Okay. So, I’ve come a way down the path since my last post several months ago. If you remember, Symphony 5 is my first all steelpan symphony. I started work in January 2024.
The first big development is that I adjusted the structure of the symphony from four movements to five.
- i – Verse and Chorus
- ii – Panyard
- iii – Stage Side
- iv – Minor
- v – Jam
I couldn’t let myself get away without a movement deliberately titled ‘Minor,’ because in the Panorama idiom “the minor” – a variation in the minor key – has become an indispensable trope of the genre.
That having been said, now I tell you about the compositional developments.
In my last post I was happy to report that movement i was done and I had started movement ii. Coolo breezo, as we say here; movement ii is done, as well as movements iii and iv. All that’s left is the last movement, the Jam. More on that later.
Movement ii is a fast movement in a standard 4/4 meter. It proceeds as I envisioned in the previous post, with percussion breaks that recur, rondo style, to anchor the structure of the movement with new minor motifs introduced in each new section. Instead of simply repeating the raw percussion break, with each iteration I added one new melodic or textural element from the pans, so as the break recurs it is more fully fleshed out. Then, the last iteration of this break sounds like its own theme, which amounts to a little jam session.
I think this is an interesting structure. It echoes the ethos of what actually happens in the pan yard, the iterative development of the musical texture. This is the framing concept of this movement, development through iterative process.
Movement iii, Stage Side, is a little weird in its design. For this movement I focused on the compression of time – I don’t know why. It is structured in 4 sections, each in a different time signature, 5/4, then 4/4, 3/4, and then 2/2. The melodic theme, itself a permutation of the theme of movement i, is reorganized according to these different meters in each section. The fourth section, in 2/2, actually reprises the closing theme of the first movement of the symphony – a little cross reference for the sake of structural unity.
Across all of this metrical juggling, the percussion layer stays in 5/4 throughout. This is incongruous with the melodic/harmonic arc, and here is where the interest sits. What happens when conflicting time signatures pull out of sync? What happens when the established rhythmic layer meets a force that wants to move differently through metric units? Is this confusion?
Movement iv, Minor, is of course in a minor key, in a 3/4 waltz meter that never changes. It is reminiscent of Lionel Belasco’s waltzes for its reserved and introspective melodic and textural style. It’s only recently been completed so my thoughts about it are not quite developed. More on that in the future.
I will say that in the course of writing this movement I got stuck. For months, nothing came out. This was a combination of the stress of my day-job and the idea that I had composed myself into a corner – there was a development that (I now realize) I just didn’t like, and I wasn’t able to transform into something that I did like. It took me a while to accept this as a dead end, scrap those 16 measures, and take a different pathway. Once I did, we started cooking again.
So, it’s on to the Jam. It’s fair to say that I have no preconceived plan for this movement other than the controlling idea of the symphony, which is that the theme(s) should be a permutation of the main theme established in the first movement.
Maybe I will, Beethoven style, quote passages from the earlier movements to make the last movement a recap and a compendium of the entire symphony.
Or maybe I will, Ives style, treat the final movement as a realization of the several explorations of the earlier movements. Are the earlier movements simply the introductory throat-clearing before the main oratory? Do they test and develop ideas that come to fruition at the end?
I’ll know more when I actually get to the writing. The answer is waiting for me on the stave.
Well, there we have it. Nothing monumental. Just a workingman’s update on the work.
In future posts I’ll start to develop my thoughts on the creolization of genres, forms, and practices. This I think is a developing aesthetic in the music I’m writing.
Roger J Henry Music 