Symphony 5 Update

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.

Movement One Complete – two Underway

First, I know I’m kinda plugging you in during a process that’s already started and it might be a little confusing.

Sorry. I have to take this as it comes.

Anyway, tldr – movement 1 of Symphony 5 is done. I’ve started movement 2.

I’ve shifted my approach to the structure of the symphony from my habitual structure of fanfare, dirge, promenade, and jam. For this symphony I’ve chosen the following structure:

  • Movement 1 – Verse and Chorus
  • Movement 2 – Panyard
  • Movement 3 – Stage Side
  • Movement 4 – Jam

Each movement will hope to represent its title in some way, however esoteric it might be.

So, movement 2.

This starts with a percussion break that leads to the entry of the theme, a permutation of the theme of movement 1. Taking a call & response approach between pitched and unpitched, till we come to a cadence and some fragmentation and repetition of the tail end of the theme as a little band phrase to end the section.

That’s where I’ve gotten to. I think from there I’ll write out a little percussion jam section and then bring back the theme, a little better fleshed out. I haven’t made my mind up about that yet. But I’m thinking these percussion jams will be a recurring theme in this movement, getting shorter and shorter as new permutations of this new theme keep interrupting.

Those are my raw thoughts as I proceed a little further down the path of this new composition.

The New World – Symphonies

The premiere of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95 From the New World is one of the landmark moments in classical music history. 

The piece debuted on December 16, 1893 at Carnegie Hall with Anton Seidl conducting the New York Philharmonic Society. Critics at the time lauded the work’s blend of symphonic tradition and American influences. Some, like Leonard Bernstein, felt it was more a European symphony linked only tangentially to American ideas. 

Dvořák set off to compose a work that he felt represented the sound world of the place he had found himself living in, America, with its mix of cultures both native and imported. He worked specifically to incorporate African and Native Indian music culture with his own Czech sensibilities informed by European symphonic influences.

Some critics at the time dismissed these ‘new’ influences as “primitive” and incapable rising to the level of serious art, or of rivaling the great European traditions. A chauvinist, if not outright racist mindset.

Yet, history has proven the piece to have been extremely important in the exploration and championing of an American aesthetic in symphonic music, with composers like William Grant Still, George Gershwin, and Aaron Copland drawing influence from Dvořák’s work.

The conversation opened by this work is a pertinent one in Trinidad and Tobago in the latter days of 2024. The broad question: can the elements of Trinidadian and Tobagonian folk, calypso, and other musical forms and styles rise to the level of high art to rival the ancient and now established music traditions of Europe and America? Do the processes for development of thematic material in Panorama music fit into the symphony as a genre?

For me, the only possible answer has to be, yes! Of course, yes!

Panorama music, the genre formed as a derivative work for steel pan orchestra based on a preexisting calypso song, is – despite its seeming folk roots, its ‘knife fight’ history – a bona fide genre of formal composition. It’s classical music.

In this genre we see the work of some 6-odd decades establishing a music that is predictable and consistent, with generic expectations and outcomes regarding structure, and regarding the processes and devices of composition. We have a defined and consistent set of performance-practice, rhetoric, and audience expectations. The fact that the music begins and ends in the realm of the folk, the people, makes this music unique, as genres of formal composition go. 

For people who like me who are interested of exploring new avenues for the development of ‘local’ music, the music of Panorama is our obvious ‘big brother’ genre, the music we imitate in order to innovate. 

One surprising aspect of this exploration, I’ve observed (a weird push-back) is the fulmination of that same mindset faced by Dvořák and others, that this music does not rise to the level of high art and has no place in the ‘concert hall.’ 

“That’s for the pan yard, not for Carnegie Hall.”

This is an important conversation, even here in Trinidad and Tobago, even now at the close of 2024. Specially important, because this conversation cuts to the heart, not just of who we are in this place, but of who we think we are, of who we know ourselves to be. Not of what ‘they’ think of us, but of what we can see and catalogue and study about ourselves, in the music we practice. 

An important conversation raised 131 years ago and still pertinent today. As good a reason as ever to listen to Dvořák’s Symphony #9, From the New World, and to consider what the future might bring.

Claiming A Trinidadian Sound-World

Making music is about making deliberate choices about how to organize sound. Most often, you take these things, pitches, and you organize a bunch of them until you have a thing that you can hum along to or vocalize. A melody.

If you want to get fancy, you can use rhythm. Rhythm is the relationships between the relative durations and intensities of sounds. Another way, you could take a bunch of short sounds and a bunch of long sounds, and juxtapose them, and voilà, you’ve got rhythm, baby! Similarly, you take a bunch of louder sounds and a bunch of quieter sounds, and juxtapose them, and hey presto! Rhythm. When you add rhythm to your music, you’re really turning up the heat.

A thing we don’t recognize as being a part of music is the kinds of sounds we think of as being musical. Stay with me, because if you thought adding rhythm was fancy, then this is cosmic!

Consider the sound of a flute, or of a violin, or of a piano. When you hear any of these instruments being played, you automatically think, ah, music. But, the sound of a tree falling in the forest (when you’re there to hear it) doesn’t immediately make you think, ah, music, but instead, ah, shit, lemme dash to safety! I don’t wanna get squished by some random tree here in this forest where no one’s around to hear me scream.

In short, there are sounds we think of as music sounds, and other sounds we think of as, well, just sound. Noise.

Stay with me.

We think of musical sounds as sounds of music, only because we’re accustomed to these particular sounds being used in music. We’re acculturated into it. Trumpet call? Music. Car horn? Danger. Child singing on a plane? Music. Child wailing on a plane? Noise! Pass the ear plugs, please type of noise. (Or, maybe that’s relative – you might think child wailing on a plane is music to your ears. Meh. Relative.)

Anyway, here is the concept of a musical sound-world; it’s just the constellation of sounds and patterns that people will accept as musical. They accept these sounds through acculturation, in a certain place in a certain time.

At a certain time in the history of Trinidad and Tobago, there existed side by side two cultures with clashing sound-worlds. For one of these cultures, the sounds and patterns of drumming were elemental, normal; for the other culture, drumming was just noise. Dangerous noise, at that. Pass the colonialist repression type of noise.

Long story short (others have written about this history, at length), suddenly there was the steelpan (which some people call a steel drum, but please don’t, even though it’s literally a drum made out of steel), moderately repression-proof. And, for the past sixty years or more, the unique voice of this one-of-a-kind instrument has become part of the music soundscape of Trinidad and Tobago, a part of our sound-world. It’s more than just the creation of a new musical instrument; it’s also the fact that this particular voice is accepted as musical, and essentially Trini.

For me, making music that sounds like this place – Trinidad and Tobago – means incorporating the voice of the steelpan into the music I create.

In my blog post, Starting Symphony 5, I talked a little about the voice of the steelpan; at another time I’ll talk a little more about this idea, but the post will give you a primer.

For me, it’s important that I do this deliberately, consciously, obviously, only because I think I’m reacting to the perception I hold that we in Trinidad and Tobago tend to miss the forest for the trees, a little. We’re hyper-focused, some of us, on the steelpan (the tree in this little analogy), and we miss the fact that our acceptance of pan-sounds in our constellation of music sounds makes our sound-world broader than that of someone who doesn’t know pan sounds or thinks of these sounds as noise (the forest).

Think of the difference between someone trying to create a piece of art, who thinks that they can use only paint on canvas for their creation, and someone creating art using paint, yes, but also other media like charcoal; on canvas, yes, sometimes, but also on wood, or on plaster, or on stone. In the second case, the artist’s palette of what’s possible is that much broader, so the art is different.

Having a wider more inclusive sound-world gives us options and agency in music-making that other cultures with different sound-worlds don’t have, yet.

So, even though I write symphonies, I’ve adapted the typical symphonic orchestra plan to include a grouping of five voice-parts of the steelpan family. So, in my score, there are five families – winds, brass, percussion, steelpan, and strings – each family, like a choir, having its own grouping of voice-parts.

In creating music for this unusual symphonic profile, I open myself to the exploration of new doubling relationships, of new patterns of rhythm, of different musical effects. There’s a tradition of centuries of symphonic composition, and also a newer world of steelpan composition, open to me.

Not exactly the final frontier, but exactly the kind of space I’m ready to explore.

A jumping off point

The Genesis of New Music (Part 1, I Guess)

This is the second entry in my ongoing series on creating my next symphony, whose working title is “Symphony 5.”

So, last time, I waxed poetic on my hopes and dreams for the work. Today, I’m bringing you up to date on my progress so far. This will be a short post.

I’m in the process of planning out some structural things about the work. I know I want four movements; in the preceding works I’ve titled the movements, I: Fanfare, II: Dirge/Elegy, III: Promenade, IV: Jam. In so doing I established a programme framing the theme and character of each movement, and told a story around the rhythms of life in Trinidad and Tobago; wherever you look, see these elements of “hey there”, of pathos, of exhibition, of “lewwe party-down”. I felt – and still feel – that this is a meaningful frame within which to present a work that reflects the lived experience of normal people everywhere. So, I’m keeping to that framework.

The next step in my process, typically, is to decide on an overarching harmonic scaffolding. In this I’ve imitated Bach and others who use a ‘tonal arc’ in their multi-movement works. A tonal arc is just a way of establishing Key relationships among the movements: the first and last movements are often in the same Key – home; the internal movements are in Keys that have a functional relationship to the home Key. Using a tonal arc is one way to unify a multi-movement work – these movements exist on a single storyline defined by Key relationships.

Sticklers might quibble about my capitalization of the word Key. Well, in music, there are keys and there are Keys. On a piano, the white and black thingies that you press to sound a pitch are called keys (hence, keyboard). In music composition, the orientation of melodic and harmonic material around the pitches of a specified major or minor scale is Key. It’s not often easy to know which you’re talking about, so I’m using the capitalization as a visual cue. (It’s not about grammar, Nazis!)

For Symphony 5, I’ve decided to use C Major as the home Key. C Major is actually an easy first Key when you’re starting to learn about Keys in music. It’s easy because you don’t have to remember much. On a piano keyboard, if you play the piano key C and then play the next 7 white piano keys in sequence you end up on another C (one octave higher). That’s the C Major scale. Also, if you sing the do re mi fa so la ti do (Solfège) melody while you do this, all the piano notes line up with your aural expectation. When you create music using the pitches of the scale of C Major, you are composing in the Key of C Major.

Starting on any note other than C and playing only white keys, it’s impossible to sing the Solfège melody correctly because the pitches don’t line up with your aural expectation of the major scale; you’re forced to use a combination of white keys and black keys to maintain the ‘correct’ Solfège melody.

There’s more to say about scales and keys and Keys and Key Signatures. It suffices to say that C Major is the home Key for this symphony.

So, the first and last movements will be in C Major. Here, in my first major work for steelpan, I think this is a very good place to start.

The plan is to establish the entire tonal arc – the Key of each movement, as well as the harmonic plan within each movement – now, before I do anything else. This will be a first, in a sense; while I typically do start with an overall tonal plan for the movements, I normally allow the harmonic relationships within each movement to evolve during the writing of the music – organically. For this, though, imma lay everything out, even before I write any melodies.

Welp, I guess I lied when I said this was going to be a short post. Instead, I talked about the thematic frame for my symphonies, then about my intention to use a tonal arc, and somewhere in all this I went down a rabbit hole about keys and Keys and the C Major scale. The teacher in me can’t help but explain things, I guess.

More later. In the meantime, here’s a picture of me with my glasses all crooked. It’s a beautiful day, by the way.

Starting Symphony 5

Writing a symphony begins with the decision to write it. Aside from the questions – can I, should I – the decision itself – I will – is the beginning.

I’m gonna compose this work; it will be my fifth symphony.

I’ve decided that it will be a symphonic work for only steelpans, and this is the scary part – excited-scary, not the other sort. To date, I’ve written only two purely steelpan pieces: a solo piece, Pan Solo Number 1, for tenor solo; and Daina’s Smile, a short ensemble piece.

One of the things I want for this work is for it to feel genuine. It must be genuinely a steelpan piece, genuinely Trinidadian, genuinely me. For those three ideas to fit together in one piece will be tricky. But not impossible.

The question of a “genuinely steelpan piece” is tantalizing; the instrument is so new – just a few decades of history – and we’re still exploring what it means to write for this instrument’s voice. Because of the way in which the notes are arranged on the face of the instruments, the typical vocal-style melodic line favoring stepwise intervals between notes is not a requirement. Steelpan melodies, and therefore voice leading, have broader options available than is typically the case. We can break some of those rules.

So, for me, “genuinely steelpan” means a style of melodic creation that takes advantage of this unique aspect of the instrument, that notes a fourth apart or a fifth apart or an octave apart can be really close together on the pan’s face, so there is no extra effort to accommodate a melody that leaps around.

Another thing about the unique voice of the pan is that, since these are in fact drum instruments, the sound of each note has a percussive articulation – very quick initiation followed by a sharp drop-off – and then a fairly long ring. Essentially a bell. It’s not like a violin where the player can adjust the articulation with the direction, speed, or weight of the bow, or like a trumpet where the player can adjust the articulation by manipulation of the lips and tongue and the strength of the breath.

So, “genuinely steelpan” means accepting the drum nature of the instrument and adapting to its idiomatic percussive articulation.

So many more ideas. But let these meager few suffice for now.

What’s a “genuinely Trinidadian” music, anyway? Here in Trinidad you’ll hear Kaiso! Soca! Calypso! Yes, true.

And there’s more. There’s a melody to the way Trinidadians talk, and this aspect of daily sound is a filter through which we not only create but also interpret melodic sounds. Rhythm, and the capacity to accept, recognize, respond to and engage with a highly sophisticated language involving the relative durations and intensities of sounds, is the cornerstone of Trinidadian music.

These concepts exist as aspects of the sound world of Trinidad and Tobago. So, any new music that hopes to be “genuinely Trinidadian” has to invoke – indeed, inhabit, that sound world.

As for me? “Genuinely me”? That’s the easy part. If I write it and I giggle, that’s good. If I sigh, I cry, that’s okay too. Cringe? Absolutely! If it somehow speaks to me and also speaks for me and speaks of me through whatever means, then that’s me.

Because, music encodes and embodies lived experience.

So much more to say. But there’s world enough and time, right?

So, onward.

I’ll keep you posted.