Composing Phrase by Phrase 24

Double Bars! Coda to the End

Hello and welcome or welcome back to Composing Phrase by Phrase, the blog where I compose a new work one phrase at a time and talk in detail about the choices I made and why. This week marks the last week of the first composition in this series! The whole thing will be posted as a score video on YouTube soon, so if you've been keeping up with this series from the beginning (thanks!) you'll get to hear the final result in not too long. Let's hop to it! What have we got?

mms. 222-end

A lot of notes, is what we've got! Don't worry, though. Like last week's entry, this part of the phrase includes a good bit of repetition to help glue this ending together. From measure 222 to measure 229, the main building block is a call and response approach between the first and second violins. They're trading off a pentatonic scale. The scale type used occurs commonly in Japanese music, but it can also be understood as a subset of the Phrygian mode.

Phrygian mode with pentatonic scale highlighted

Here's the figuration as it first appears in the composition.

mms. 222-223

And here it is passed back and forth between the two violins.

mms. 222-229, pentatonic call and response

There are two layers to the motif's accompaniment - the cello, providing the bass, and the viola paired with one of the violins. The cello's bass part is strongly percussive. It's chords and double stops establish A as the root of everything built above it. Rhythmically, it either emphasizes strong beats (for 5/8 bars) or works in hemiola against the motif's meter (in the 6/8 bars).

mms. 222-229, cello

Throughout, the viola provides rhythmic and harmonic glue to help stick everything together. This voice sticks entirely to A's and G's, using double stops to help give extra emphasis to the cello's chords and double stops below. The harmonic consistency helps keep things stable as a large unit. At measure 226, there's a slight break in this role where the viola adds a little extra harmonization to the pentatonic motif. This break is both to help keep the ear's interest in an otherwise relatively static phrase, but it's also used to prepare the slightly different texture played by the quartet in the next phrase segment.

mms. 222-225, viola

Speaking of texture, when each violin switches to the accompaniment role from the motif, they perform A's and E's in double stops. They also are instructed to perform a technique called jeté, the french word for "throw. The effect is a bouncy, skittering type of sound that sounds much more difficult to achieve than it is. I'm admittedly on the fence about this, it's something I'd have to hear live before I really commit to it. I just wanted to try adding in a little extra to the texture as an experiment. If I hear it live and don't like it, they'll just go back to eighth-notes.

mms. 222-229, violin accompaniments

Moving on, here's the next chunk of the Coda:

mms. 230-233

From measures 230 to 233, the pentatonic motif is compressed into a smaller motif that is less a pentatonic scale than just an arpeggiated chord. The first is an A7, the second is an Fmaj7. The G in the second chord can either be looked at as an add2, or it's some kind of non-chord tone, it doesn't particularly matter in this instance. Here's what they look like in the piece.

mms. 230-233, violins

Beneath the violin exhange, the viola provides a little bit of harmonic glue and contrast, starting with a B-flat and G and then an A and an F-natural. The B-flat clashes pretty hard against the prevailing A's that abound, a tension that releases during the change to the minor pentatonic scales. That release still keeps the door open for further harmonic progression, however, which helps establish the harmonic change in the next phrase.

mms. 230-233, viola

During all of this, the cello is play A and E double stops on a harmonic node. This particular harmonic has something of a bright, shrill quality to it and stands out not just because of the timbre's quality, but because the string harmonic timbre hasn't been used at all over the course of the whole composition.

Alright! We're into the last stretch!

mms. 234-end

Everybody at this point is playing in rhythmic (if not metric) unison, just pure eighth-notes chugging along at full speed. Building from the bass up: the cello starts on open G, emphasizing metric points with crunchy triple stops across the top three open strings; the viola adds a B-flat and an F-sharp against that, both notes clashing with the A's and G's below, respectively; the second violin adds more weight to that A and G; and the first violin reinforces the D and B-flat. Overall, the chord quality is G minor-ish? Gmin9add#7, which is a mouthful.

mms. 234-237

For brevity, the chord quality of the next two bars is an A7Flat9Add4, another chord that just rolls off the tongue. After that is, uh... hm. So, everything stays the same except the bottom note of the cello's bass and the two notes played by the first violin go up a half-step. I guess it's a poly-chord? That's not how I thought of it, I was just going by voice leading, but that's basically what I ended up with: an A7 and a Bmaj7 playing at the same time. It's maximum crunch, like opening a jar of peanut butter and finding, like, a giant peanut inside.

mms. 238-241, harmonies

We're all set up for a plane crash, at this moment. But then, right at the very last second, the cadence motif swoops in to save the day. The cello does a little cheeky tritone substitution, but it's otherwise a V-I progression. The last chord is a D major chord voiced with as many open strings as possible while reinforcing the D with octaves and unisons. The cello plays a snap pizzicato (or Bartok pizz) to give a little percussive pop at the end. It also has the effect of minimizing the bass note, really allowing the chord to exist as this high, bright sound.

There's also a phenomenon where percussive effects, especially snare drum or cymbal-like percussion, help highlight the upper harmonics of a chord. I don't quite remember where I came across this bit of info, so it could be entirely false, but hey. It's worth a shot. We don't have a snare or a cymbal, but a really low snap pizz in the cello gets as close as we can get.

mms. 242-end

And that's it! It's not a super long piece, all told. Clocks in between 3:45-4:00 minutes, depending on the tempo the ensemble takes (even less if they decide to go really fast), but it is, as I hope is clear from the 23 weeks of blog posts that went into this, rather involved. On the other hand, describing music with words inevitably spills more ink than the music itself.

If you've been on this journey with me from beginning to end, I thank you wholeheartedly! The next Composing Phrase by Phrase series will probably show off much shorter compositions. I'm planning on doing a series of little preludes for piano using dodecaphonic composition. It's mostly me figuring out stuff you can do with 12-tone writing, so it should be... interesting.

Hope you join me next time!