The Composing Process Part 1

I've never tried anything like this before. I'm a jazz guy, and pretty much think in terms of tunes. In thinking about how to approach music for Howl, the foremost goal for me has been how to craft a compelling performance, to create a dramatic arc that will open and close strongly, that will support and not bury the recitation, and will allow room for everyone to come to the fore and make a contribution.

For starters, I tried to analyze the poem and subdivide it into sections where there's a clear change of mood and subject. My breakdown is probably a bit arbitrary, but Part 1 especially yields to decomposition. Ginsburg may have been writing free verse, but he seems to have been thinking about tension and release.

Once I had my initial set of sections, I tried to figure out timings, so I had a sense of how *much* music was required. it turns out math is involved, insofar as I had to turn minutes into bars of music. I've dodged some of that by creating open sections that repeat until cued by a line from the poem, because I have a feeling that being overprecise will (1) make rehearsal agonizing and (2) lead to a stiff performance.

OK, now I had a map of the whole piece and could start think about putting notes on paper. As do many folks, I have a folder full of fragments and jottings, germs of ideas and motifs that might be worth developing. I dug it out and harvested anything I thought I could use, creating a notebook with a page for each section.

Next I went back to the poem and annotated it more precisely, looking for key points and cue words, places which demanded a musical response, places where a musical interlude sans recitation made sense (to allow the performance to breathe), and perhaps important, pasages that needed to be recited in full relief, with the band silent.

All this setup served to break a large problem: how do I write at length? into a bunch of small problems: what's needed here? Small problems are (usually) easy to solve. Now I was ready to write.

In terms of underlying material, I had a couple of notions inspired by the poem. One was to reference Middle-Eastern sounds, in keeping with Ginsburg's biblical and Jewish references . I know very little about Middle-Eastern music, but I did see the movie The Ten Commandments and figured, for my purposes, that a film composer's approach -- tom-toms, gapped scales and ambiguous harmony -- would suffice.

Another obvious color on the compositional pallette would be jazz, mentioned throughout the poem. I chose mainly sounds drawn inspired by the Eric Dolphy album Out to Lunch. Although the poem was written in 1956 and the album is 1964, it has a tonally abstract nature that, to my ear, equates to the urban subscape that the poem describes. There's a bebop moment in there, and some cocktail music - they're more programmatic than basic to the overall mood, though.

Details about each part in a future post.