Gazing at the Night Sky - Composition Walkthrough Pt.6 - Bars 68 - 76

Today, we're going to have a deeper look at the Brass Chorale part in GAZING AT THE NIGHT SKY.

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

The previous parts of this composition walkthrough are available here.

We need to approach this part a bit differently as usual, so a short score as in previous parts is rather unpractical. I created one nevertheless, also for a rough harmonic analysis but neither the reduction nor the common chord symbols really work that well to analyse that section:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/gatns-b68-76-piano/s-P0LR54K3BE3

In this case, it is better to look at the actual score sheet. It is not too demanding to keep an overview of it as there are only a few instruments involved in that section:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/gatns-b68-76/s-TBXSkUFvCNv

There were several intentions behind that section. Firstly, I felt that the theme that we had only in a heroic version in that piece so far also works very well in a more sentimental version and could work very well with a mild reharmonisation, so I felt that in order to give that piece a bit more emotional depth, it would be great to add a section that would focus more and the "wonder and awe" than the adventurous quality.

In this regard, I also felt that a noble brass chorale would transport this emotional quality quite nicely, as it does at least for me have a certain majestic quality that I would associate with something like gazing at the night sky.

The general approach here was a little different than in the parts before as I wanted to focus a lot on individual voice leading here. Of course, it is quite a challenge to properly voice lead 11 voices at the same time, so some elements double here and there. Also, I didn't want to strictly follow classical part writing rules as doing so would create a certain sound that I didn't feel to be completely appropriate for what I had in mind.

With all this individual voice leading going on as well as some quite complex harmonic situations emerging from this, the whole concept of chord symbols is pushed to the limit here as some of these chords become quite ambiguous depending on how you look at them.

The approach here was more pandiatonic, which means that all notes of a diatonic scale become equally important, moving away from "traditional" chord constructions and chord progressions and rather let the voice leading and individual qualities of a voicing dictate the chord structure.

I would say that this section moves somewhere between a traditional and a pandiatonic approach as we clearly have some harmonic pillars that are rather unambiguos which would guide the larger structure of the harmonic path. But due to the quite "busy" voice leading the actual sounding chord changes its "hue" almost constantly.

Also, the fundamental idea was to have a staggered entrance of the sections, starting out with the horn quartet and shape this whole section in a way that it starts off with a quite narrow chord in the middle register and keeps spreading out to a wide range chord at the climax at bar 75.

I have to admit, getting this all to work is indeed quite challenging and I spent quite some time working out this section. On revisiting it for this article, I realize that I could have probably spent another hour or so on it ironing out a few more edges.

On bar 69 we start with a narrow Ab chord that also has a 4th in it. As the main melody was set already, it would define the highest voice. I had this idea in my head of that descending lowest voice starting on C moving in quarters, so any decision that I made in the other horns were subordinate to these two lines. The general approach was to use the harmonic pillars of the grand structure to connect via plausible musical paths in all voices. 

Having that descending line established (and the theme being fixed), the only way to continue developing this in a plausible way was to keep going with the "spread" of the harmony with the continuous descend of the lowest voice. At the end of bar 70 the trombones enter by overlapping the horns and continue the descending quarter note idea. Whenever I could I tried to counteract  descending lines in one or several voices with an ascending line in another voice (e.g. Horn 4 in bar 71). With bar 71 having a lot of downwards motion (in the theme and the accompaniment) this would in classical voice leading not be considered  as particularly attractive (as well as some fourth parallels) but I felt with the idea of the descending line targeting towards 72 and the theme again being a fixed factor, it was worth going outside the rules  for the higher intention that I was following. And that ascending 4th horn helps at least slightly to counterbalance that descending motion.

That strong focus on voice leading also creates some harmonic situations that on their own feel rather weird. For instance count 2 on bar 71 has a strange Cm7/Db chord. However, I would not call it like that. In this case, I would argue for a pandiatonic approach combined with a voice leading that lead to this particular voicing. So it's not so much a Cm/Db but rather a chord sourced from the Ab major scale with a root note of Db (or to put it short: a sort of subdominant of Ab). You could even dig deeper and understand count 1 and 3 of that bar as "proper" Db chords and 2 and 4 as chords that function somewhat dominantic to it. You could harmonize that bar also as Db, Ab, Db, Eb (changing on each quarter) which would be the structural idea behind it.

Similarly, bar 72 works in the same way of landing on the inversion of the Subdominant, moving to Gm7b5 which could also stand in for a Eb7 which would be the dominant, moving on to Ab in 73.

With the first moment of rest reached in bar 72 and the musical idea of the descending line coming to its conclusion there (reaching that very low F on the Tuba) there was a need to find another vehicle to keep developing this passage to push onto the climax in 75. One was the trumpets entering which now took over the melody approximately an octave higher and adding more brightness to the sound and the other was the contraction of the rhythmic pulse by adding some eighth note figures with some strong melodic contours.

I kept the idea from of the tension rest on the downbeats of 72/73 from the original theme as it created some nice textural variety.

From a reharmonisation standpoint, in spite of this passage feeling harmonically quite complex, the basic structure remains more or less as the original idea. The reharmonisation happens on the level of bass notes (which I change around for the third or fifth of the chord sometimes) and extension of chords with 9ths, #11s etc.

The only actual reharmonisation happens in bar 75 which at the same time becomes the vehicle for the modulation in 77. In the original version of the theme, bar 75 would be a Fbmaj7 chord which is substituted here for a Cb chord which becomes a variant of a tritone substituted dominant for the following Bb chord.

As you can see especially in the part from 73 onwards, some of the middle voices lose their voice leading quality a bit in favor of vertical structure (eg Trumpet 3) but in general most lines remain their linear integrity.

Writing it like this of course also has the benefit of each musician playing and interpreting a rather plausible musical line and in spite of our brain not being able to focus on all these voices individually, the effect of this summed up voice leading still feels quite fullfilling musically.

As a few side notes, you might notice that I quite specifically wrote in rests for breathing or slured the phrases in a way that it would accomodate for breathing. In such a setting, it is quite essential to "think with breaths" as when ignored it might be possible that lines are being split apart within a musical gesture.

Also, you might notice that quite a few chords are violating Low Interval Limits which has several reasons.

As the melody was set in its contour and the range it would play in was set by the range of the french horns, it was already defined that the highest voice would be already relatively low, so in order to provide the entire chord information in some places a violation was unavoidable. However due to the soft dynamics and therefore only few high harmonics that were present in the sound, it is not a big problem to violate these and still remain quite transparent. In a forte setting this would not have worked.