Matthew C. Saunders--Orchestral Music--www.martiandances.com

Orchestral Music

Five Rhythmic Etudes for orchestra (18 minutes)

Movements 1 & 5 premiered June 2007 by the Ohio State University Symphony Orchestra, Marshall Haddock, conducting (movements 1 & 5), Columbus, Ohio

Is it perhaps a rite of passage for a composer to spend a great deal of time in graduate school crafting and honing a piece for orchestra, getting it ready for the school ensemble, hearing the premiere and then perennially sending out recordings of the premiere for follow-up performances that never come? This is exactly why I have written but one original composition for orchestra (I have done some arranging, off and on, for the Macon Symphony Orchestra in central Georgia). It is also why I am considering whether I should make a band transcription. The piece, if I may be so bold, is quite good, but orchestras are more interested in playing the music of dead composers. I’m still looking! The piece that I labored over for nearly a year still hasn’t had a complete performance—do you know a conductor who would like to give the premiere?

The piece itself is an examination of rhythm as it applies to the orchestral texture. That makes it all sound very boring, though. The truth is that when I began the piece, I had was coming off the high of both Martian Dances and Auguries of the Soul (see Chamber Music), two pieces that have their basis in scientific theories and science-fiction dreams. I decided to base my next work on science, and chose Richard Feynmann’s book Six Easy Pieces, taken from a set of lectures given at CalTech by one of the great scientific personalities of the twentieth century. My intent was to have one movement based on each of Feynmann’s chapters, a sort of musical tour through basic physics. The first movement originally held the title “Atoms in Motion,” for example, which is poetic enough and, once you hear the movement I wrote, very apt for the resulting music.

As always, it didn’t go that way. Six pieces became five, and the correlation with the book was lost. I seem to prefer odd numbers to evens anyway. I often ask my students when they are designing a new piece to tell me which is more symmetrical—three of the same object or two? Many of my multi-movement forms and quite often my single-movement forms hold to this tripartite plan, often creating two balanced fast sections with a slower section in the middle.

Rehearsals for this piece were a little bit scary—I wanted to be there every moment, but I also didn’t want to be the hovering composer. I am still intimidated by string players—I don’t know why, except that they seem to have this shadow over me, as though all the real music were written for their instruments. As you can tell, the real musicians at that performance were the brass and woodwind sections, and I knew that going in—just the structure of the only orchestra at Ohio State that meant there were lots of grad students and talented undergrads in the winds and brass, but the entire studio in the string sections.

The performance was also a strange night. The entire concert was devoted to concerto competition winners, except for my piece and Dan Perttu’s Light and Shadow in Yosemite. I had already passed my final oral exam, so I should have been relaxed, but I had taken a full load that term, including extra counterpoint and a seminar in advanced theory (Lewin is fun, I think), so there was no relaxing. The hall was nice and full, but my parents were nowhere to be seen. I kept calling them from the lobby, and I missed the whole concert before my piece—the date had completely slipped their minds! It was June 1, and if you don’t turn that calendar page, you won’t see it coming. I totally forgive them—I can’t remember another time anything like that happened, and they’ve done so many other things for me over the years that it didn’t matter. They did sit through graduation a week later, too.

The five movements rely on very different rhythmic approaches: “Hobnob” uses mixed meter, “Serenade” emphasizes a vocal approach to meter, “Scherzo” employs hemiola to a great extent, “Fugue” is a minor tribute to Morton Feldman (in spirit, not technique) and flows directly into “Finale,” which experiments with metric modulation.

The title is a reflection of my unwillingness to draw unwarranted and unwanted comparison to two of my compositional heroes, Arnold Schoenberg and Bela Bartok. For this reason, I rejected the titles Five Orchestral Pieces and Concerto for Orchestra, despite the great importance of these works to my design and process. Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces in particular is a piece that I have long loved, ever since I discovered a metric and rhythmic plan among the various movements while analyzing the piece as an undergraduate.

Listen to the first movement, “Hobnob”