After holding out for as long as possible, I finally gave in and did one of these composite videos with my group, Orchestra Seattle / Seattle Chamber Singers.

If you’re wondering why was I holding out, you are either insane, or you have no idea how many hours these things take? I myself would find it impossible to create an accurate accounting of my time. I lost track, along with my fool brain, while I was doing it.

[At least I wasn’t alone in this. All my colleagues have talked about how intense it is making one of these things, including the great Dr. Tiffany Lu; we talked about it on my podcast this week.]

I made a very savvy decision early on though: I chose one of my own pieces as the subject of the recording. This, I knew, would be the one thing to compel me to stick with the task to its completion.

Here, for posterity, is the email I wrote to the members of my ensemble when announcing the completed video:

Ciao tutti,
I know that I had originally slated tomorrow night for Zoom games, but I want to postpone those until Sunday evening at 7:00, because I’ve run out of time to make any games.

“Why?” you ask?

Because it turns out that video editing — the kind I’ve been doing to assemble the project that so many of you submitted recordings for — is, for someone who has precisely zero idea what he’s doing, a soul-sucking, RAM-busting enterprise that literally dissolves the stuff of which time is made.

But the video is “finished,” or at least has been uploaded, so instead, let’s assemble virtually to watch it together tomorrow night at its YouTube premiere tomorrow, Tuesday, December 22, at 7:30 pm. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/JI3uNx33BeQ

You all did such a great job performing and recording yourselves for this project, and I want to commend you for your labors and thank everyone who participated. I also especially want to thank those of you who didn’t participate, because with every additional video, I lost 5% of my sanity and 2% of my lifespan.

You might wonder if it will be worth watching this video. Will it, for example, be “good”? This is a great question. Having lost all perspective on the matter, I would say that the finished product exists outside the dialectic boundaries of “good” and “bad”. It is a-hermeneutic and anti-epistemological; it is a sequence of 1s and 0s that, on some metaphysical level, can be said to exist, and even that is an assertion I am hesitant to make.

But I also kind of think you’ll love it.

Maybe you’ve seen other groups’ videos, outsourced to professional editors, with their slick, sleek, perfectly-shaped boxes and faultlessly synced sound. This isn’t that. It’s quirky and colorful and weird. On the editing level, it’s akin to that experiment from the 1960s where members of the Navajo tribe who had never held a camera before were given professional film equipment and told to make a movie about their society. So just be prepared.

Anyway, I’m excited for you all to see it, and if, after seeing it, you have any constructive criticism or feedback, please know that I absolutely do not want it, and would even go so far as to argue that it is literally impossible to judge a digital “object” such as the one that you will have witnessed.

I’ll send a reminder tomorrow night. Until then, happy solstice!
Will

I recently published a demo recording, produced — against all odds — during the past two months. It’s a piece I composed over a year ago, but you know how it goes with these things: first you have to write the piece, then the players have to practice, then there’s the premiere, then there’s the recording, then the editing / mixing / mastering, and finally you’ve got yourself a recording. Add several months for a pandemic.

A friend I was texting with kindly said that the last movement was his favorite of the three. I thanked him and told him that upon reflection, I felt that that movement was my best solution yet to the Finale Problem.

I’m not talking about Finale the music notation software from MakeMusic, which indeed has a LOT of problems (I’m still eagerly awaiting Tantacrul to drag them.)

So what is the Finale Problem? It’s this: how does one craft a final movement of a multi-movement work that is both satisfying unto itself and conclusive of the entire work?

Here are some options:

1. Write a short, flitting, breezy last movement that leaves your audience delighted! This is what composers did before anyone realized finales could even be problematic.
2. Try to bring it all together. As far as I know, Beethoven started this trend, and thus the problem was born. The fifth symphony finale references back to the third movement; the ninth famously brings back strains from all three previous movements. Musical theater composers are big into this for their Act I finales (see: Into the Woods and Les Mis)
3. Write a grand, sprawling movement that counterbalances everything that came before it. It may or may not reference earlier musical ideas. This was Mahler’s gambit.

My overall approach to finales tends toward the “short & sweet” camp. I think that a large-scale work should accelerate to it’s conclusion — it keeps the whole thing propulsive.

I’m also in the camp that in order to sound like the conclusion of the whole piece, you really want to give a nod to what came before. But a little of this goes a long way. In a grand symphony you can have many themes wend their way in and out of movements (I love this Franckian “cyclical” approach), but in this quintet — clocking in at just 16 minutes — I limited myself to a recapitulation of the first movement’s second theme.

I think it works quite nicely; it breaks up the predominant mood of the movement and recalls what happened before; it’s both unexpected and familiar. But I don’t think that if the movement were played on its own this reminiscence would sound “wrong”. Can’t ask much more from a solution to the Finale Problem than that!