Gazing at the Night Sky - Composition Walkthrough Pt.7 - Bars 76 - 87

Welcome to the final part of the composition walkthrough for GAZING AT THE NIGHT SKY. Today, we focus on the last section with the sentimental string ending.

As usual, Score, Audio and Midi attached at the bottom of the post.

The previous parts of this composition walkthrough are available here.

After the calm brass chorale that we had a look at in the last part, I felt the piece could need another recapitulation of that theme to give it more of that awe and wonder feeling and to bring it to a rather emotional and sentimental ending. I also felt that another mild reharmonisation of the theme would be possible and give it yet another "hue". As I said at the beginning of this walkthrough, I really felt that this little theme was suitable for quite a few different emotional qualities which I wanted to explore.

The passage that we're looking at today: https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/gatns-bar-76-87/s-4BffoiCV83Z

And the playback of the piano reduction from below: https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/gatns-bar-76-87-piano/s-DkxvMj4SLB9

Bar 76-87

Just as a little reminder, we used the ending of the Brass chorale from before to modulate us into that new key of Eb coming from Ab. The last chord in the Brass part was a Bb which of course serves perfectly as a dominant to Eb.

I personally love the emotional quality of different chord notes other than the root as bass note, so my rehamonisation strategy here is quite similar to the reharmonisation of the brass part which is to keep the big structure of the harmonic progression intact but introduce new colours through different bass notes and additional chord extensions. As you can see in the harmonic analysis above, the chords get quite a lot of "additional" notes like ninths, sixths, major sevenths, 11ths etc. which of course all create some of those beautiful inner voice rubs that, at least for me make a harmonic progression more attractive and multi layered than simple triads.

The conceptual idea of this section was to give the lead melody to the first violins and a counter line to the celli. This of course is a quite clichéd approach but of course the emotional quality that celli develop in their mid and higher register serves the intention of this passage very well. So I place that counter line in this range of the celli. I also tried to move it rhythmically complimentary to the main melody being more active when the main melody is sustaining on a longer note and being less active when the main melody moves.

Another important decision was to keep this passage rather "small" and "emotional" which for me very often has the consequence of leaving out the double basses for most of it. This of course is not a strategy that I invented and you can see it very often in emotional string writing. Usually, even softly played double basses generate such a "low end boom" that subjectively it increases the "size" of the sound which is not necessarily what you would want in a section like this. However, I see this quite often with learning composers and orchestrators that they always treat the string section as a unit without differentiating between different configurations within the sections - like leaving out the double bass.

So coming back to this section, looking at bar 77/78, my work order here probably was something like writing out the melody and bass note and adding the counter line in the celli. As these three elements narrowed down what the remaining two sections would need to do, there weren't that many options of what they could do.

There are a few things that I focus on in a situation like this where I fill in "inner voices"

• providing missing chord tones
• trying to voice lead that inner voice as well as possible 
• not conflicting with another voice

Balancing these three points with each other sometimes is quite tricky and in some cases almost impossible to satisfy all three points but investing some time into it usually pays off as it sounds more musical and also is more interesting to play for the musicians. This also means in some cases to change voice order (e.g. Vln 2 being lower than Vlas as seen in bar 80). However, in any case, you should try to make sure that the top line which is in this case transporting the main melody always stays the top line and ideally the next lower line doesn't get too close to it (e.g. within the range of a minor second, or sometimes even major second). Having said that there are however moments, where I personally like such a rub quite a lot even though it blurres the actual melody a bit.

From the general approach, bar 77, 78 and 80 are quite identical with all voices moving rather individually. Bar 79 interrupts that approach a bit by moving more in a homophonic way. As I already mentioned in another article, it is always useful to counteract a motion of many voices into one direction with a motion of one (or more) voices into the opposite direction. In this case I try to do it in the bass voice which is moving upwards. It is also a nice contrast to change the harmony on every quarter in this bar as opposed to the barwise sustaining harmony in the surrounding bars. Again, as you can see, the chords are loaded with additional notes to sustain a uniform harmonic language. This is one of my pet peeves as well when I see compositions that randomly and without actual reason jump around between simple and complex chords as this really makes a harmonic language rather vague and patchy.

Bar 81/82 pick up again that initial idea of the theme of leaving the downbeats free which again provides a nice contrast to keep this passage interesting. In order to push the "emotionality" even more, I change the octave in the repetition of a the motif in the first violins. As this one motif gets repeated I use it as a vehicle to introduce a surprising chord in 83 of Cbmaj7(#11). In fact that Cbmaj7(#11) chord feels rather surprising but also well connected as after all, it is not so much different. The preceding chord is an Fm7/C which means that Eb and F (7 and 1) are also part of the Cb chord (3 and #11). This is a very effective way to connect chords that seem rather far apart but as soon as you can find notes that are part of both chords, they will very effectively connect these chords together. Apart from that this major7 and #11 quality of that chord feel very much like "scifi" and "space" to me so it felt like a perfect harmony to end the piece with. I wanted to create a warm and resonant final chord so I brought the double basses back in to create that low end warmth as well as the low brass and woodwinds to add to this feeling. Three flutes and 2 clarinets keep alternating back and forth between effectively 2 different voicings of the same chord in the last bars which created a shimmering feeling that I really felt to be appropriate for this. It was a conscious decision to leave out the oboes here as their tone would be way more defined as well as the legato between the notes. With flutes and clarinets and their super fluid legato, it felt emotionally more like what I had in mind for this.

A final word on the Harp: I used the harp throughout that entire passage as accompanying instrument, quite often doubling the strings or providing some arpeggios as I felt that it had that calm and emotional quality that would benefit for this section and also give it a bit more definition. I will cover this in more detail when we talk about the harp on its own but also here I used the principle of not mistaking the harp for a piano with a different tone. You can see that the harp part is considerably more sparse than what you would write for a piano but even if in this context it would have been possible to write "more" for the harp, I feel that the more sparse use of it is more effective and accompanies the strings nicely.

Looking back at the entire piece, I'm still quite happy how it turned out and am also glad that I got the chance to record it with an orchestra. I would have loved to have more time with the orchestra as in the recording there are a few moments that I would love to "tidy up". Maybe I will get the chance to record it again at another session. Also, I'm very happy that this track turned out to be one of my commercially most successful ones with Spotify adding it to one of their editorial playlists when I released it which brought it to the ears of many thousand people who now also seem to regularly listen to it. The stream revenue from it of course is still laughable but it's still great to see that so many people seem to enjoy it.

I hope you found this multi part walkthrough informative. If you got here just recently, you might be interested to know that the entire multitrack recording of this piece is available for download so you can dig in deep into the individual microphone signals and lines and also try to mix it or use for reference for a template setup. One of my patrons attempted a midi mockup of the piece with the material provided which is definitely very cool.