Obviously, I haven’t posted in about a month or so, partly due to the end of the semester and partly due to defending my research for my doctorate, WHICH I PASSED. Woo! As of this post, I am not done as there are revisions expected. I am, of course, completely fine with that as I and my committee want the best possible outcome. I have plans to escape my home to work on the piece and hopefully make a recording of an upcoming work. Stay tuned for that!
In the mean time, as I scour my recordings to decide what to post next, I thought it would be worth covering a movement that I uploaded a few weeks ago but never wrote about. That would be the second movement of my symphonic work Paschal. I did discuss the first movement some in this post here, but I did not really reveal any information about its composition. I seemed to have spent that post preparing myself for this new, shelter-in-place reality that we are experiencing and may continue to in the coming summer months. (Heck, were not even going to Montana this year!)
Without intending to do so, I am happy that I get to discuss the building blocks in some detail now as the first two movements are really strung together by the development of their composition. I mentioned that the original ORIGINAL version was Messiaen inspired and about 20 minutes long. That version was never read through and when I started my studies, the piece began anew from scratch except one basic element: the chants from Easter. The first two movements were once one movement with it beginning about a minute into the first movement and ending where this movement does. The chants are not obvious in any way, but they are there. If you pay attention to the bass pitches at the end of this second movement, it makes up the beginning of the Victimae paschali laudes, the sequence for Easter. All of the chants before that point are there and in liturgical order up to that point. While the first movement only uses the introit, the second movement incorporates the psalm, the alleluia, and as mentioned, the sequence. The last movement, as might be predictable, uses the offertory and communion. More on that last movement soon (though the video is up at the time of this post).
Listening to the first two movements back to back, it is clear in my mind how they were once a single musical goal and now they are two whole movements. What is interesting to me is how these sorts of things evolve and what was once a 20 minute single movement work to a 7 minute single experiment to a five movement something-or-other becomes a typical slow-fast-slow symphonic work. Everytime I listen to each movement now, it works better than it should based on the journey the musical material took, but that is one of the weird things being a composer. Sometimes things turn out better than expected.