Wallitner Weekly 39
Hello everyone!
A lot of productive things happened recently
Well, maybe not super productive… I apologize for not sending out a weekly last week, some crazy stuff happened. My fiancee woke up one morning with a pinched nerve, so we went to urgent care to get some meds. And then my car was stolen… Thankfully it wasn’t the new one we bought last month, but still a huge pain.
I did however make some huge progress in my writing! I have some actual sketches done for the trumpet solo and I wrote a percussion ensemble piece for a local middle school. Writing for young musicians is a challenge because they can’t always do what you want to write, but its worth the effort to see young musicians succeeding.
I’ve got lots of plans for next week too!
Im going to continue sketching out this trumpet solo. I’ve started doing score study of studio Ghibli movies and surrealist films too. Im trying to expand my musical vocabulary in as many different directions as I can. I also started writing short stories again, to get myself back into the creative swing of things. With all the chaos from last week, I was a little burned out.
It’s time to bust out the big paper.
When I was in college I had a reserve of what I called “big paper”. Normal paper is 8.5 x 11. Big paper is 12 x 18. If I had a big project, whether it was for a large group of people, or it was a longer piece, I would call it a big paper project.
The advantage of big paper is there is way more room for everything. If the group is a wind band and you need 20 different instruments, then you could only fit a few measures at a time on normal paper. My favorite way to use big paper is for long projects that only involve 2-3 instruments though. I’ll take a few lines and write out a main theme, then Ill skip a few lines and write another. Then I’ll draw a big arrow and connect the two and say something like “Super cool transition” in the blank space.
Big paper gives me room for creativity. Especially the conceptual stuff. I don’t feel so crammed that I can’t write words to describe what I think of a section. Or if there are lyrics I can write the whole poem on one side and then write the music on the other side. The best part is every time I use big paper, the majority of the concepts in that 10+ minute work fits on that one page. And then I have a really aesthetically pleasing piece of paper to look a while I work on the details.
One of my favorite composers, Eric Whitacre, does a similar thing. He calls it the emotional architecture. He’ll draw out a piece based on what the audience is supposed to be feeling at certain points. Maybe the piece starts calm and then grows to something a little more chaotic and then gets timid again. Its really cool to listen to a piece of his when you’ve seen the “Emotional architecture” because then you can point to the calm part and the chaotic part.
Its important to have a plan when you take on a big project. I am the kind of person where every piece of music I write its like I have to remember how to write again. I was just looking back at my “Prayers of a Fallen Angel” piece and I don’t have the slightest idea how I came up with the piano part. Its super cool and I love it, but I don’t know how I came up with it. However, I do remember the process I went through to get there. And thankfully, that helps. I catch myself looking back at old works and thinking, I wish I could write like that again.
Regardless of what you’re doing, the process is what’s important. Not everything we do will be the best we’ve done so far. Life is not linear that way, but if you come up with a plan that makes sense and stick to it, you’ll get there eventually. Especially if you write it on big paper and tack it to the wall over your desk. Even if that paper only serves as a shield for your face when you feel like you’ve hit said wall, you’ll get there eventually.
