would be playing a full symphony in ten days. We sat down to play, and although we were only sightreading, for the first time in my life I heard this piece.

It was the most difficult thing I had ever played. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I knew, right in that moment, that I wanted to play classical music for the rest of my life. 

Since then, this music has become everything to me. In this world that is so often dark and chaotic and difficult to understand, it's the only thing that has always made sense. In the times where nearly everything seems to change before we can understand how or why, this music is steadfast, eternal, unchanging, forever allowing us to discover some new truth or comfort from it. That's what makes these great composers great: they could see the world as it is and paint it how it should or would or might be, touching the lives of anyone who listens in a different way. I'd be willing to bet that Stuart or Christian or anyone else you could find who aspires to make a living off music could tell you a story quite similar to mine. Maybe it was a different composer, maybe it was a band, maybe it was a concert or a performance, but for just about every musician there's a moment when they realize that there is nothing else they want to do but bring more music into the world. And if my music can touch just one life in the way Tchaikovsky touched mine, if it can lead one person to view the world just a little bit differently, I'll consider myself a success. 

Not much progress on the Mozart front this week, but I came across a few new themes I'm very, very excited about.

It's the second full week of SpireSpire, and I've already learned a lot about myself through this journey... Here's a small sampling of what I've gotten out of this week. 

It's the second full week of SpireSpire, and I've already learned a lot about myself through this journey... Here's a small sampling of what I've gotten out of this week. 

Lesson number one: I can't draw single sixteenth notes. The picture on the right is just a small sampling of the pathetic attempts I've made while transcribing a string quartet this week. (The quartet in question is going well, albeit slowly. I've got about half of the Adagio done... it's nice to have a sub-goal where I can clearly see what kind of progress I've made.) Seriously, though... pathetic, right?

Lesson number two: I've got so much more support for my composing than I ever thought possible. My piece "There Will Come Soft Rains" premiered on Thursday at my school's choir concert, and ever since then I've had people coming up to me and telling me how beautiful they thought my piece was and that I should absolutely keep writing... it's been really amazing to have the whole music department behind me in this endeavor. I've also had a surprising number of people tell me that they're following me here on SpireSpire and wishing me luck. I suppose the idea of having a community you hold yourself accountable to in achieving your dreams is what the SpireSpire project is about, but deep down I guess I never thought there would be other people who actually believed I could write a symphony. It's really, really empowering.

Lesson number three: I get really, really on edge when I don't have a big composition project in progress. Hopefully I'll be able to start writing my own quartet next week... for now, here's the 

By March 1st, 2013, I will have written my first symphony.

Those could quite easily be the scariest words I've ever typed. 

Honestly, I was hesitant to take the SpireSpire Challenge at first. Between my classes at school, my various music ensembles, and the college auditions looming over my head, the coming year is certainly busy enough already. No matter how much I tried to reason with myself to turn down Shay's offer, though, I couldn't. After this year is over I'll be months away from college; if not now, I thought, when?

Like most of the other goals on the site, this one is huge. I've tried to break it up into steps, as follows: 
STUDYING ORCHESTRATION:
1) Transcribe a string quartet by hand. I once heard a composition professor say that the best way to learn how to write for strings is to sit down and write out the parts to a Mozart or a Beethoven quartet-- this seems like a good place to start.
2) Transcribe a concert band piece by hand. I'm assuming the same holds true for winds; I don't know nearly as much as I'd like to about winds and percussion, and I feel like this would help me a lot.
3) Transcribe a symphony by hand. This is going to help a lot with basic symphonic structure, orchestration, etc... there's such a long symphonic tradition before me, I don't feel quite right jumping right into a symphony without knowing as much as I can about how they're put together first.
4) Orchestrate a piano piece for full orchestra. Here's where all those three subgoals come together. I feel like it's really important that I'm not trying to learn orchestration while I'm also trying to think of themes... one step at a time.
STUDYING INSTRUMENTATION:
1) Write a short chamber ensemble for strings.
2) Write a short chamber ensemble for woodwinds.
3) Write a short chamber ensemble for brass.
4) Write a short chamber ensemble for percussion. 
These next four steps are test number two of my orchestration skills, with a specific focus on being able to write things for each specific standard instrument that won't make musicians hate me.
THE SYMPHONY:
1) Finish movement 1.
2) Finish movement 2.
3) Finish movement 3.
4) Finish movement 4.
I'll be collecting the melodies and piecing them together all year, of course... I've been writing down any instrument combinations, melodies, accompaniment patterns, chord progressions, rhythms, etc. that have come into my head for the last several weeks in the hopes of eventually piecing them together into this symphony. Still, it feels like a long journey there already. 
I've already printed off a Mozart string quartet from IMSLP (an online sheet music database of works in the public domain) that I'm transcribing... but it's slow going. Hopefully I'll have more to show for my efforts by this time next week. Whenever my goal seems impossible, I take comfort in reading about the composers who came before me. Mozart wrote his first symphony when he was eight. Tchaikovsky finished "Sleeping Beauty" in two weeks.