Gazing at the Night Sky - Composition Walkthrough Pt.2 - Bars 1 - 20

After talking about the thematic material and the concept of this piece in the last part, let's dive right into the piece itself today. As usual we're working with reductions here, the score sheet itself is attached at the bottom of the post.

Bars 1-9

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/gatns-bars1-9/s-2MyIMB4T7EU

I wanted to open the piece with a calm but flirring texture, somehow portraying the sparkling stars or a general sense of awe and fascination, so I chose to give it an intro that would somehow set the mood for the rest of the piece. Of course it is a hyper cliché to open a piece with a high sustaining violin note but I nevertheless felt it to be fitting for this piece and "clichés are clichés because they work" ;) 

The harmony moves back and forth between a Gbmaj7 and Fmaj7 chord which I personally find particularly "awe and wondery" probably to my upbringing and all these 80s and 90s movies that used these chord types extensively.

But this harmonic assessment is just part of the truth here.  There's this melodic call on top that is first being played by the solo flute followed by the solo horn which is the head motif of the B theme that we later on hear in the middle part of the piece. And this melodic statement contains notes that are not really what we would consider to be "first choice" looking at the chord below.

Over the Gbmaj7 they additionally introduce a C and an A and over the Fmaj7 there's a Db played. This is where something that I recently wrote a lengthy article about comes into play. Neither the melody nor the chords alone paint a complete picture here but only in context it becomes apparent that those are not "standard" maj7 chords.

The notes in the melody colour this harmony in a way that it seems to be derived from a different scale than simply Gb major (or ionian). Taking the notes from the melody into consideration here we end up with scale material of: Gb, A, Bb, C, Db, Eb and F which is the 6th mode of Bb harmonic minor. This impression becomes even clearer with that cello side line that enters in bar 6 over the Gbmaj7 chord again and descends down these scale degrees. It just happens that Gbmaj7 is also part of the chord material that this scale provides.

Personally, I love playing with such things as they create interesting harmonic worlds and particularly in this case with the #9 and especially #11 create some feeling of awe and wonder.

Similarly, the Fmaj7 chord includes a Db in the melody which is this "classic space scale" of regular major with a flattened 6th degree. This scale is also known as "Harmonic Major".

Orchestrationally, I consicously decided to open with a texture that has no bass register and only fill that register later on in bar 6 to first create this kind of weightless, suspended feeling before it gets grounded. I use string tremolos and trills to create this flirry feeling which is barely noticeable but still creates way more texture than static sustains.

In bar 8 also low brass enter with a Fmaj7 voicing in piano creating this extra "warm" texture.

Bars 10-20

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/gatns-bars-10-20/s-NlXSU3u9fKK

This sequence serves as a bridge from the calm opening of the piece to the fanfaric main theme. There are quite a few things going on here that are worth mentioning:

In the high strings, I establish an arpeggio of an Fsus2/4 chord which remains pretty static throughout this section and creates some sort of rhythmical engine through its movement (with a nod to Holst's Jupiter). Additionally it functions like one layer of a more or less constantly shifting bitonal harmony that sometimes splits apart into two distinctive harmonic fields and sometimes melts together into a more resolved souding extended chord.

The lower layer of the bitonality is formed by the brass and low strings. The whole passage in itself is a throughcomposed crescendo with more elements joining in bit by bit but also by moving the top notes of the sustaining brass chords upwards mostly in steps.

Regarding the intervallic tensions some of the bitonal chords are pretty spicy but that upper layer in the strings feels almost like a high pedal point (pedal chord?) that is quite forgiving regarding the sometimes heavy dissonance. I really liked the harmonic tension that builds up here.

Notice some recurring elements like the chord progression Gbmaj7->Fmaj7 that we already had in the beginning or the dotted eighth followed by a 16th rhythmic motif that becomes a central element of the main theme. The choice of chords was made rather freely. I wanted to create that feeling of moving through the circle of fifth. Structurally it's twice the scheme third down - tritone up: Db-A-Eb and Eb-C-Gb. But I didn't have that structure in mind when writing it, I rather chose chords that I felt sounded good.

In bar 16 and 18 whenever the chord progression hits the supposed tonic of F, I establish a scale motion upwards in the woodwinds/glock to fill the rhythmic and harmonic rest of these bars.

Bar 20 moves to a rather dominant feeling chord where the Fsus2/4 in the strings arpeggios and the Cm7(b5) in the lower instruments form a chord that you could call Csus4(#9#11) if you looked at it together.

In general, you could look at the harmonic stages of this section in different ways depending on whether you see them as bitonal or on the other hand as "very extended" chords, however in some cases (like for instance bar 12) trying to find one chord symbol for the harmony would become rather impractical and cumbersome. After all I would always prefer to try to analyse it according to how you hear it and in this case I would say it is pretty clear that these two layers remain rather separated in our perception. This of course is mainly due to their very different texture and register (high short note string arpeggios vs. low sustained brass).

I mentioned already several times that I very often prefer to shape long (brass) notes dynamically rather than just sustaining the note on a flat dynamic. In this case the longer brass chords hit with a strong accent, drop immediatley and crescendo up again towards the end of the note. This has a positive side effect that you still get that brassy quality from the notes with the strong attack but immediately create some more space for the rest of the orchestration. If the brass were playing through in forte, they would mask a lot of the other instruments.

In the next part we will dive into the first statement of the main theme.