I took Dvorak’s 8th with me in the car today to listen to a couple of things, the orchestration and the development. I learned enough to depress me.

First of all, my impression was (and a study of the score this afternoon confirmed it) that the strings do all the heavy lifting. They never stop playing. They may be playing pads and chords under the winds occasionally, but mostly they’re playing “the piece,” and they never stop. So I have to learn to do that. You would think this was easy. It is not.

Second, the man’s development I have always admired: tuneful, witty, inventive, and beguiling. Seemingly organic. Seemingly effortless.

I know it can’t have been. I know he took a lot of time with each of his symphonies, and he wasn’t just doing it a couple of hours twice a week. It was his day job. Besides his natural gift, he worked at his craft, many hours every day.

I begin to wonder if I would be more productive if I had all day every day to thrash out ideas and discard the less worthy ones. I think this is part of my fear of just generating crap: I don’t have time. I’m not even using everything I’m writing. I am sketching out things that don’t go anywhere. But with Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near, I’m afraid that I will sometimes settle for what’s on the page already.

Can you tell that this evening’s work didn’t go well? I’m going to eat my Häagen-Dazs raspberry sorbet.

Actually, I spent a lot of time rejiggering some of the orchestration of the first part of the G major section. The solo violin is now gone and in its place is an oboe, with a flute in an upper octave for support. The inevitable repeat has been taken down an octave in the upper strings, which gives it a warmer sound. I also switched the harmony line to the violas instead of second violins. The cellos are now bowing instead of plucking.

The rest of the time I had I started just throwing the melodies to the strings. I think I’ve been dumb to resist letting the strings carry most of the load. Probably what I should be doing is starting with the strings playing everything and then back off from there.

Of course it sounds like crap right now, so give me another day to make sure there’s enough crap to make it worth clogging up your browser with another mp3.

I’ve got to figure out now how to orchestrate the Big Time Recapitulation of the Rachmaninoff Ripoff™ theme. I’m pretty sure it’s in the wrong register for everyone, but it’s got to be in G major, so there we are. Hey, you think this why no one’s written a G major symphony since Mozart? (Well, Stephen can think of only two, Dvorak’s 8th and Mahler’s 4th. Fortunately the Dvorak is a favorite of mine, and a model if I may be so bold.)

If you’ve been keeping up, you will remember that this morning I despaired of moving IV. Lento, Allegro beyond the repetition of the main theme, but then I posted an update saying that “all hell had broken loose.”

Well.

Here’s the mp3 of the new bits. I don’t know that you can tell whether the hell had broken loose. This is what happened. There was no way around repeating the main theme (the Rachmaninoff ripoff), so I just did that. It’s fairly blatty, but at least it’s out of the way. I’ll polish later.

Then I sat down and started playing with the agitato theme, seeing what I could do with that. I’ve been using 12-staff folio score paper to sketch on, and suddenly I found that I had three of these booklets going at one time, with bits and pieces linked across pages, back and forth. As I tinkered with each strand, suddenly each would split, generating another strand on another page that had to be written and then tied back in to the original.

All in all, by the time I quit for lunch and the Masterworks concert, I had sketched out enough music to double the length of the movement so far, and get us all the way to the Big Time Recapitulation of the Rachmaninoff Ripoff™ them.

So what I’ve done here is put the piano sketches into the score. You may not be able to tell where this is heading, orchestration-speaking-wise, but it’s in my head somewhere.

We start (after the twin statements of the Rachmaninoff Ripoff™ theme) with a statement of the agitato theme, very wistful, with simple 8th-note accompaniment. Then it undergoes diminution as well as picking up the tempo, and we’re treated to a variety of keys.

Suddenly the agitato theme inverts, and we get more adventure. Notice the new motif : two descending eighth-notes and a quarter. It starts out innocently enough but immediately swerves into startling harmonic changes.

You may be surprised to hear the original agitato theme enter in a definitely minor treatment, I reserve the right to expand that section. Right now it’s only four measures, the theme repeated.

And then we’re back to the Rachmaninoff Ripoff™ theme. Be patient and keep listening. There are a few more surprises before we hit the Big Time Recapitulation, which is where I stopped.

Marc should be very proud. I just vomited it all up on the page, tied it all together, and stuck it in the score. Now I’ll refine it over the next few days. Those who followed the orchestration of 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way will remember what fun that is.

Two quick things before I get back to work:

Rumor has reached me that our conductor, upon receiving the first 30 measures of IV. Lento, swore oaths. I may have written uplayable stuff. Oh well.

Back at the beginning of this unbegun symphony, there’s a bedrock motif I have in mind for the first movement. It’s important that the symphony start with this bedrock motif. This morning, I’ve been playing with some major key versions of the agitato theme for the ending, and it suddenly occurred to me that the bedrock motif fits beautifully over the major agitato theme, meaning I can wind up the symphony by overlaying the original theme over the end in some glorious finale.

Mere coincidence? I think not.

Back to work.

All right, here it is.

I like the last bit before the double bar, where the strings pluck the diminished seventh chord and it heads into the major section. I’m not sure I like the transition. I think we need one more gasp of the tympani there. I’ll play with it to see.

I’d really like to hear it more cleanly and more humanly played. I might know what to do with it.

Tonight I will have to work very hard to get IV. Lento to the double-bar, i.e., the transition into the G major portion of the movement so we can begin working towards its glorious ending. In preparation for this, I pulled up the file and listened to the whole thing this morning.

I hate it. It’s not compelling, it doesn’t sound inevitable, it sounds contrived, and of course the computer’s inability to sculpt any kind of sensitive performance makes it sound even worse.

That’s the loathing. The fear is that I can’t fix it. Is it a matter of orchestration? Do I just need to reassign what’s being played to some different combination of instruments? Or do I need to reconfigure the phrases themselves? Am I stuck in the same motives and need to find a fresher way to explore them? It just sounds stodgy right now.

Then there is the fact that Stephen has asked to see a score this weekend. There’s no way I can have the movement completed by then, of course, so that’s part of the panic and disappointment. The other part is the idea of letting someone who actually knows what’s what look at it. He’s already said he likes what he’s heard, but still…

Time’s wingéd chariot, and all that, eh, wot?

Maybe I’ll feel differently tonight.

I think you’re going to be pleased, if not astonished. I know I am both.

You know I am a true Lichtenbergian* because this passage is really masterful, and yet I stopped before fully fleshing it out. Well, it’s bedtime, and I have a long weekend ahead of me. I can mess with it all day on Saturday while ignoring the GHP parent orientation video. Anyway, it’s all just clicking in the notes at this point.

The slow part coming out of the brass choir, right at the start, still sounds idiotic. There’s a gap where there should be a dying note. Oh, well, hear it under lights. **

I know you’ve heard it before, but here forthwith is the next section of IV. Lento.

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* No, I haven’t heard from Noah, and no, I don’t have access to lichtenbergian.org. I understand he is very busy with some stuff that actually makes him money, but tomorrow will be two weeks from when the domain name went live. It’s getting to be a little too Lichtenbergian. Just hold those thoughts. That what your waste book is for.

** Honest to God, I was working on this passage tonight and glanced over at the pile of papers on the right and was shocked to see the piano score for “Dream Land.” I had completely forgotten the progress I had been making on Day in the Moonlight. Too late now, I’m on a roll. Plus, Stephen wants the score next weekend.

All right, I think I’ve got it. I sequestered the heavy section into its own file, for future use. Then, and follow this carefully, I took the original opening (this one, up until the first brass choir) and added it after the brass choir in the current version, adding some woodwinds for flavor. In other words, it’s sort of the opening of this movement, but stripped down, without the scurrying violins.

Then, and this is the new part, I brought back the violins in their nervous 32nd triplet runs, and under that comes the English horn with a weirdly beautiful version of the agitato motif, very slow.

I think what’s going to happen is that the strings will pick up the agitato motif in a higher key, mutating it closer to its final form, and then it will struggle to stay alive, gasping for breath, until it just dies away.

From that death will arise the main theme in G major, solo violin, as you can hear at the end of the above clip.

No mp3 from tonight’s work. I want to get all the bits right first. But I am on the right track.