I shouldn’t be writ­ing this. I should be work­ing on my arrange­ment. I have less than a week to get this all done. As indi­cated in my pre­vi­ous post, I’m prepar­ing a piece to enter the CBC Evo­lu­tion con­test. What I’m work­ing on has a large amount of instru­men­ta­tion. A full orches­tra is going by the end of it is a rau­cous dis­play of joy. If any of you fine reader has scored parts for an orches­tra, then you know that it can be very tax­ing. Try­ing to get every­thing to fit together  with­out sound­ing like you scored it by splat­ter­ing ink on the sheets is a chal­lenge. If I’ve learned any­thing by now it is that less is more. I will say it again louder for empha­sis: LESS IS MORE.

There are times when you should be ruth­less in cut­ting. Be bold and just snip that part out. It wasn’t work­ing and it should go. Don’t look back or think twice. For instance: the bridge was sag­ging. I tried to prop it up with two lay­ers of coun­ter­point on vio­lins and trum­pet over arpeg­giated vio­las. It wasn’t work­ing one damn bit. It sounded like Bach barf. So I cut it. Rather than flog away at some­thing that wasn’t work­ing I came up with some­thing that did. By just using the trum­pets to accent about every 4 mea­sures and hav­ing the vio­lins arpeg­giate at half the note value of the vio­las every­thing became clear. Parts weren’t fight­ing with each other for attention.

Hav­ing every­thing sound­ing all the time is sure to over­whelm any com­po­si­tion. A song needs space to breathe, where phrases can surge in and out of exis­tence. It keeps your lis­ten­ers atten­tion because there is always some­thing new to lis­ten to. It pulls you in direc­tions and a back and forth dynamic emerges. You enter into a con­ver­sa­tion with the piece rather than being talked to, or worse yelled at, by it. Elim­i­nat­ing super­flu­ous and jar­ring parts will strengthen your work to no end, so be strong and sharpen your scissors.

Tags: Arrangement, Songwriting

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 6:03 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.