question
Write a musical passage involving at least four instruments and that makes a diminuendo transition but as the dynamics get softer, increase the harmonic tension (consonance-dissonance)
So, this one is all about dynamics – that is, I’ll be playing with the volume of the notes.
Since it helped a lot with the last exercise, I wanted to use a well-defined form to start with. This time, I think I’m going to use the [[Rondó|rondó]] form. We’ll come back to that.
I’ve got a form to research. But first, the big change for this exercise is instead of just composing for one voice, it’s four. The first two were easy – I’m gonna stick with piano, and the addition of an upright bass seems pretty straightforward. For the last two, I settled on the oboe and xylophone, for reasons.
Back to the rondo. It seems it’s actually a bit simpler and looser than the minuet. It can go from a very simple ABA to a more complicated ABACABA or even longer.
Basically, originating in the Baroque period, a rondo is simply a principal theme (or “refrain”) interspersed with one or more alternating themes (“episodes”). For vocal rondos, the main theme with was interspersed with episodes featuring each of the musicians (vocalists, but in my case, instruments).
ABACADA
- A: main theme
- B: instrument 1
- C: instrument 2
- D: instrument 3
If I want to feature each instrument, I’ll need to do ABACADAEA – a nine-part rondo.
that…might be too much for this exercise.
Ultimately, I went with the Sonata rondo – a five-part rondo with a couple extra requirements. the A section is always in the root key, but the C section and the first B are in other keys. So… in addition to writing for multiple voices, I gotta take a stab at key changes.
On to the actual writing. It’s not yet done, but I’ve got most of it written.
I started with a long-ish introduction, where each of the voices comes in one at a time. First, the bass plays a simple walking bass line (centered around the Royal Road chord progression). Next, the piano comes in with the same chords. Third, the oboe comes in with a melody. And then finally, the xylophone plays an accompaniment to what the oboe’s doing.
Once I got the intro to where I wanted, the A section was one of the easier sections to write. The bass continued with a walking bass line, but I changed up some of the directions & notes, for variety. And the oboe played a variation of the same melody from the introduction. Rather than playing chords, I decided the piano would follow the oboe melody (but, being a piano, I could add in extra notes for most of it). I tried to do counterpoint, but I only had a vague grasp of it at the time.
The xylophone was a little trickier – I wanted to give it a little more to do, but couldn’t settle on anything. Finally, I decided that I’d build something off of the melody & chord keys, and add in a bunch of sliding arpeggios (which just feels like a very xylophone thing to me).
For the B section, I gave the bass a break from the walking bass line, and had it play the Royal Road chord progression. I wanted to do a “proper” counterpoint here, so I slowed down the oboe part & wrote a cantus firmus melody using whole notes. And for the piano, I wrote a second species counterpoint (using half notes). This took a very long time, and since the xylophone did a lot in the A section, it got to take a break & just played some decoration at the end of every 4 measures.
Then, the A section again. Much to my delight, it actually sorta worked without needing to change much about A or B here.
The C section, however… I actually ended up writing this once, scrapping it, and then rewriting it. For the bass, I went back to a slightly tweaked version of the intro’s walking bass line (instead of the chords from the B section). The oboe played another cantus firmus, and then jumped right into a fifth species counterpoint for the piano instead of sticking with second or third, which would have been smarter. Eventually I sorta scrapped the idea of doing a “proper” counterpoint & just wrote something simple that sounded sorta like a decent counterpoint. Then I added some notes going in the opposite direction for intra-piano counterpoint.
I honestly couldn’t even tell you how I went about writing the xylophone part here, or what was going through my head. I know there were a lot of false starts & deleted notes, though.
Eventually, though, I got it all to a point where it sounded okay together. But I was missing two things – the key changes in a sonata rondo, and … the dynamic / harmonic tension that was the whole point of the exercise.
I wanted to get the key change out of the way, first. The whole piece was written in D major. I did a lot of research into key changes and wasn’t really able to find very much in the way of useful information. I basically picked two key signatures arbitrarily – the B section I would rewrite in the key of A, and the C section in B minor (chosen because A major is the dominant key for D, and Bm is the relative key. No idea if that’s a good reason to pick them or not).
Then since the whole thing’s sorta built off of the Royal Road progression, I had to make sure than in transposing the parts to the new keys, I kept those chords intact. Which was a nightmare.