Links

I made some progress on …our light is here… during the week, which was definitely a positive step, and I feel much better with the piece now that I have taken the two “movements” and swapped their order around. Somewhere in all the fog of the sketches and the doodles and the crossings out there is a structure that will work and make sense, but it is still taking a while to discern exactly what it is.

I have been slightly hung up on the question of how to get from one section to another, whether to make it a steady but inexorable change of material or just to stop and start again. There are times when each of those solutions is correct, but there is also the fact that writing a link passage that makes sense is much, much more difficult than coming to a halt and introducing new material in its own self-contained section.

Somewhere buried deep in my music library is a book which states (if memory serves correctly) that one of the elements that makes Haydn’s Op.33 string quartets so much more advanced than the Op.20 group is the link material. Whereas before this material merely marked time, in the newer pieces it is integrated into the whole and shares its ideas with other areas of the movement.

Lutosławski, who, as long-term readers will know, is one of my compositional heroes, eventually developed a “chain” technique in which certain passages shared material both with the section they were coming from and the one they were going to, and I think that is still my favoured solution, even if it is very difficult to get right and not always suitable to what is at hand. As always, I keep tinkering and keep trying and, on a good day, end up discovering something new.

Back in the more immediate world, we had great performances of the Missa Seria and my arrangement of This Joyful Eastertide at Christ Church yesterday morning, after which I retreated to the burrow and sketched a little more. Meanwhile, somewhere out there is the right answer for …our light is here… – I just need to conjure it up in a way that makes it feel as if it was always there.