About My Musical Language (an imaginary Q & A)
Q: Who would you say are your main influences?
A: I’m composing a lot of choral music these days – and where choral music is concerned, I think I have been much influenced by the “Three Ps”: Palestrina, Poulenc and Pärt. I’m also a big fan of the choral music of Bruckner and Rachmaninoff. In my instrumental music, I sometimes feel the influence of Shostakovich, Debussy and Britten, among others.
Q: How do you think about music, and approach composing?
A: I’ve heard that there’s a dictionary that defines music as “the art of combining tones.” And I’ve heard musicians criticize this definition as too narrow. “Silly dictionary,” they say, “there’s more to music than just tones. There’s also rhythm, dynamics, texture, timbre, expression and other things, as well. Clearly, whoever wrote that definition was no musician!” But applied to my music, “the art of combining tones” fits pretty well. Yes, of course there are many other aspects to music – and to my music – but my primary interest as a composer lies in pitches and in their interactions.
Q: Let’s take a closer look at your scores. There’s no key signature on the page, but there are plenty of accidental sharps and flats. So is your music atonal – or what?
A: No, my music is not atonal. But neither is it tonal in a traditional sense. Rather, my music is a chromatically fluid continuum of tonalities: it’s more about the journey than the destination (although my pieces often have a way of ending up where they started). Sometimes, my music may seem to settle into a key-centre for a few bars, but it’s not long before it wanders off in a different direction. I don’t think about keys when I’m composing, and performers needn’t worry about them either – because worrying about key-centres in my music is like worrying about what way is “up” if you’re floating in Outer Space.
Q: But couldn’t you add key-signatures to your music, after you’ve written the piece?
A: I could, and occasionally I do. But with most of my pieces, a key-signature would only get in the way. And by not using key-signatures I invite the performer into my compositional thought-processes. There are 12 notes in an octave, and I like them all! Of course, the same notational rules apply to my music as apply to “normal” music: sharps and flats persist through the measure, but are cancelled out by the next bar line.
Q: And what about the strange way you sometimes spell notes?
A: Different kinds of musicians feel differently about this issue. Keyboard players don’t care much if they’re looking at an E-flat or a D-sharp on the page. It’s all the same to them. Wind and string players care a little more – and singers care very much. So it’s mostly vocalists who find some of my spelling decisions perplexing. But here’s the problem: often, when I try to make the notation of my horizontal lines look as smooth and clear as possible, vertically the score looks like gibberish, full of weirdly-spelled chords. And when I concentrate on making my music look right vertically, I get horizontal gibberish, bursting with awkward intervals. Often, the best I can do is a compromise between vertical and horizontal logic. There’s simply no way to make my music look like Mozart on the page.
Q: How would you describe your harmonic language?
A: I’m glad you asked! In part, it’s the product of some deliberate stylistic restrictions I’ve imposed on myself. First of all, in keeping with the tenets of 20th-century modernism, in which I was schooled, I avoid simple major or minor triads like the plague. However, in a clear and deliberate break with modernism, I also enforce a strict a ban on semitonal relations in my music. You will never find a D and an E-flat sounding simultaneously, or a G-sharp sounding against an A, for example – not even “in passing.” Vertical sonority is very tightly controlled in my music.
Q: So what kind of chords do you use?
A: The basic “building blocks” of my music are four-note chords. I like dominant seventh and dominant ninth chords, half-diminished seventh chords, and quartal and pentatonic chords. Occasionally I’ll write a fully diminished seventh chord, or a chord derived from a whole-tone scale, but these are rare in my music. You won’t find a chord in my music that Wagner never wrote – so in this way my music is very much connected to the 19th century.
Q: And how do you get from one chord to the next?
A: That’s where it gets kind of tricky. But usually, I’ll use some kind of pivoting technique, making use of common pitches. It’s rare for me to make a leap from one chord to another chord that contains no common pitches. The result is a kind of chromatic “slip-sliding” – and sometimes even my suspensions have suspensions! Also, to mention Wagner again, like Wagner I have cultivated the subtle art of delaying cadence. In many of my pieces, there is no stable, “finalizing” cadence until the last measure.
Q: What about rhythm and meter in your music?
A: Usually, I strive for the same kind of fluidity in rhythm and meter as I do in my harmonic style. So I usually compose without time signatures and bar-lines, marking them in later.
Q: What about melody?
A: I generally avoid any kind of melodic writing that sounds straight-up diatonic: just as my harmonies are chromatic, so too are my melodies. For my melodic material, I’m a big fan of the octatonic scale, and sometimes I use pentatonic (or altered pentatonic) scales.
Q: So why make yourself (and your performers) jump through all these tricky stylistic hoops?
A: I can best answer that question by talking about the difference between originality and distinctiveness. In the dark days of the 20th century, many composers were obsessed with the desire to be original, and the results could be hideous – hideous in a highly original way, perhaps, but hideous nonetheless.
Personally, I do not aspire to be “original” in my music, but I do wish to have a strong, audibly distinctive and consistent personal style. In this regard, I think Francis Poulenc is an excellent role-model: there’s nothing especially “original,” about his music, but his style is so distinctive that it’s impossible to hear a few bars of his music without knowing that it’s by Poulenc. I would like the same thing to hold true of my music: after a few bars, it’s clearly and recognizably mine.
I’m well aware that there are some composers nowadays who take a very different approach, embracing eclecticism – even to the point of mixing styles within the same piece. But I don’t want to be one of them.
© Colin Eatock 2021
A: I’m composing a lot of choral music these days – and where choral music is concerned, I think I have been much influenced by the “Three Ps”: Palestrina, Poulenc and Pärt. I’m also a big fan of the choral music of Bruckner and Rachmaninoff. In my instrumental music, I sometimes feel the influence of Shostakovich, Debussy and Britten, among others.
Q: How do you think about music, and approach composing?
A: I’ve heard that there’s a dictionary that defines music as “the art of combining tones.” And I’ve heard musicians criticize this definition as too narrow. “Silly dictionary,” they say, “there’s more to music than just tones. There’s also rhythm, dynamics, texture, timbre, expression and other things, as well. Clearly, whoever wrote that definition was no musician!” But applied to my music, “the art of combining tones” fits pretty well. Yes, of course there are many other aspects to music – and to my music – but my primary interest as a composer lies in pitches and in their interactions.
Q: Let’s take a closer look at your scores. There’s no key signature on the page, but there are plenty of accidental sharps and flats. So is your music atonal – or what?
A: No, my music is not atonal. But neither is it tonal in a traditional sense. Rather, my music is a chromatically fluid continuum of tonalities: it’s more about the journey than the destination (although my pieces often have a way of ending up where they started). Sometimes, my music may seem to settle into a key-centre for a few bars, but it’s not long before it wanders off in a different direction. I don’t think about keys when I’m composing, and performers needn’t worry about them either – because worrying about key-centres in my music is like worrying about what way is “up” if you’re floating in Outer Space.
Q: But couldn’t you add key-signatures to your music, after you’ve written the piece?
A: I could, and occasionally I do. But with most of my pieces, a key-signature would only get in the way. And by not using key-signatures I invite the performer into my compositional thought-processes. There are 12 notes in an octave, and I like them all! Of course, the same notational rules apply to my music as apply to “normal” music: sharps and flats persist through the measure, but are cancelled out by the next bar line.
Q: And what about the strange way you sometimes spell notes?
A: Different kinds of musicians feel differently about this issue. Keyboard players don’t care much if they’re looking at an E-flat or a D-sharp on the page. It’s all the same to them. Wind and string players care a little more – and singers care very much. So it’s mostly vocalists who find some of my spelling decisions perplexing. But here’s the problem: often, when I try to make the notation of my horizontal lines look as smooth and clear as possible, vertically the score looks like gibberish, full of weirdly-spelled chords. And when I concentrate on making my music look right vertically, I get horizontal gibberish, bursting with awkward intervals. Often, the best I can do is a compromise between vertical and horizontal logic. There’s simply no way to make my music look like Mozart on the page.
Q: How would you describe your harmonic language?
A: I’m glad you asked! In part, it’s the product of some deliberate stylistic restrictions I’ve imposed on myself. First of all, in keeping with the tenets of 20th-century modernism, in which I was schooled, I avoid simple major or minor triads like the plague. However, in a clear and deliberate break with modernism, I also enforce a strict a ban on semitonal relations in my music. You will never find a D and an E-flat sounding simultaneously, or a G-sharp sounding against an A, for example – not even “in passing.” Vertical sonority is very tightly controlled in my music.
Q: So what kind of chords do you use?
A: The basic “building blocks” of my music are four-note chords. I like dominant seventh and dominant ninth chords, half-diminished seventh chords, and quartal and pentatonic chords. Occasionally I’ll write a fully diminished seventh chord, or a chord derived from a whole-tone scale, but these are rare in my music. You won’t find a chord in my music that Wagner never wrote – so in this way my music is very much connected to the 19th century.
Q: And how do you get from one chord to the next?
A: That’s where it gets kind of tricky. But usually, I’ll use some kind of pivoting technique, making use of common pitches. It’s rare for me to make a leap from one chord to another chord that contains no common pitches. The result is a kind of chromatic “slip-sliding” – and sometimes even my suspensions have suspensions! Also, to mention Wagner again, like Wagner I have cultivated the subtle art of delaying cadence. In many of my pieces, there is no stable, “finalizing” cadence until the last measure.
Q: What about rhythm and meter in your music?
A: Usually, I strive for the same kind of fluidity in rhythm and meter as I do in my harmonic style. So I usually compose without time signatures and bar-lines, marking them in later.
Q: What about melody?
A: I generally avoid any kind of melodic writing that sounds straight-up diatonic: just as my harmonies are chromatic, so too are my melodies. For my melodic material, I’m a big fan of the octatonic scale, and sometimes I use pentatonic (or altered pentatonic) scales.
Q: So why make yourself (and your performers) jump through all these tricky stylistic hoops?
A: I can best answer that question by talking about the difference between originality and distinctiveness. In the dark days of the 20th century, many composers were obsessed with the desire to be original, and the results could be hideous – hideous in a highly original way, perhaps, but hideous nonetheless.
Personally, I do not aspire to be “original” in my music, but I do wish to have a strong, audibly distinctive and consistent personal style. In this regard, I think Francis Poulenc is an excellent role-model: there’s nothing especially “original,” about his music, but his style is so distinctive that it’s impossible to hear a few bars of his music without knowing that it’s by Poulenc. I would like the same thing to hold true of my music: after a few bars, it’s clearly and recognizably mine.
I’m well aware that there are some composers nowadays who take a very different approach, embracing eclecticism – even to the point of mixing styles within the same piece. But I don’t want to be one of them.
© Colin Eatock 2021
