Rejection and Complications
Hello again!
I just recently learned that there are, in fact, 4 of you that read my last post, which is more than double what I expected! With these posts reaching such a wide and diverse audience, I might have to look into doing these more often. XD
January was an exciting month with a lot of adjustments and progress, so without further ado we’ll jump right into it!
Project Updates
The Lonely Machine
This is my grade 1.5* Concert Band piece that I’ve been working on for the last few months. I was able to meet with my percussion colleague who had some minor feedback and tweaks that I’ve been incorporating, and I was able to get the feedback from my director friend written in. Overall, the piece is very close to being ready for the final copyediting phase, which is good because I’m starting to get a little bored working on it.
Still planning on premiering the piece in May, but no details yet.
Summary: Draft 3 finished, incorporating feedback for Draft 4.
*For those that aren’t aware, every piece of music for concert band will come with a difficulty rating based on musical factors. It is (mostly) standardized by the American Band College and can provide some interesting limitations to composing a piece. One of these days I’ll do a whole post about how they assign grades to pieces, and how that impacts the way I write.
Spaceship Video Game
Bad news here. After submitting my most recent draft, my friends decided that my music wasn’t a good fit for the game. There was a bit of drama and back-and-forth on everything (I’ll spare you the details), but for my part I’m glad to have cut ties with the game. The biggest struggle of this project was that they wanted the music to be something very specific, but weren’t willing to work with me to get the music to that point (despite my efforts to establish common vocabulary and a healthy revision process).
The nice part is that the tracks I worked on can be adapted for other mediums, and perhaps incorporated into a future video game. Also, the specific track I submitted to them could (surprisingly) make a great concert band piece, so I’ll be looking into rearranging that.
Summary: Project closed, looking into future development of these ideas.
The Lost Star Princess (Working Title)
This is a project that has gone through about a dozen different iterations over the last several years or so. I originally wrote it as a Piccolo Trumpet solo for my Songwriting class at BYU (back in 2016, if you can believe that!), but am now trying to get it programmed with a British-style Brass Band** as an Eb Cornet Solo. I gave the solo to my friend who plays Eb Cornet to look at for feedback, and will also be giving the drumset part to a friend for feedback.
I’ve been playing with this Brass Band for several years now, and while I’ve wanted to premier a piece with them for some time I’ve had trouble “cracking the code.” As opposed to other ensemble types, this style of group doesn’t conform to nice orchestration patterns (in a traditional orchestra woodwind section, for example, there are usually 2 players on each instrument. This makes it easy to splice out chords and balance the sound of the ensemble); while playing with the group, I’ve noticed that the composers and arrangers often have to go through orchestrational gymnastics to balance the parts. The big struggle for me was the low brass – for whatever reason, it was just hard to get the unevenly split parts to balance nicely. I also had to reorchestrate a significant portion of the piece because the previous version’s French Horn parts had notes that were lower than a Tenor Horn can reach (the equivalent of a French Horn in British Brass Band). But after several hours of workshopping and revision I feel confident with my orchestrations!
After I get feedback from my Eb Cornet friend, I’ll pitch this to the director of the group and see if we can premier it at one of our next concerts (probably not the next one, as we’re working on a very difficult competition piece based on some Paganini variations…).
Summary: Waiting for feedback on the solo part, ready to pitch to the director.
** A British-style brass band uses instruments that are rather uncommon here in the United States, and has a much lower and warmer sound that a traditional brass band. Groups typically have the following instruments: Solo Cornet (5 players, which is ironic since it’s a “Solo” part), Eb Soprano Cornet (1 player), 1st Cornet/Repiano (1 player), 2nd Cornet (2 players), 3rd Cornet (2 players, the part I play😊), Flugelhorn (1 player), Tenor Horn (3 players, 3 separate parts), Baritone Horn (2 players, 2 parts), Euphonium (2 players, 2 parts), Trombone (3-4 players, 2-3 parts + Bass Trombone), Eb Tuba (2 players), Bb Tuba (2-3 players), Percussion (Timpani + 2-4 other players). The other interesting thing is that, with the exception of the Bass Trombone, every part reads in Treble clef, and due to each instrument having different ranges there is a boatload of transposing for each part. One day I’ll do a post all about British-style brass bands and all the compositional complexities that are entailed because it is incredibly complicated.
Ukrainian Orchestral Piece (Working Title)
Another project I started on this month is an orchestration of a String Quartet I wrote at the U of U. This has been really fun to work on, as it allowed me to indulge in focusing solely on orchestration (one of my favorite aspects of the composition process). I wrote the original piece wanting to explore the Octatonic scale combined with parallel 5ths*** and to explore string techniques. The original piece is good, but at the time I was woefully unaware of how difficult double stops are for strings (playing 2 notes at once on different strings) and the end of the last movement basically asks them to perform like a full 60-piece string orchestra. So it should come as no surprise that I finally got around to actually adapting the piece for full orchestra.
When I sat down to orchestrate this out, I decided that I wanted to experiment with thinner orchestrations and fewer parts, as well as minimizing how intense the percussion parts were. Part of this was a simple decision to limit the parts (2 flutes instead of 3, 1 oboe instead of 2, etc.), but it was also fun to figure out what textures I could get with a string part plus a single wind or brass part. My biggest concern with this piece right now is how difficult the 3rd movement is – the strings and woodwinds have fast triplets going up and down the octatonic scale which, although they sound really cool, are incredibly difficult to actually play. I’m currently workshopping those runs to see if I can find an easier solution to get the same effect, but we’ll see if they are stubborn enough to stay in.
I’m hoping to have this one premiered by another group I perform with (seriously, how many groups are you in???), potentially next year sometime. All 3 movements are about 12 minutes long, and if they’re unable to program all 3 then I’ll likely push to have the 2nd movement performed (the easiest and best-sounding movement, in my opinion).
Summary: Draft 1 finished (mostly), submitting for feedback and/or programming consideration.
*** If that composition jargon doesn’t make any sense to you, no worries – just think of it as a cool-sounding scale that I’ve modified for this piece. Or you can do a deep dive by looking those up online. Either way. 😊
Looking Forward
I’m at a weird place right now, in that I’ve finished most of the projects I’m currently working on. With how many I tend to work on simultaneously there’s typically a lot of overlap between starting and finishing a piece, but this time I reached a weird confluence where all my projects are at a similar place. So for the next week or so I’ll likely do a lot of brainstorming and drafting for ideas, and hopefully have a couple of new entries in the update for next month.
Final Musing
Being rejected is never fun. As a composer, an unfortunately large part of my career is learning how to cope with rejection while moving forward. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn in college was how to accept feedback and not take it personally – in fact, one of my professors (who was probably one of the best I ever had) had a habit of not sugar-coating anything he said, and many of his comments were difficult for me to swallow initially due to their bluntness. However, as I spent more time receiving this feedback from him and others I came to learn that I could separate myself from the thing being critiqued, that my self-worth was not dependent on my ability to play trumpet or to churn out a piece of music in the “correct” style. This separation allowed me to grow at an exponential rate and to not feel like a constant and utter failure; in other words, it allowed me to healthily receive feedback and criticism.
Although getting kicked off the video game project was a gut-punch (and made me rather upset), I was able to contextualize the rejection for what it was – not an indication of low self-worth, but a rejection of the product that I was creating. Although I’ve felt discouraged at times over my “washing up” as a video game composer, because my self-worth is not tied to my success as a composer I have the emotional capacity to try again with another project, to redirect my energies in other directions, to still work towards a career that I feel will help me share my music with a wider audience. So, despite this rejection, I’m not done composing; in fact, I’m just beginning.
Until next time,
J.M. Whitchurch
February 6, 2023
