WIP: Glass Constellaions
I’m working on a brand new piece for wind ensemble right now, titled Glass Constellations, and it’s going great. The title immediately jumped out to me when I saw it in a bookstore - it’s based off the poetry collection The Glass Constellation by Chinese-American poet Arthur Sze, but my work isn’t particularly inspired by any of the poetry in the book, just the title. I’ve created my own mental image of “Glass Constellations” and used that image as inspiration for the work.
Previously, I’ve spent most of my time composing at the computer and some time on the saxophone or piano. After I worked on conducting one of my pieces with my school band, I quickly learned that relying on the playback to tell me what my piece sounded like was not a very good idea, since my sound samples were wildly inaccurate. That made my piece sound all out of balance when we played it live, and I had to make a lot of changes before the premier. It was around this time that I became interested in different compositional methods of famous composers. The one who stood out to me the most was David Maslanka. He has a lot of tricks and quirks to his method, but here’s a couple of things that I’ve found particularly interesting:
- He doesn’t use the computer at all in his works, just pencil and paper (which is pretty astonishing when you realize he’s written 9 and ½ symphonies, some longer than 134 pages with perfectly legible handwriting).
- He views himself somewhat like a channel for creativity to flow through, not a conscious music-maker. He said it himself: “I tell people that I couldn’t possibly make this stuff up on my own. I wouldn’t know how or why.” Read "The Nature of Consciousness: Correspondence"
- He uses a technique called “Active Imagination”, a concept from Jungian psychology. It basically means self-aware, conscious daydreaming, “moving the conscious mind into the space of the unconscious”, as Maslanka puts it.
I think that these 3 big techniques are the methods that will take my work to the next level, I’ve really been only working at the piano with my notebook for the majority of Glass Constellations, and you can really see the impact of that on my sketches, which are 1000x better than my last band piece Play to Win!! already. But some issues still remain: I’m still having trouble writing transitions and relating good ideas to one another (especially in slow sections). I think I have a lot of good ideas, but I also have trouble abandoning ideas, especially when I like them, which leads to me having too many ideas. More score study will lead me to the answer to this dilemma.
Anyways, here’s a preview of the fast section!