My Adventure in Classical Music Composition
In March this year I decided to undertake a longstanding ambition to try to compose a piece of classical music for solo piano. I first began dabbling with classical music in 2015, beginning with a short ensemble piece titled Rapture of Logic, moving on to scoring a short film, and culminating in the classically-inspired prog rock of my 2020 album Reason and Romance. But all of this music was written for synths and sequencers, with a corresponding dearth of subtlety, and usually as the backdrop for heavy rock instrumentation.
My first piece for solo piano, While You Were Dreaming, is so-titled because I wrote it late at night. My best ideas happen at night, when I am secluded and immersed in my work. For my first attempt, I knew I wanted the piece to be something dynamic and emotive, and playable by a live musician. I decided to keep it simple and let it come out of me naturally, without overthinking it. I did what I knew I could do. I selected a chord progression for the left hand, then wrote a melody for a right hand. I developed it in four distinct parts that followed each other in a logical progression that let the music rise and fall then rise again in a crescendo, and arranged it like a song with a verse and chorus structure, not unlike the rock music I was used to. I massaged the main melody to let it reveal itself in veiled allusions over the course of the piece, rather than all at once. I added some flourishes and surprises. I tickled my brain with just the right notes and harmonies at the right moments. Then, I went back and adjusted the note dynamics and tempo to make the piece breathe as much as it could while being played back as a MIDI file through a synthesizer.
When I was all done I was a little shocked at how quickly I had worked, and how much I liked the result. Sometimes music comes out of you so naturally, with such little friction that it can feel like you are only a conduit for something supernatural, as if the song was floating around the Universe until you, like a lightning rod, channeled it down to Earth. Whenever you get this feeling, you know you're onto something good. But I also felt it was *too* easy, because I had not strayed very far from my comfort zone. Writing this piece of music was not so different from writing a rock or pop song, and I didn't even have to learn the piece to play it.
So I decided I should take this experiment further. I should challenge myself to write something much more difficult. I should force myself to grow new muscles. I should try to write something really incredible, as if it had come from a great master of Romantic-era piano music from the 19th century. Something that evoked Brahms, Rachmaninoff, List, or Chopin. My next piece, Rhapsody No.1, took at least three times as long to write, and it is one of my greatest achievements. I feel I succeeded. This piece modulates key, moves through different modalities, plays around with lots of different time signatures, and includes some almost-playable impossible stuff. Truly, it would take a great master to perform it, as I originally wrote it. But, that was the point. Only great masters can perform Rachmaninoff's most difficult work.
With both pieces finished, I decided my next step was to arrange everything as sheet music, replete with dynamics markings and tempo instructions, and have them performed by a pianist. It is simple to import a MIDI file to a notation program like MuseScore, but MIDI does not translate in any precise way to sheet music. When composing my pieces in MIDI, I had manually adjusted the velocities and durations of every note and dynamically adjusted the tempos, to give a human-like feeling to the final result. If I exported the music *as composed* in my MIDI editor, it produced an unreadable mess that no human being could understand. So I had to "flatten" the music by removing all dynamics, and then go back through each piece measure-by-measure, note-by-note to include dynamics markings and tempo instructions. Since I had never done anything like this before nor even used notation software, it was a laborious learning experience.
After preparing the sheet music, I went to the website fiverr and solicited bids for performances. Antonio Giardina, a Sicilian pianist and Conservatory graduate lowballed everyone else I approached. I think perhaps he did not understand the tremendous amount of work that would be required of him to complete the contract he was agreeing to, but that was soon to be his problem, because the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition demanded that I accept his very generous terms. Still, I tipped him very well.
Ultimately we decided to tackle the hard job first, Rhapsody No.1. I would like to find out some day if there is nobody on Earth that can play what I originally wrote, but suspecting that might be the case, I agreed it would work best to arrange the piece for two pianos, recorded separately, and to slow the tempo down. Antonio did the bulk of the work on this new arrangement, which I then edited and corrected for mistakes. He also re-arranged While You Were Dreaming to make it a little easier to read and play.
I am greatly pleased with the final results of all this effort. I don't know what I will do with these recordings, but in any case they exist now, and they didn't before. These are two great pieces of music that I have birthed into the world and I'm proud and happy to share them as wide and far as I can, though my reach may be limited to mere dozens of individuals. Enjoy!
