Composing Phrase by Phrase 6

Second Theme

Hello and welcome or welcome back to Composing Phrase by Phrase, a phrase by phrase breakdown of a composition in progress! Last week, I made the jump from unaccompanied melody to string quartet. In the process, I added space to the original theme in order to help support a longer composition. What comes next? Two things - planning out a form, and starting to fill that form in.

Planning first. I've got two points right now. The first is the revised version of the original theme, which looks like this.

First Theme excerpt

The second is the Bb major contrasting theme I wrote couple weeks back. I haven't done a string quartet version of that bit yet, though, so let's get into it. Here's the original...

Second Theme original

...and here's the string quartet version.

Second Theme quartet

The first thing to notice is I evened out and maintain a consistent meter. I did this because the revised first theme is even more wonked out than the unaccompanied version. The original form of the first theme is metrically uneven, but it was also rhythmically consistent. The addition of harmonic highlights adds a layer of rhythmic depth the original doesn't have, and even though it's not a lot a lot, it adds enough off-kilterness I felt it would be good to balance that out in the second theme.

Another point of balance is the arrangement. The revised first theme is given to the first violin and harmonized by the second violin. For the second theme, I turn it upside down - the theme is given to the cello and harmonized by the viola. The two violins add a high sustained tone on top to give a nice pad of color the theme can move against. It's a little bit like... Bob Ross's wet-on-wet painting. You establish a base and by adding color before the base dries, you get nice mixes and blends you which would otherwise be very difficult to achieve.

Other than the meter, the melody is basically unchanged. The original had a rest at the end of the four-bar antecedent and another at the end of the consequent. I took the opportunity to fill this space with a line that leads the violins away and back to their high harmonic pad. The phrase, altogether, has the following arrangement: mm.1-2 cello/viola melody with violin pad; m.3 all four instruments harmonizing together; m.4 cello and viola cadence, violins lead back to repetition of antecedent. Here's a visualization of the effect in the score.

Trading Foreground

This technique of shifting the listener's attention to different parts of the ensemble is extremely important as works get longer and longer. This instance is a very localized example. Symphonies and operas and the like will do the same across large swaths of the composition. The very best will have this kind of foreground shifting at the phrase level, as well, so I'd say it's good I practice that where I can.

The eighth measure is also worth taking a look at. The original theme simply and sensibly cadenced and left it at that. In this case, it felt right to reharmonize the expected closed cadence to an unexpected open cadence (nerd-speak: a deceptive cadence using the V of vi). That created the space for a phrase extension, passing the ending curlicue between the violins and viola/cello pairings before everybody comes together for a unison statement of the curlicue, helping reinforce the actual cadence as the actual authentic cadence.

Now, I've got two points, it's time for a third. When I originally planned out the form, I thought I was going to go for a sonata form. In brief: Exposition (Themes 1&2 or more expose themselves); Development (Themes run from the police); Recap (Themes 1&2 or more return, now reformed and functional members of society). That's not what I ended up with, which is fine. Revising is part of the creative process. You'll have to just wait and see where it goes.

Nevertheless, I did another arrangement of the original theme in full, unchanged. It looks like this.

Theme 1, full statement

The arrangement gives the melody to the first violin, harmonizes it with the second violin and viola, and the cello holds down the bass. The result is a rich, full-bodied sound that is especially resonant given the key-signature uses lots of pitches that align with the instrument's open strings. There are very few harmonic alterations in this statement, barring a couple of chromatic bends in the consequent, because this was intended to be the expository statement of the theme in full after a somewhat chaotic and disjointed introduction.

I'd also like to draw attention to a rhythmic element in the cello. One thing I was always on the look-out for were ways to help massage the blocky regularity of the original theme. The first two measures of the section show one way to do this. The overall meter is 5/8 (musical units are grouped in fives). The melody and its harmonization are entirely eighth-notes. The cello is given quarter-notes. Now, I could have arranged the cello's part in an alternating quarter/dotted-quarter pattern, like this:

alternative arrangement

Instead, I opted to keep the quarter note rhythm consistent. The consequences of this is, the cello's rhythmic pattern runs over the bar-line and creates a two-bar musical line under the melody's 1+1 phrasing. This type of metric overlapping would probably be called polyrhythm, but this is such a simple case I'm more inclined to call it a basic polymeter: the melody is in 5/8, the bass is in 5/4. Whatever you call it, the effect is the same. The longer bass line helps glue two units of the melody together into a single structure.

As a nod to classical balance, I opted to make the second half of the theme metrically similar. This also helps drive the music towards its cadence a bit better.

Ok! I think that's plenty for today. If you enjoyed reading, consider following the blog on your RSS feed for weekly updates. If you really enjoyed it, consider joinging my Patreon, where I post audio samples of the blog excerpts along with other compositions that don't make it to my website. Either way, thanks for stopping in!