I’ve been focused on energy in music for a long time. It all began with composing, and that’s my focus in this post, on pieces I’ve constructed with great attention to energy profile. I’ll potentially do more of these over time.
My position about music is that it is basically the action of sound energy over time, a pretty obvious truth if one considers how music comes to us through the air. And thus composing is the manipulation of that sound energy by a person. However fully one wishes to exert control over the outcome as a composer, it is a function of one’s process and one’s beliefs or desires about what music can do. We talk of communication, and given an understood set of conventions, there is a sort of communication. But I’d say the main thing that gets communicated is the energy. Once the variations of sound energy reach our minds, our minds interpret that energy according to our lived experience, our memory, which again calls on our beliefs and is quite personal. Without images, words, or visible action, there can be little agreement on what those energies attempt to relate, but we can certainly investigate and consider what caused them. Some composers try very hard to stimulate certain reactions, while others put their music together the best they can and let reactions follow as they will.
Here’s my story of composing My Love Lives Down That Long Dirt Road*, a piece for harpsichord that I wrote for my spouse, Vivian Montgomery, during our first year of marriage. We were living in Pittsburgh, having moved there from Ann Arbor. We had a new, unpainted harpsichord that Vivian was painting gradually. For several weeks, if not a couple of months, I followed my usual procedure of playing around with sounds, finding ideas and writing them down with no particular thought of whether or how they would fit into the piece I was writing. This is my typical process, one that allows me to sense the energy of an idea and then how it might connect to other ideas as I sort back through ideas at a later time. My fascination returned again and again to ideas that used both manuals (keyboards) of the harpsichord, as those allowed a kind of rhythmic and sonic interplay that I found to be amazing.
As I reviewed the ideas, I found that I could construct an interesting formal arrangement out of the energies. I’ve aimed for years to allow each idea to be fully itself yet work with others, and that led to a decision to write a set of short movements rather than one long piece. Composing for a person accustomed to short movements played a role in that decision, I’m sure. (Vivian plays primarily baroque music, which mostly has short movements.)
As for the energies and the shape of the whole, I was happy to find that I could arrange the movements to chart a path through what I felt to be the energies of the evolving relationship between Vivian and me. At the same time, this would place a two-manual movement in every other position, creating a nice symmetry.
[As I go through the energies of the piece, you may follow the links provided, to YouTube videos, or you might hold off and listen to the whole series in Spotify (which preserves CD order if you pay for the premium service.)]
The first movement ended up fast, full of rapid articulations and mostly in a high register, matching the excitement I felt in first meeting Vivian. That one I called A Funky Pair. The second movement used a little tune I’d written in our early months of involvement, and the whole thing was thus infected with the energy of courtship in my mind. It gets the title of the whole composition, My Love Lives Down That Long Dirt Road, which is written into the score as a lyric to be known but not sung, carried by a simple melody that introduced the pre-existing one. The third movement, another two-manual one, carried a rather proud-sounding rhythm and texture. It created for me the image of a couple walking down the aisle in a marriage ceremony. The title is simply Funky Pair II. Following that, a minor, turgid, low and slow movement found its place, bearing the energy of sadness, disappointment, and conflict as it went lower and lower to its end — all of which led me to give the movement the title Darker Days. In the movement that followed, positive energy gradually returned in another two-manual movement, Still the Funky Pair, whose performance indication “injured, broken” points to the rather limping rhythm, striking dissonance and non-unified timbre. The cyclical return of positive energy there suggested a fitting spot for the following movement, one I composed to honor the things that I heard Vivian practicing, things I could tell she loved to play. The title, then, Spring, suggested that cyclical return. Thinking of bluegrass as the most positive music I knew, I composed the final movement, another of the funky pair sort, as the most forward-driving, positive energy I could muster, and called it Together. In my world, the energies of the final movement obviously point with hope to the future.
I’m relating my concept of the energies in the music, but as I’ve alluded to already, without the nudges of image, word, or movement, your receipt of the energies could easily suggest something else as a storyline. And so it is with energy! My titles are nudges, and the program note I usually provide has more significant nudges. I’d be very interested in how these energies come across to you, or to anyone who hasn’t gotten the nudges!
Of course I’m not telling about all the little decisions made in the course of composing, and any description of energy for a whole movement will be an averaging, with a mix of energies actually producing the generalized one. Separate movements allows one to keep energies rather similar, while longer movements or single-movement pieces will often work to balance energies of differing sorts. In fact, if you pay close attention to the whole, you’ll hear traces of my method, whereby musical elements — melodic patterns, rhythms, timbres, registers — form correspondences between movements that help unify the piece and allow references to previous energies in so doing.
* Links for individual movements are to YouTube videos. You might wait and listen to the whole series in order using Spotify, which has the entire CD of material and includes pieces not discussed here.