Chamber music, from duos to larger ensembles of one player per part, can teach us some of the most important lessons about the craft of composing. The creation of chamber music encourages an investigation into, and refinement of, myriad musical aspects, from timbre and harmonic colour to large-scale structure, and allows one to test out ideas through live performance with relative ease. Both theoretical and practical experience can be gained through ensemble writing, and whilst chamber music is worthy of a lifetime’s exploration in its own right, insights gleaned from its creation can inform everything from solo to orchestral works.

A Holistic Approach

The reciprocal relationship between art and life is always at the forefront of my mind when writing for a small group of players, and I feel it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that playing or writing a chamber work can teach us something about how to be good human beings too. Things to consider when writing chamber music include the following: are all musical elements (rhythm, melody, articulation, dynamics, etc.) being used to maximise the music’s communicative power? Will the notes on the page bring the best out in the performers? Are the aims for the piece being honoured, without a slavish adherence to theoretical ideas that may not in reality translate to an engaging musical narrative? To achieve these things, a composer will need to be empathic, inquisitive, determined, respectful, flexible, generous, idealistic, realistic, and self-aware.

Once a piece is written, if you are lucky enough to have it rehearsed, you will also need to be observant, open to constructive criticism, flexible (whilst remaining true to your ideals for the piece), and above all good at listening, and not just to the notes that the musicians play. It is likely, particularly at the early stages of your composing career, that your performers will have had many more years of experience than you, and you should take every opportunity to learn all you can from them. Direct dialogue between composer and players will always be more effective in a chamber music context than an orchestral one, where, due to finances and the need for order, there is simply not the time to receive feedback from everyone.

It takes a combination of humility and cast-iron inner confidence to be able to take criticism of your newly born opus: the slightest query can feel like a personal injury from which one may never recover, and my initial instinct tends to be wholesale acquiescence to a musician’s suggestions. But, whilst it is always good to take comments on board, you must stand up for what you have written if it deserves defending: is a passage you have written truly not idiomatic, or does it simply require a little more practice? Is there a compromise to be made that will in fact increase your music’s power? For example, perhaps that complex rhythm in the viola part really is needed to convey a sense of turmoil and frustration in a certain bar, but do there simultaneously need to be so many triple stops? Might a reduction in harmonic complexity in this passage result in your intended emotion being communicated more effectively and allow your viola player to concentrate more on music than on mechanics?

Whilst the vast majority of performers are endlessly dedicated to bringing out the best of any piece of music, they are only human, and I have seen exasperation (after, for instance, a long day of contemporary music workshops) boil over into outright dismissal of a composer’s ideas. If you are unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of such treatment, it can feel utterly devastating, and it is at this point where you have to draw upon reserves of strength (composing can be a crash course in learning to deal with rejection), honesty (is there an aspect of your technique, or score presentation you really need to work on?), and understanding (criticism is rarely personal, and at any rate, a nasty experience like this can, if approached constructively, provide a useful insight into the psychology of performance, and the vulnerabilities that it can engender).

The reality of a composer’s life, particularly if you are still classed as ‘emerging’, is that you will be asked to write more chamber music then orchestral music, as it is less expensive to commission and perform. Chamber works (particularly works around ten minutes for standard ensembles) can be performed easily by many different groups, and inserted into very varied concert programmes, even those that are otherwise solely made up of the classic great works. If a cellist in a piano trio is impressed by your work, you will find that your name travels along the musical grapevine and other commissions will ensue from chamber groups eager to play new music. The musical possibilities when writing music for an ensemble of one instrument per part are limitless and are an artistic reward in their own right, but I can think of no better play and training ground for a composer than writing chamber music: there are fewer places to hide inferior technique and lacklustre ideas, but triumphs are similarly easy to discern, and performers will champion your compositions, doing a lot of your marketing and public relations work for you!

Towards Rehearsal

Without doubt, the most important experience for a composer’s development is to hear their own works performed live. But before you get to this stage in the life of a new work, and no matter what one’s ability, a composer can (and should) frequently put their ‘performer’s hat’ on and interpret their own work: a vital part of the creative process for me involves looking at the score as if for the first time, and playing or singing what I have written, taking only the information currently on the page into account. By slowly playing a two- or three-part passage (perhaps by playing the piano and singing simultaneously) you can really hear how the parts fit together, and if there are any unintended clashes or un-deliberate parallels. It’s surprising how often you realise that what you have written isn’t quite what you meant: perhaps those triplet quavers are really a quaver and two semiquavers for instance (using a metronome can be very helpful in determining such things).

If for any reason you are unable to play an instrument, you can use computer playback, replaying over and over until you can fully appreciate how each part relates to each other. The danger when doing this is that you forget that real people will ultimately play your music: the computer can perform a series of semiquaver tetrachords extremely fast, but a double bassist can’t. But as long as this fact is at the forefront of your mind, it can be useful.

Duration in music often feels different when brought to life by human movement (such as the moving of a bow arm, or a deep intake of breath). For instance, in the build-up to a climactic point in the music – perhaps at the zenith of a long crescendo in a slow movement – some notes (and bar-lengths) preceding the high point may feel as if they need to be lengthened slightly. There’s something about getting to the arrival point that needs an extra hair’s breadth of time, much like one would take an extra-long breath before telling someone something of the utmost importance. Or perhaps there’s a hurry to arrive at the climactic point, and your unbroken run of quavers needs a single group of quintuplet quavers to underline this urgency. In another section, the omission of just one semiquaver in a fast passage, turning one of your 2/4 bars into a 7/16 bar, gives that extra dash of scherzando to your phrase: often, when made physical through performance, that extraneous note can feel heavy and unwieldy in the hands or vocal cords. Simply ‘performing’ a piece in one’s head is another option if the singing and playing are not possible: with enough practice you can bring a chamber-size work to life in your imagination, reading through the score at performance speed and getting a good idea of how the musical gestures feel in time, even if you are not certain you can really hear all the notes. Unhampered by any lack of technical skill on an instrument, one can experience the music at the pace it is designed to be heard at and ascertain whether the varying phrase-lengths ‘breathe’ as they should, or if they seem stilted and unnatural.

During this process, I try and make sure that only what is needed in the music is there on the page – bearing in mind that sometimes what is needed is a wall of raucous hemidemisemiquavers screeched out at fortissimo dynamic. In the arena of a string quartet, for instance, a feeling of inner conflict can be created with tiny glitches in a rhythmic unison between second violin and viola: the violin’s four semiquavers followed by a crochet destabilised and imbued with doubt by the viola’s quintuplet semiquavers, with the last semiquaver tied to the following crochet. Dyads can be weighted so that a mezzo-forte E is coloured with a hint of piano G♯ (in my mind’s eye, three measures of green, one of red), or a major seventh in a high tessitura can glint and rotate in the light as each player’s dynamics rise and fall non-concurrently. In the chamber context, these intricacies can have the greatest communicative power, and if framed well by the music of other members of the ensemble (or by silence) there can be great clarity in complexity, and a powerful emotional precision.

Of course, hearing one’s music rehearsed and performed by others is even better. For various, mostly practical reasons, the way to receive regular feedback as a developing composer from the people who really matter (e.g. the performers) is to write chamber music. Within hours of finishing a work (or indeed when only fragments are complete), a duo, trio or quartet of friends can be gathered together in a domestic room to bring what you have written to life. To my mind, chamber music is an excellent vehicle with which to test one’s ideas in the real world: on the one hand, training your mind and ear to appreciate a vast palette of timbral, harmonic, rhythmic and dynamic variations and combinations, and on the other furnishing a composer with a healthy dose of common sense. In critically listening to your chamber work, you can ascertain what it is worth being fastidiously specific about, and what is worth letting the performer use their inherent musicianship to intuit.

For instance, one may spend a long time worrying about where the oboist will breathe in the phrase at the writing desk, but in performance, alongside the other players, it becomes apparent that the artistry of the player communicates the impression of a continuing line, even during the intake of breath. This is not to say that you shouldn’t strive to write the most idiomatic music possible, with adequate time to breathe, but that only in real-life performance do those more nebulous aspects of instruments (that are impossible to discover from textbooks) become apparent. I personally have discovered that I worried far too much about the differing characteristics of tone colour across an instrument’s range, so clearly delineated in my orchestration books. Of course, these principles are extremely important to be aware of, and I would never expect a dyad comprising an oboe playing B♭ below middle C and a flute playing middle C to sound balanced in dynamic or timbre. But the difference between a written middle c on the horn (in my book classed as ‘deep and solid) and the g a fifth above it (described as ‘bright and heroic’) is nowhere near as monumental as I once expected, and a skilled player will be able to achieve many tone colours over most of the instrument’s range.

Much as a good host ensures that all their dinner guests are involved in the conversation and appreciated for the individual character traits they bring to the table, a composer who seeks to create a work that is more than the sum of its instrumental parts will be cognizant of how the players interact within the group on many levels. In an ideal world, idiomatic instrumental writing, democratic distribution of material, tautness of structure, and clarity of notation will all work together to create a direct and compelling interpretation of the composer’s musical message. It is rare to achieve such symbiosis: one either tends to think too much of practicalities (the piece ‘works’ really well, and is beloved by the performers; but does the large-scale harmonic structure that was meant to provide a sense of tension throughout the entire movement function as intended?) or to too slavishly follow a philosophical/technical intention for the piece (each instrument’s music is strongly delineated with a distinctive character, but, by sticking so rigidly to the compositional aim, is the narrative of the work one-dimensional in performance?). However, the point is to carry on trying, and chamber music is an ideal vehicle with which to continue failing at achieving the perfect balance between the theoretical and human aspects of a musical composition.

The Limitless Possibilities of Conventional (and Unconventional) Ensembles

As your catalogue of chamber works expands, there will be times where you will want to write for an instrument that is a complete mystery to you, and most players –particularly of less common instruments – are only too keen to show you how they work. I had personal experience of this recently when I was asked to write a short piece for solo accordion. Apart from what one can see (i.e. keys and buttons played with two hands) I had no clear idea of how the instrument functioned, and it took two drafts of the piece before I was able to fully comprehend how to write what I wanted. A small misunderstanding during my initial meeting with the accordionist (concerning the lefthand ‘stradella’ (chord-playing) keyboard) meant that the chords that I had written (which I thought would sound like a towering pile of thirds – B♭ major on top of B major on top of C major triads, with a range of over two octaves) instead came out as a violent cluster chord, with all notes contained within one octave. These mishaps will always happen, and the important thing is to be flexible enough to partially (or completely) rewrite your music if necessary: in this case I realised that, with the use of various registers – different octave doublings and timbres controlled by register buttons on the accordion, analogous to organ stops – I could create the sense of harmonic expansiveness I was aiming for, using much simpler harmony. It’s easy to feel embarrassed when making mistakes like this, but as long as the quality of your musical ideas is good, and you bring your sketches to performers with a curious, good-humoured, and respectful attitude, you can be ensured of a creatively enriching experience.

Other than music of exceptional quality, the thing that performers place great value on is evidence that the composer really knows how to write for their instrument. A player will devote all their energies to mastering a fiendishly difficult passage if they feel it has true artistic merit and is written by someone who has made an effort to understand the characteristics of their instrument and how it works. With this as a foundation, they will be willing to experiment, pushing technical boundaries and attempting to make what might initially seem impractical passages work: they may even discover they are able to do something new on their instrument as a result.

It can be a wonderful thing, finding one has little or nothing to say in response to hearing a run-through of a piece for the first time: it can mean that you have transmitted all that needed to be said to the performers and the audience through the markings on the page. This leaves you free to discuss those aspects of a piece that can’t be notated in a score: subtle aspects of interpretation, the philosophy of the piece and its performance. Perhaps most important is hearing the chamber musicians talk about the practicalities behind the musicality: how playing a particular melodic passage in (for instance) a particular part of the bow and strings when it occurs in each part means that the same graininess, or airiness, will communicate a similar emotion to the audience. Being witness to a discussion about tone colour and its production between two players of similar or different instruments can awaken a musical sense that can too easily lie dormant in composers, when notes, rhythms, and dynamics jostle for attention to be fixed in time and space. These are experiences that a composer should store in their memory bank, so that when writing, the note, the technique to play that note, and the physical gestures that produce both can be brought naturally to mind and symbiotically inform and inspire the musical material as it is created.

Paradoxically, it is possible as a composer to be absolutely clear about what you want in a score at the same time as being flexible and open to multiple interpretations of your work. Consider the playwright, who, having enough confidence in their work, will allow an actor to deliver a line at a slightly more rapid tempo than they had heard in their mind’s ear, if this results in a more convincing portrayal. The words spoken will be the same, whoever the actor is, but pitch, speed, and emphasis will all vary slightly: the strength of the message contained within the line has to be clear enough to not only withstand these differing presentations, but to positively be enhanced by them. It’s much the same in music (although with different variables – for example I would draw the line at letting performers alter my pitches!), and if my experiences of writing and rehearsing chamber music have taught me anything, it’s that sometimes leaving ‘space’ for a player’s own musical expression and interpretation can enhance your work in ways you might never have predicted and make you aware of aspects of your work that you may have previously been unaware of.

As a final note, it’s worth mentioning that, although being able to hear what you have written is vastly preferable, not everyone will have the privilege of access to musical friends who are generous with their time and feedback. In this case, learning from the existing chamber repertoire becomes even more important (although essential for all composers, of course) and, as long as the virtual is complemented by going to as many live concerts as practical and affordable, it is possible to watch and listen to vast amounts of chamber music without leaving the house or spending any money. Online concerts such as those from Wigmore Hall in London can bring the world of chamber music into one’s own home, and many scores can be perused online for no or little cost, either on publisher’s websites, the Petrucci Music Library (for out-of-copyright scores) or via a subscription service like nKoda (for which some colleges or universities have a subscription to access for free).

Nowadays one can write for any combination of instruments one pleases: there are a growing number of ensembles comprising instruments that composers of the past would have never thought of writing for. (The Hermes Ensemble springs to mind: with their line-up of soprano, clarinet, harp, and double bass, they have created an entirely new chamber repertoire.) Really you should write exactly what you want to write, and if you have three good friends who are all tuba players, then why not try a tuba trio? Often, when writing for unusual combinations, your imagination is stretched in ways that it might not be with more ‘standard’ combinations: writing for three low brass instruments might lead you to think more clearly about intervals (you’d need to be careful not to write too many closely spaced chords in the lowest register, as you’d run the risk of creating a sort of harmonic sludge) and tessitura (yes, one could allocate low, middle, and high ranges to each tuba, but would the first tuba be fatigued within minutes, having to play all those high notes so continuously? You want to keep your friends, after all!).

These adventures with unusual combinations will be tremendously satisfying, and the innovative musical tricks that you come up with will come to mind when writing for more conventional ensembles: for instance, the hocketing technique that you thought of for your two lowest tubas might be applied to the whole bass section in your new orchestral piece, creating a sense of thrilling instability in the work’s roots. I recently completed a work for renaissance recorder quartet: as these instruments sound vastly better when played only diatonically, I decided to use two recorders at the modern A440 pitch, and two at Baroque pitch (A415, one semitone lower). With this combination it was possible to create chromatic music using only diatonic notes: the complication lay in that both As (i.e. A440 and A415) were notated as the note A in the score (not A and G♯, as you would hear). By the time I had finished this piece, I not only felt like a musical puzzle master, which was tremendously satisfying, but I felt as if I had honed my ability to write music in which all parts were in constant dialogue; to achieve chromaticism there was a great deal of back-and-forth between the pairs of recorders in modern and baroque pitch. As the work is very fast at times, it was vital to pay attention to the length of melodic/rhythmic groupings, which had to be short enough so that the music wouldn’t get too comfortable in one tonality, but long enough so that each player would be able to maintain a sense of the pulse (e.g. hocketing single quavers around the group would be impossible to maintain at a regular pulse for more than a couple of beats).

Nevertheless, the most performed work in my catalogue is a nine-minute piano trio: one of the best ways to get one’s work widely performed is to write short pieces for standard ensembles that can easily be slotted into a variety of concert programmes. Whilst a half-hour string quartet by a contemporary composer might deter more conservative audience members from attending their local music society’s concert (a harsh, but often true, fact), a short modern piece in an otherwise classical programme can often turn out to be the highlight of the evening for many attendees. It is likely that, as you are trying to make your mark as a composer, your fellow performers will be attempting to do just the same, forming duos, trios, quartets, and quintets to promote to concert societies and to enter into competitions: it is worth being pragmatic and writing for ensembles that are very common at least some of the time.

Taking Inspiration from the Canon

Each ensemble has its own challenges, and when writing a string quartet or a piano trio it is particularly easy to feel weighed down by the great works in the canon as well as inspired by them. However, many of the great works (from classical to present-day) do seem to have many commonalities in terms of their approach to orchestration, register, and distribution of melodic material which a composer would be wise to take heed of, even if no pre-existing work is consciously used as a model for what one is writing. For instance, listening to the piano trios of Schubert, Ravel, and Birtwistle reveals many more similarities than differences despite the fact that the latter’s trio eschews the conventional four-movement form of its predecessors, encompassing three distinct sections in a single, fifteen-minute movement.

The opening of Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor (1914) is exquisitely beautiful; the chordal melody in 8/8 (divided as 5/8 plus 3/8, in reference to the Basque zortico dance, which is notated in five beats) is so beguilingly elegant that all is needed, after the initial presentation of the theme in the piano over a dominant pedal, is a repetition of the melody with the addition of the violin and cello in unison, two octaves apart. The violin and cello encapsulate the piano in this second statement of the theme, the piano’s chords in second inversion so as to provide the chordal melody that all three instruments contribute to with a wider range span and greater lustre. Both string instruments are in a relatively high (but not stratospheric) part of their range, the cello beginning on E above middle C with the violin two octaves higher. The effect is that of a melody that feels translucent and luminous, the pianissimo dynamic meaning that register, string (both instruments play on their top strings), bow pressure, and bow length (an average of two notes per slur) all contribute to the feeling of lightness and airiness. The two-octave span between the two strings also means that each instrument has its own registral identity – the violin above the right hand of the piano, the cello below it, and the left hand of the piano below the cello. Barring the bell-like doubling of the E above middle C in the piano left hand, none of the four parts overlap, resulting in a timbre that is devoid of any muddiness: it sounds as if simultaneously made of velvet and air.

In the opening of Ravel’s trio, the three instruments join in the presentation of one idea, with the combination of each player’s timbres blending to enhance the chordal melody. Another common texture is that of two complementary or contrasting ideas (frequently melody and accompaniment in the classical canon) divided between the musicians, most commonly with the two string parts either playing in rhythmic unison to provide chordal accompaniment to a piano melody, or stating the theme in either octaves or (for instance) thirds. Both Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 (1827) and Birtwistle’s Trio (2010) use this method of dividing material a great deal throughout their works, with the only real difference being that Birtwistle’s material for the strings, whilst it is often very similar and in contrast to that for the piano, is not in total rhythmic unison (as it often is in the Schubert). In all three works, great interest and variety is achieved by varying the manner in which instruments combine in emphasis or contradict or comment on each other’s material: in Ravel’s trio there is a greater fluidity of function, the cello one minute adding definition and sparkle to a piano chord with a pizzicato; the next having a flowing arpeggiated conversation with the violin whilst the piano plays the melody. In Birtwistle’s work, there is a more sustained contrast between the strings and piano, such that it takes on a structural as well as textural function: here, as Erica Jeal states, ‘the piano is a different beast, insidiously introducing the stuttering, mechanical rhythms that will dominate the second section, the work’s core. Having won the strings over, it is the piano that begins to rein the music in again; a quiet, hesitant dialogue ensues, by the end of which all three instruments sound like exhausted automatons.’¹

Some groupings, such as clarinet, violin, and piano, present different conundrums depending on how you think about them: is it an overcrowded duo? Or a trio that lacks the amount of strength in the bass register that you would usually expect? How do the two melody instruments relate to the piano? I like to spend time thinking about each instrument’s individual characteristics, and how one might emphasise and subvert them, before looking at other works for the same ensemble. The presence of two high melody instruments in a clarinet trio might lead you to wonder how it might work if you were to give only the piano a melodic line in one section, making the violin and clarinet the bass instruments. Or perhaps you might decide to experiment with a four-part canon, with the clarinet and violin in the middle of the tessitura. Looking at works such as Charles Ives’s Largo (1901), where for long stretches only the clarinet and piano play, might give you the courage to do something similar, giving the performers and audience a chance to luxuriate in each instrument’s tone colour. (When composing, it can often be difficult not to use all the instruments all the time: I often have to remind myself that this is not essential!) Other composers, such as Hans Gal and Aram Khachaturian, often share the melody equally between the two instruments (each alternating between faster and slower melodic material, as if in a perpetual conversation), with unison melodies over chordal piano writing at climactic points.

Just as when writing for piano trio, maintaining a degree of registral integrity for each instrument when all are playing is often advisable for textural clarity; but in ensembles of three or more very differentiated timbres, there is just as much inspiration to be found in the jarring of tone colours as there is in the blending of them. A violin and clarinet playing a unison low G (a fourth below middle C) will sound very different to a unison high E on three ledger lines: in the former, the warmth of the clarinet’s G may add a smoothness and mellowness to the graininess of the violin’s open string, but near the top of each instrument’s range, it will be the stridency of the clarinet that will add steel to the colour, potentially overpowering the violin at loud dynamics. What might adding a sforzando hit in the piano on the same note add to the texture? If nothing else, it is a stimulating mental exercise to imagine how each instrument’s varied characteristics might bolster, develop, deepen, conflict with, reduce, or cancel out another’s, and how following or breaking established compositional principles might inform the emotional and structural narrative of your work.

The ensemble types that you find tricky will largely depend on your musical background: if you grew up playing in a brass band, then a brass quintet should be within your comfort zone, whilst a string trio will feel like a foreign land. In my case, when writing a brass quintet, I had a full grasp of each instrument’s characteristics, including extended techniques; but in rehearsals it became apparent that my trumpet writing was quite unrelenting, making the work extremely difficult to play. All that was needed was a few extra rests, and a more equal division of the high notes: no more than eight beats were changed to remedy the situation, but these brief resting points made all the difference. Writing chamber music is reward enough in itself: the limitless timbres and forms will keep you busy for a lifetime, if you so desire. As long as your work is rooted in respect for your performers as well as the drive to create stimulating, communicative work, you cannot go wrong, and you will learn much about yourself and your fellow musicians along the way.

Listening List

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At some point a young composer will face what seems a daunting task: writing for orchestra. The main challenges are the lack of familiarity with most of the instruments we will be writing for, and to imagine how different combinations of timbre may sound. There are many orchestration texts that are useful for consulting details concerning register, idiomatic aspects, and other information that, unless we play the instruments, we may not know off-hand. In this chapter I will focus on works and topics that are not generally covered in the available literature. Since I believe that when writing for large forces, orchestration should be an integral part of the compositional process, my observations will not be about how to orchestrate as an abstract concept, with rules about what to do or not to do when writing for the orchestra. Instead, I will provide my insights on selected orchestral passages, focusing mainly on how the specific sonorities were achieved. Beyond the bibliography at the end of this book, there are many instructional videos on instrumental techniques available on YouTube, as well as the scores that are posted with accompanying soundtracks which are recommended.

The Development of the Modern Orchestra

The idea of orchestration as a separate discipline from composition is a nineteenth-century development. Notwithstanding the discoveries and advancements during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of orchestration, and the fact that composers consciously applied their acquired instrumental knowledge in their works, the terms orchestration or instrumentation were never used. The first recorded instance of such terminology is the German term Instrumentierung, which appears in an 1807 musical lexicon by Heinrich Koch.¹ Although the first decades of the nineteenth century saw the appearance of textbooks dealing with instrumentation,² it is with the publication of Hector Berlioz’s Grande traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (1843) that we have the first important theoretical text on the subject. It did not take long after the appearance of this treatise for the concept of the orchestra as we know it today to crystallise and to become normative.

By the time Scheherazade (1888) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes (1897–9), and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (1888) were written, the orchestral ensemble became in great measure the format that, to this day, persists as a template for composers to work with, or rather to work around. During the twentieth century, there were many examples of resistance against the fossilised nature of the orchestra; however, the heft of its institutionalization together with the museum quality of concert programs may explain why it remains today as the default option for large-scale ensemble writing. The advent of computer technology together with the arrival and evolution of notation software over the last four decades have changed the way we work as composers. While these programs, combined with the almost real-life quality of virtual sounds, are of great advantage to all of us, they also posit the danger of not understanding the idiomatic aspects and limitations of each instrument, since the computer can and will make a synthesised rendering of anything one puts down on the virtual score.

In his Principles of Orchestration (1913), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov painstakingly addresses many of the issues regarding timbre, voicing of chords, homogenous and heterogeneous groupings, and dynamic balances between the different families of instruments. In chapter III of the treatise, he contends that ‘the art of orchestration demands a beautiful and well-balanced distribution of chords forming the harmonic texture. Moreover, transparency, accuracy and purity in the movement of each part are essential conditions if satisfactory resonance is to be obtained. No perfection in resonance can accrue from faulty progression of parts.’³ These principles are still valid today; good orchestration will never save a badly written work.

The First Half of the Twentieth Century

The first significant act of rebellion against the prevailing late nineteenth-century framework was Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1911–13). The expansion in terms of instruments (including inclusion of the Caribbean guiro – referred to as rape guero – at rehearsal number 70), the massive sonorities, the non-normative deployment of instruments such as the bassoon in the high register, together with other aspects related to rhythm, pitch, and form, argue for the work to be regarded as truly radical within the musical context of 1913.

To consider how novel Stravinsky’s conception of the orchestra was, let us focus on a chord in short score version (Example 7.1; see also four bars before rehearsal number 13).⁴ The chord is already interesting in its sonority, and the voicing is as important as the pitch content. But what denaturalised it, creating a new kind of synthetic sound, is the orchestration. The lightness of the six solo violas in the upper pitches (the high D played as a natural harmonic) combined with the bass clarinet in the lowest note transform the chord into an ‘unearthly’ sound, a synthesised sonority that in its alterity did not exist before. If we re-voice the chord into a more traditionally functional way and re-orchestrate it using the string section, the results will be less striking. Without changing the pitch content, we have normalised the way it sounds.

Example 7.1 Two voicings of a chord from Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring (1911–13), 4 bb. before fig. 13.

There are certainly other ways to reimagine the same pitches with different results and varying degrees of musical interest. What becomes clear is that, although we can start with an abstract conception in terms of pitch content, the results will depend not only on how a chord is voiced, but also on the registers we use and the choices we make during the process of orchestration. This last aspect of register is exemplified in the opening bars of The Rite of Spring where the bassoon plays in the upper limits of its register. I will venture to affirm that, more than the notes themselves, it is register and timbre that come into focus.

Dull, perfunctory, and generic orchestration must be avoided, and the material assigned to each instrument should not be based on vague notions of register, dynamics or colour. It is always very tempting, when presented with a large number of instruments, to feel like a child in a metaphorical candy store. Composers like Mahler, Stravinsky, or Debussy never used more than what was needed to achieve their intentions, and their choice of instruments was never uncritical. It is illuminating to examine their scores and study how their choice of instruments is integral to the musical results.

Doublings are one of the most difficult aspects to handle when making decisions about melodic material. We generally decide to double a musical line or melody in response to audibility, but also to look for colour. The choice should never be just about register, and must always be carefully measured according to dynamics, contour, and timbre. In Dialogue du vent et de la mer (see seven bars after rehearsal number 54) from Debussy’s La Mer (1903–5), a remarkable doubling occurs with flute and oboe that goes beyond simple melodic enhancement. In previous iterations (such as rehearsal number 46), the same motive appears doubled in rhythmic unison and in octaves between the oboe, English horn, and bassoon, a more homogenous sonority out of Rimsky-Korsakov’s sound world. However, when the same motive reappears here it is transformed by means of orchestration: the sonority floating in the air, evading any semblance of a simple reduction of instrumental timbres.

This sonority is the outcome of a doubling, where the oboe plays in unison with the flute but articulates each beginning of the phrases in crotchet triplets while the flute plays the same triplet as a minim followed by a crotchet. To further enhance the effect, Debussy stratifies the orchestral accompaniment in three distinct areas: a combination of a low pedal holding the same interval of a fifth (D♭–A♭) that is articulated with a tremolo in the cellos while the basses and the fourth French horn hold a D♭ and an A♭; a central register with harps playing a measured tremolo of a minor third an octave apart (A♭ and F, completing a D♭ major chord with the lower instruments) is joined by tremolos in violas and second violins playing sul tasto; and a high A♭ played in harmonics by the first player of each stand in the first violins. This diffusion of a D♭ major chord sounds full and ethereal at the same time, while the high A♭ harmonic creates gentle friction with the B♭♭ and B ♭ of the melody that contributes to the shimmering effect of the passage. The precision demonstrated by Debussy in terms of how to effectively convey in the score the difference between background and foreground, and which instruments and modes of playing are assigned, is a fundamental goal for composers who aspire to master the orchestra.

Another paragon of orchestral meticulousness is Daphnis et Chloé (1909–12) by Maurice Ravel. Notable in this work is the use of orchestral pedal tones, ‘hidden’ agents that are fundamental within the orchestral texture. The first sound we hear in the ballet score is a low pedal on the note A with the timpani playing tremolo, the double basses, and on the second bar the second divisi of the violoncellos. The bass drum picks up the tremolo (five bars after rehearsal number 2) as an unpitched echo with a new low F pedal played in octaves by the double basses, taken up at rehearsal number 3 with a low F played by the fourth French horn in conjunction with the second divisi of the double basses. Although the first musical signal we hear in the work is a pedal tone, it quickly recedes to the background, giving way to melodic and harmonic content which becomes the focus of the listener’s attention. These ubiquitous long tones function as a kind of binding glue that holds the orchestral textures together and contributes to the fullness of the orchestral sound. Also worth studying is Ravel’s near-constant use of divisi in the strings, which can be interpreted as a counterstatement to the prevailing massive sonority of nineteenth-century orchestral string writing.

In his book Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, Theodor W. Adorno makes one of the most compelling observations I have read about the composer’s orchestration. Adorno argues that in the first movement (one bar after rehearsal number 10) of the Fourth Symphony (1899–1900), the four flutes in unison, rather than reinforcing the sound, turn the instruments into a single sound, that of an imaginary ocarina.⁵ This is another example of using doublings as a way of transforming timbre. In this passage, orchestration becomes a metaphor, a means of expressing something that goes beyond the materials; as Adorno writes, ‘it creates an effect sui generis, that of a dream ocarina: such must have been children’s instruments that no one ever heard’.⁶ Almost a hundred years later, Krzysztof Penderecki reifies Mahler’s illusory ocarina in The Dream of Jacob (1974), this time not in the form of a childhood memory, but rather in the form of real ocarinas, creating a sound world that is at once strange and familiar.

My observations about the works discussed so far relate both to the specific technical approaches and to the inherent aesthetics of the composers. As timbre and colour became focal points, the new sounds stemming from non-tonal chordal constructions further radicalised the way composers used the orchestra. The concept of Klangfarbenmelodie of the Second Viennese School, and other explorations by mid-century composers still provide fertile ground for us to rethink the way we approach the orchestra. What we learn by looking at these scores is that orchestral sounds are not the result of applied knowledge acquired in textbooks; they are the outcome of both the musical material and the expressive needs of the composers. In Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 (1914–15), or Arnold Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1926–8), the superimposed hierarchical structure of the orchestra did not impede the imaginative rethinking of the medium. Both works start as if the premise is an ensemble piece, and in the case of Berg a percussion group! The fragmentation that characterises the music of these two composers and the orchestral colours they create are inseparable from harmonic, contrapuntal, and rhythmic ideas. Contrary to being some kind of mannerism, the music emanates from abstract compositional concepts.

Most of the modern literature on orchestration emphasises European music; however, there are composers from non-European countries that are as prodigious as their European counterparts. The Malambo from Alberto Ginastera’s Danzas del Ballet Estancia (1941) turns the orchestra into a sonic vision from the Argentinian Pampas. At the beginning of the movement, Ginastera transforms the traditional strummed guitar accompaniment into orchestral textures that combine oboes, trumpets, violins II, violas, and piano (left hand); meanwhile, the arpeggios in the flute and piccolo (doubled by the right hand of the piano), together with the glissandi of violins I, remind us of the simple static triadic harmonies that are characteristic of the genre.

Ginastera’s Malambo is one of the most successful pieces in the repertoire in terms of the precise articulation of complex orchestral rhythmic structures. In the above-discussed passage, the superimposition of groupings of six quavers and three crotchets are punctuated by percussion instruments and trumpets with rhythms that, together with the other instruments, create a metaphor for a malambo ensemble (guitar, drums, and percussive sounds, like stomping on the floor, produced by the dancers).⁷ This metaphor goes so far as to sustain the illusion of the dance movements in the way the percussion and the glissandi on piano (e.g. rehearsal number 2) evoke the kinetic nature of the dance. Ginastera takes the use of percussion out of the exotic, fully integrating the ensemble to express the essence of the Argentinian malambo; here the percussion ensemble is not supplementary, but it is rather an integral part of the music’s formal and sonic structure.

After the Second World War

After Stravinsky’s breakthrough, we must wait until the avant-garde of the post-war era of the 1950s and 1960s to hear again the kind of tectonic movement that audiences experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century. Composers like György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Krzysztof Penderecki still used traditional orchestral formats, but their compositional processes led them to reimagine the ensemble. The sounds of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–7), Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), and György Ligeti’s Atmosphères (1961) are as distant to the sounds of the first half of the twentieth century as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was to its predecessors. In Ligeti’s case, we can see new types of synthetic sound textures, as I previously noted in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (Example 7.1).

The first measure of Atmosphères presents a massive tone-cluster with a divisi in the string section, creating an orchestral texture of atomised diffusion. Ligeti’s idea of using extreme divisi is not merely colouristic; it responds directly to his concept of micropolyphony where multiple lines of dense counterpoint obscure the polyphony, creating in that way a textural mass of sound. In terms of orchestration, one of the most striking moments occurs between rehearsal letters E and G in the orchestral score. The aural illusion and synthesis of a glissando is achieved by pure means of orchestration, for none of the instruments playing in this passage actually executes a glissando. Through meticulously staggered rhythmic displacements and a complex web of dynamic changes, Ligeti moves the orchestral mass in a virtually fluid and continuous manner. The orchestral sounds of Atmosphères are uncanny and otherworldly, but what is remarkable is that they are inseparable from the compositional processes. They are the result of the intersection between form, registers, timbre, dynamics, and micropolyphonic structures.

From 1979 to 1982, I studied composition with Ligeti at the Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg. At that time, he had completed his opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–7), and a group of students went with him to hear a performance in Hamburg. I remember afterwards that one of the aspects that he was unhappy with was the orchestration (he revised the work in 1996). As complex and dense as his music can be, Ligeti was always preoccupied with absolute clarity and precision in terms of orchestration. He once remarked to me how frustrated he was after the premiere of Melodien (1971). He thought that the linear clarity he was striving for was not achieved, a notion that was dispelled after he heard subsequent performances of the work.

During the last decades of the twentieth century the surge of sinfonietta-style chamber orchestras has produced many works that pull away from the gravitational forces of the orchestra. The inclusion of live electronics has made possible new sonorities and textures that were not available before. However, the orchestra remains as vital a vehicle as it ever was, and there are many composers working today producing innovative orchestral music. At the end of the chapter, I will provide a list of works for further study.

From the Piano to the Orchestra: Sketches and the Short Score

When approaching composing for orchestra, we can consider several different methodologies. One possibility is to work from a short score, a sketch notated in two or more staves approximating the scope of a piano piece. We can also bypass the short score and go directly to the orchestral template, composing and orchestrating at the same time. This approach requires a clear idea of what the composer wants to do: in other words, it requires as a precondition having conceived the music in its final shape before committing it to paper or the notation software of choice. A third way would be to combine the idea of the short score and use the orchestra template to sketch out ideas. Any of these methods can be useful, and sometimes all three are combined.

Although orchestration is not just about transcribing notes from one medium to another, for many composers, the piano is the neutral field of work where ideas are elaborated. Some of the ideas come in the form of passages that include pedalling or that convey certain characteristics of the piano as an instrument. We need to ask ourselves how the effects and sonorities we have in mind, which are usually notated in sketch form, are going to be transformed into orchestral music. In the historical repertoire, we have many examples of how composers transferred sounds from keyboard works to the orchestra. The best examples are those that fully recontextualised the work, avoiding the plain act of a literal mapping of pitches. Ravel is the quintessential example, with brilliant orchestrations of his own piano pieces as well as the masterful rendering of Modeste Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1922), which are worth studying in detail. When I think of writing for winds and brass, ‘Catacombæ (Sepulcrum Romanum)’ [‘Catacombs (Roman Tomb)’] immediately comes to mind as a model for such ensemble writing. The precision in voicing and use of registers avoid the grey and muddled sonorities often heard in wind ensemble pieces.

The orchestration of ‘La grande porte de Kiev’ [‘The Great Gate of Kiev’] is another example of clarity and precision. At rehearsal number 110, Ravel renders the accented piano chords on each downbeat and the low notes on each second beat of the left hand in a striking manner. While the French horns with bass clarinet and tuba play sustained tones, they are reinforced by percussion, harp, and lower-strings pizzicatos. The effect of the percussive sounds of the piano with its characteristic quick decay is achieved by combining these elements, which by themselves would not be as effective. The percussion section consists of an actual bell playing at each downbeat, while a cymbal and a tam-tam reinforce both the lower tones and the resonance created by the bell.

In Moussorgsky’s original score, purely pianistic passages require reinterpretation. Five bars after rehearsal number 111 in the orchestral score is such a case: here the strings articulate in static slow-moving tremolos the broken chord figurations of the right hand in the piano score, while the flutes, oboes, and clarinets play chords in semibreves providing harmonic support and adding the sustained upper resonances we hear when using the pedal. At this point, Ravel uses the full orchestra to enhance the crescendo marked by Moussorgsky. It is also interesting to observe that, as the music gets louder and the density increases with the illusion of clanging bells, Ravel never turns the orchestra into a murky wash of undifferentiated sonorities. For example, at rehearsal number 112, changing from arco to pizzicato in the third divisi of the first and second violins, and the second divisi of violas is a necessary act of clarification within the texture. While playing the main melody, the pizzicato notes reinforce the plucked sound of the harps. The effect of combining the harps with pizzicato strings evokes the percussive nature of the piano and clarifies the orchestral texture without being intrusive.

A different approach to using the work of another composer is the concept of expansion and elaboration. The Fandango attributed to the eighteenth-century Spanish composer Antonio Soler was the basis for my own Fandangos (2000). In this work I explored some of the basic elements of the original harpsichord piece and expanded them into an orchestral fantasy, weaving baroque motives into my sound world. The gestures and ornamental figures of the harpsichord original are amplified and examined through the orchestral lens.

In the first three bars, the D minor triad that initiates the harpsichord piece is amplified, refracted, and ultimately transformed, not only in terms of timbre but also in the nature and the intention of the original motive. Soler’s fanfare-like announcement of the key centre becomes a real fanfare played by the first trumpet with non divisi violas and French horns shadowing the articulated interval of a fifth. The initial arpeggiation is immediately refracted and echoed by the other trumpets (muted) and the oboes. The flutes now shadow the interval of the fifth in the same register as the trumpets and oboes. A simple gesture of three notes becomes material for development and orchestral speculation, with changes of register, dynamics, and rhythm.

The intersection between the tonal world of Soler and my own non-tonal approach was an important element in the development of this orchestral fantasy. Starting in bar 73 of my Fandangos, the prevalent tonal centre of D minor disintegrates. I engage the tonal diffusion at multiple levels: introduction of the chromatic aggregate, superimposition of notes running at different speeds and the use of divisi in the strings and the winds (see bars 77–83). The stratified approach to the orchestra was influenced by the nature of the compositional process – an instance where the orchestration cannot be separated from the compositional process, and where a sketch, due to textural complexity, can only contain basic foreground information. In the next section I will describe in more detail how I worked from sketches to the full score in my Sinfonia No. 4.

Orchestral reductions (i.e. transcribing from full orchestra to piano) can also be revealing. One remarkable example is Béla Bartók’s piano reduction (1944) of his Concerto for Orchestra (1943), intended as a rehearsal score for a ballet production that apparently never happened! Due to the limitations of what a pianist can play, in piano reductions the composer is forced to decide which elements are essential and which to leave out: what we get is a ‘virtual X-ray’ of the work. The published score by Boosey & Hawkes provides Bartók’s original reduction in autograph facsimile and an edited version by György Sándor. A note by the composer is also included, where he explains that small-head notes are not to be played but give a better idea of the work.

Let us look at the first page and examine what Bartók omitted or changed in the reduction. The first eleven bars contain most of the notes of the original score. Two of the changes are the three C’s played divisi by the violas at bar eight, and the line of the second flute at bar eleven which he wrote as small-head notes. String tremolos are indicated in word abbreviations (trem.), allowing the pianist to decide how best to produce the desired effect. At bar thirty we see further simplification in order to prioritise the flute melody and to facilitate the playing of the tremolos in the violins. The greatest compromise of the first page of the score happens at bar 39, where the arpeggiated lines in violas, violoncellos, and basses are reorganised in a way that makes it playable without changing the pitch content. At bar 37, a lower E pedal tone is held for at least seven measures, providing the depth of sound we hear in the orchestra (the pedal starts on bar 35 with the timpani). In György Sándor’s edited version he indicates the use of the sostenuto pedal from bars 37 to 50 as a pianistic solution for the passage.

What do we learn from this orchestral reduction? First, Bartók was concerned with keeping the score playable, and second, he wanted to ensure that what needed to be heard could come across without ambiguity. The idea of orchestral timbre and articulation was also important, even at a mimetic/metaphorical level – see the indication at bar 39, ‘metallic, quasi trombe’. Close examination and comparison between the reduction and the orchestral score will be very beneficial to any composer who wants to learn about orchestration. The reduction can also serve as a blueprint for what can go into a short score, although we need to keep in mind that an actual sketch or short score will never be as detailed as this reduction.

In any sketch or short score there are sonorities that, while not visible on the page, are nevertheless implied. I already mentioned the piano pedal, and in addition, there are doublings that the composer will add during the process of working directly with the orchestral score. Although the sketches will be incomplete and cannot provide sufficient information regarding all aspects of timbre, they allow us to jot down melodic and harmonic content without committing to all the materials that will eventually surround these ideas.

We are fortunate to have available, as an online resource at The Juilliard School Library’s Manuscript Collection, the sketches for Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1910–11).⁸ The sketches appear in twenty-four digital images. As is typical of sketches, some ideas will make it into the final score, others are quickly rejected, and many will go through transformations. Some lines appear with instrument labels, while often the composer just indicates piano or orchestra. The first ideas for the beginning of the Danse Russe appear on pp. 6 and 7, and on p. 17 the music that appears on the second page of the notebook can be mapped to the beginning of the Danse at Rehearsal Number 33 of the orchestral score (Figure 7.1). The lower staff of the short score (a variant of the sketch from pp. 6 and 7) is discarded, and the upper staff becomes the right hand of the piano and the material for the upper winds. Instead of the more dynamic moving bass line deleted in the sketch, Stravinsky opted for a harmonically static version. This change of mind directly influenced the block-like sonorities in the orchestration. On the third system of the sketch, as a reminder, he wrote at the bottom one bar of piano music (indicated as F. Piano), a pattern that becomes the piano part from Rehearsal Number 34 to 35. In this system, Stravinsky also has three staves of orchestral material in a condensed form. The upper staff contains melodic lines, while the middle and bottom staves are assigned to harmonic material and the bassline. Pages 17 and 18 are worth studying side by side with the orchestral score. We not only learn how imaginative and sophisticated Stravinsky’s orchestration was, but also gain insight into his compositional thought process.

Figure 7.1 Extract from the manuscript of Igor Stravinsky, Petrushka (1910), iii. Ink on paper.

Reproduced by permission of the Juilliard Manuscript Collection, Lila Acheson Wallace Library, The Julliard School.

Composers take different approaches to sketching their music, with the short score being perhaps the most useful one. Sketches can be in the form of a whole movement, or they can consist of fragments, reminders of materials that are not yet fully worked out and that are not necessarily sequential. For example, one can write a passage that may appear at a later point in the piece, or a couple of bars may serve as the seed for a longer section. As we saw in Stravinsky’s Petrushka, some ideas will be discarded, while others will be varied in the orchestral score. His sketches also reveal the importance of having a clear idea between foreground melodic material and background harmonic or bassline ideas. When I start sketching an orchestral work, I use a hybrid method that shifts between sketches, short score, and directly writing in full orchestration. The fluidity and flexibility with which instruments, staves, and pages can be added in notation software facilitate this method. With manuscript paper, this was quite cumbersome, and I remember cutting and pasting pieces of paper as I worked with my sketches.

My Sinfonia No. 4 (2008–9) for example was composed using notation software. Melodic material was directly assigned to the instruments I had in mind, although there were instances when I made changes, and I did not write doublings at the initial stage. The orchestral piano part was used to write down harmonic material that was later transferred to the orchestra; in cases where the work does not include piano, a temporary piano part can be added to the score.

The short score for the first page of the published score contained a few elements. The pattern in the cello part was abbreviated to one beat to indicate wherever the pattern changed. The main melody was sketched on the first violin line without doublings. In the percussion section, I indicated ‘pulse in crotchets’. The idea of using the bongos as the main timbre reinforced with violas and basses playing pizzicato, harp, and muted second trombone came at a later stage. In general, I sketched complex passages directly on the orchestral score, as was the case in the third movement. From bars 43 to 54, I wrote most of the lines down as they appeared in the final version. When writing for large forces, I find it difficult to abide by one specific method of laying down ideas. After finishing the first draft of a work, I always revise, change, and delete material; this process will go on until the work is finally sent to the publisher.

The most interesting orchestral works reveal the spirit and the intention of the composer. What we write should never be generic or impersonal, and aiming at writing impressive orchestral effects can result in sheer banalities. I consider the compositional process inseparable from orchestration. How a work sounds should always emanate from its structure and the materials. The late Jacob Druckman (1928–96), whom I consider a true master of orchestral writing, once told me that he used to study Mahler’s symphonies, reading one instrumental line at a time while listening to a recording. Although there are excellent texts on orchestration, I find that the best way to learn is to study in detail the extensive orchestral literature from the early twentieth century to the present.

Listening List

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A voice is a complex thing; deeply intuitive and immediate, yet full of ephemerality and contradiction. As humans, we have a clear, embodied understanding of what a voice does and how to use it, but in trying to understand what it is we are faced with challenges. ‘Voice is nothing if not boundless, furtive, and migratory’, notes Martha Feldman, ‘sometimes maddeningly so’.¹ For a composer, understanding the voice is a relentless dance between the abstract and material, the physiological and the artistic, and the aesthetic and the pragmatic. This chapter will tease out some of these contradictions and themes, beginning with voice types and styles, then looking at the relationship between language and music, and finally exploring the nature of idiomatic vocal writing and so-called extended techniques. The chapter will finish with a nod to the future of vocal music, and a provocation for composers working in this rich and engaging area.

Voice Types

Fundamentally, the voice is a wind instrument embedded in the body. It is ‘sounded’ by breath vibrating vocal folds, much like the double reed of an oboe or bassoon, with the voice’s pitch and timbre controlled by muscles in the vocal tract rather than keys and finger holes, and sound being developed in the resonating chambers of the larynx, mouth, and nasal passages instead of ‘fixed’ reverberant spaces like a flute or clarinet. In comparison to the visible, physical gestures of an instrumentalist, the voice is ‘engendered by an internal choreography [that is] invisible but audible’,² making its relationship with the body’s mechanisms more ephemeral and complex. ‘The voice comes to us as an expressive signal announcing the presence of a body and an individual,’ writes Brandon LaBelle, ‘echoing forward away from the body while also granting that body a sense of individuation’.³ Voices are relational in a way that instruments are not: when we hear a voice, we are compelled to consider who is singing and why, and how they are situated in relation to us.

Just like bodies, each voice is unique, with its own distinct ‘assemblage of “fleshed” sounds’.⁴ Perhaps more than any other type of composition, vocal writing is necessarily a collaborative process: the diversity across singers of not just tone and articulation (i.e. manipulation of the vocal apparatus) but also approaches to pitch, timbre, and dynamics is enormous. This makes the task of categorising voices a complex one. One of the most common taxonomies is of range, dividing voices into either soprano, mezzo-soprano, countertenor, tenor, baritone, or bass. Figure 8.1 shows the common ranges for each voice part, presenting each voice’s tessitura – the most commonly used range, which is also generally the most comfortable and effective – with open noteheads, and more extreme notes that singers may be able to access with closed noteheads.

Figure 8.1 Typical ranges of common voice-types.

As a rule, the higher a voice is in its range, the naturally louder it is. This means that most voices lack projection in the lower part of the register (instead having a rich quality which can be sonorous in quieter moments) but are warm and lyrical across the central part of the range and able to produce immense visceral and climactic force in the higher notes. Working against this schema is of course possible, but as the voice goes higher it requires increased breath support and diaphragmatic energy to sustain. This makes it difficult to control, say, quiet dynamics at the top end, where the larynx is more tense, especially for a sustained period. Extremes of the voice should be used sparingly, as Juliet Fraser notes.

The voice is divided into several registers. The lowest is the modal voice (also called chest voice), which is the normal register for speaking in most voices. Singing in this register has a naturally parlando quality, and at its lower end is rich with audible harmonic overtones. Above that is the ‘mixed’ or middle register, characterised by a more consistent and ‘sung’ tone, followed by the head voice (or falsetto in male voices) where stretched vocal folds and increased resonance within the nasal cavities creates a lighter, more translucent tone. Some singers have access to a further ‘whistle voice’ register (sometimes called ‘bell tone’ or ‘flageolet’) that can reach extreme high notes, employed by Thomas Adès to depict the ethereal spirit Ariel in his opera The Tempest (2003). In between each of these registers is a transition area known as the passaggio. While many schools of vocal training work to smooth out prominent register changes, some popular music and music theatre genres employ the audible breaks of the passaggio for dramatic effect, creating a sound like a stylised cry or sob.

In the operatic tradition, an additional method for categorising voices is through their tonal quality, described in terms of a voice’s ‘weight’ and sonic density. The most commonly used method is the Fach system, which breaks each voice type down into several subcategories (e.g. lyric soprano, dramatic soprano, coloratura soprano, and so on) and associates them with roles from the Western operatic canon that are seen as institutionally ‘appropriate’ for that voice type. Generally, the ‘lighter’ the voice, the more flexibility it has in vocal agility and rapid changes between dynamics and colours, while ‘heavier’ voices are typically deployed for moments of sustained dramatic intensity and volume. Most of the opera-house ‘ecosystem’ still thinks in these terms today – hiring singers primarily on their Fächer and voice quality over, say, acting style – which presents an enticing opportunity for composers to subvert traditional expectations of what singers ‘can do’. The role of ‘Piet the Pot’ in Ligeti’s ‘anti-opera’ Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, rev. 1996), for example, takes the virtuosic showmanship of the lyric tenor in Donizetti or Verdi to its extreme (Example 8.1) as a critique of the ‘stock-in-trade operatic conventions … [and their] relevance in the twentieth century’.⁶

Example 8.1 György Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, rev. 1996), fig. 50, vocal cadenza.

Reproduced by permission of Schott Music Ltd. All rights reserved.

Another important destabilisation of vocal norms has arisen around gender expectations. Adriana Cavarero observes that song, melody, and emotion have been socially constructed as ‘naturally feminine’, whilst speech – where ‘the intellect, the words and their meaning come to the fore’ – are coded as ‘naturally masculine’.⁷ Creative subversion of tessitura and voice type has led to a range of creative opportunities to challenge these social (and vocal) constructions of gender and sexuality, ranging from the use of falsetto in countertenors or chest voice in upper-voice singers as a sort of ‘drag’ vocality – for example in George Benjamin’s opera Into the Little Hill (2006), where the soprano and alto performers oscillate between portraying female protagonists in their ‘sung’ middle ranges and male characters in their modal voices – to trans vocalists like ANHONI exploring queered and androgynous vocalisations by ‘juxtaposing elements strongly coded as masculine (low pitch range) and feminine (tone quality, head voice)’.⁸ Even today, opera is charged with subjugating the agency of female voices – who have historically been limited to portraying youthfully sexualised, ‘hysterical’, old, and demonic characters⁹ – and there is an obligation for composers to radically reflect on how vocal music constructs gender.

Genres, Styles, and Institutions

Voices are not innate but cultured; trained (whether formally or informally) to create vocal timbres that reflect the conditions and values of their production. Every concert hall or performance space has its own assumptions about the types of singing that will be present, and expectations of how tone is produced and vocal registers are used are the guiding force of institutional performance practice. Classical singing style for example, as heard in the opera house, originated with the Bel Canto (‘beautiful singing’) tradition, and is concerned with creating an evenness of tone across a singer’s range through good breath support (sul fiato) and connected ‘lines of vowels’. This approach originated in the eighteenth century as a technology of the stage (i.e. vocal production designed to project over the orchestra) and further developed towards the mid-nineteenth century with an increased focus on tone colour and control in response to bigger opera houses. Increased use of vibrato, lowered larynxes (creating a richness of tone), and seamless transitions between registers are as much aesthetic choices as they are practical, using resonance control to allow singers to perform unamplified.¹⁰

Musical theatre (MT) singing on the other hand emerged from actor-singers in vaudeville and cabaret, who focused on delivery of text more than sound. This technique developed a stratification into distinct registral affects (chest, head, falsetto) for characterisation, expressive use of consonants (rather than vowels), and a higher laryngeal position to create more parlando modes of vocal delivery. Contemporary MT training reflects the amplification and sound design techniques of modern theatre, meaning that vibrato is used for expression (i.e. to ‘colour notes’) rather than projection, and intensity is conveyed through the tonal device of ‘belting’ – where the chest voice is pushed higher in the singer’s range than usual – rather than the acoustical intensity achieved through register. Popular music singing takes immediacy of voice one step further, focusing on the singer’s directness of expression rather than standardised ‘beauty’ of tone. Singers prioritise raw emotional expression and expressive ‘ugliness’ (e.g. ‘twang’, coarseness, fragility, and so on) to directly and authentically communicate lyrical content, alongside a focus on the modal voice, and use of breathiness as a common expressive mode.

In all genres, meaning is cultural coded within the sonic materiality of the voice. For example, classical singing is often associated with artistic legitimacy and the ‘elite’, while popular and folk traditions are thought of as immediate, authentic, and ‘untampered with’: a place for alternative ways of ‘doing voice’ that welcomes singers from a range of identities and physicalities (even though these alternative or inexperienced voices often undergo electronic mediation such as pitch correction in mainstream commercial music).¹¹ At the heart of the intersection of vocality, genre, and identity is the mediation of training, with John Potter arguing that the ‘truly democratic and “natural” singing’ of aural storytelling traditions since ancient times has been marginalised by formal approaches, like classical singing, as a ‘means of articulating social power’.¹² One critique of the hegemony of classical singing modes has been to engage in stylistic pluralism, either through a single performer as in John Cage’s Aria (1958), which requires singers to inhabit ten different vocal styles, or by combining different voice types and performers. Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger (2019) opposes a singer from the Gaelic seán-nos (‘old style’) tradition against a classical soprano to evoke the social tension of nineteenth-century Ireland, whilst Du Yun’s opera Angel’s Bone (2018) uses two non-classical singers (a punk vocalist and a crooner) to depict the other-worldliness of two fallen angels who find themselves in a suburban community of traditional operatic voices.

Another response to classical vocal hegemony has been to explore alternative ‘non-genre’ ways of creating passion and intensity, often focusing on specific performers and bodies. Meredith Monk, for example, employs both her own voice and the voices of others to create non-narrative but emotionally direct vocal collaborations. Works like Our Lady of Late (1972) and Atlas (1991) attempt to cross cultural and linguistic barriers with vocal rituals that might as equally sound like operatic singing as they might the voices of babbling children or ancient shamans. The demands of vocal technique and concentration in Monk’s work call for meticulous preparation, but do not require ‘training’ in the traditional sense, focusing instead on processes of embodiment and personalisation (many of Monk’s collaborators come from oral traditions) in a commentary on classical singing’s complex relationship with the direct communication of personal experience. Collaboration and world-making are key to Monk’s compositions, leading her to use non-traditional notation (Example 8.2) and verbal instructions to communicate intentions, instead of traditional notation.

Example 8.2 Meredith Monk, ‘Slide’ (1972) from Our Lady of Late, opening. Ink on printed transparentised paper.

Reproduced by permission of the Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence.

Text and Language

Finding a text to work with is a difficult task for a composer. Texts need to personally resonate in some way (through themes, use of language, etc.) but must also be suitable for setting. Choosing texts with ‘high poetic intensity’¹³ for example can be challenging: Stephen Sondheim playfully observes that ‘music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn’t need music; lyrics do.’¹⁴ Each language brings its own syntax, sonic colours, speech-rhythms, and historical ‘baggage’ of setting; how these relate to music’s own ‘regimes of patterning’ (e.g. pitch, rhythm, timbre) will vary from language to language. ‘In some cases,’ notes Kofi Agawu, ‘language travels only a short distance before becoming music; in others the gap is much wider.’¹⁵ Beyond semantic meaning, words are also sonic phenomena, with their own sequences of syllables, phonemes, and cadences. In this sense, even fragmented or invented languages (like we find in much of Claude Vivier’s vocal music) are never ‘neutral’. The human voice invites audiences to try to hear the meaning ‘hidden’ beneath the sounds, and an audience will struggle to dissociate from the communicative act no matter how fragmented or ‘broken’ a text is.

Once a composer has settled on which text(s) to use, they must strive to familiarise themselves with it from all angles. Reading a text aloud will be the most useful method to understanding both its technical elements of prosody – metre, construction, rhythmic pacing, and structure – and the more abstract qualities of tone and emotion. Understanding a text’s density is crucial for knowing where it needs space to breathe, or where the written punctuation might hinder musical expressivity. As Edward Cone observes, it is the composer’s reading of a text that forms the basis for interpretation, rather than the text itself. ‘A composer cannot set a poem directly,’ he writes, ‘for in this sense there is no such thing as “the poem”; what [s]he uses is one reading of poem’.¹⁶ Setting a text therefore means to ‘feel through’ the words and respond to their effect and their qualities of sound as much as their functional and emotive qualities.

Determining how the text interacts with the music is vital: how interdependent the musical structure and expression will be from text, whether musical expressivity serves as a supplement or point of departure, and if the music will rupture or disturb the meaning of the text rather than just working with it. Here are some examples of text-music relationships to explore:

1. 1. Integration: the vocal piece ‘is not reducible to word influence or musical influence, but … acknowledges the sphere of influence exercised by both domains’.¹⁷ The ‘Kneeplay’ interludes from Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach (1975), for example, employ numbers and solfege syllables as text: repeated strings of numbers and words that do not hold ‘meaning’ by themselves, but create the aesthetic language of the piece in context. The counting and manipulation of rhythmic cycles being both technical – revealing the schemata behind Glass’s tight ‘repetitive structures’ – and spellbinding, drawing us into the hypnotic state of Buddhist ritual.

2. 2. Incorporation: ‘a poem is never really assimilated into a composition … [but] retains its own life, in its own body, within the body of the music.’¹⁸ Here, words give access to meaning in order to ‘remain true to the poet’s song, echoing it with [the composer’s] own’, but perhaps also ‘uncover[ing] hidden strains of poetic music, revealing beautiful … patterns that might not be heard without the aid of the composer’s art’.¹⁹ Whilst this mode appears across much art and popular song, an interesting ‘alternative’ example is in Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988), where recorded speech is ‘musicalised’ by pitched melodies but retains its own textual and sonic independence.

3. 3. Simultaneity: words and music coexist, affecting each only in as much as they are perceived as one unit. This device is used to humorous effect in Gerald Barry’s surrealist Alice’s Adventures Underground (2016), where Humpty Dumpty recounts his tragic story to the tune of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, with the melody and words not ‘fitting’ together, creating unnatural rhythms, accentuations, and repetitions that prompt us to engage with the words in a new way.

4. 4. Assemblage: ‘poem and music are brought together to form a temporary, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, set of bonds. These bonds are not parallel … [but] a complex intertwinement … which cross multiple layers and voices.’²⁰ In Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus (1986), the myth is retold through ‘broken’ and fragmented narratives, with different versions of the texts presented both forwards and backwards, sometimes simultaneously. This enigmatic treatment of text is not intended to be ‘followed’ in the traditional way, but rather acts as a commentary on themes of temporality, memory, and loss of identity.

This final example – where text provides a sonorous and affective (rather than semantic) quality – brings up the important issue of intelligibility. Text cannot be delivered with the same clarity in all parts of the voice, for instance. ‘Think about the physical set-up’, writes Fraser. To sing extremely high ‘you need to open your mouth and you need a lot of space within the mouth. For this reason, if you want your text to be audible, you should follow the sensible convention of favouring open vowels … and avoiding bundles of consonants; even better, use a melisma so that no syllables change up high.’²¹ That said, where genres like art and pop song might tend to assume clarity and directness of text, opera plays a delicate game with intelligibility in order to bring the voice to the forefront. Mladen Dolar claims that operatic singing is ‘bad communication’ because it prevents a clear understanding of the text, but that this reversal of hierarchy lets ‘the voice take the upper hand … [and] the voice be the bearer of what cannot be expressed by words’.²²

Technique I: Idiomatic Approaches

Writing idiomatically – what Paul Barker and Maria Huesca refer to as writing ‘for’ (rather than ‘against’) the voice²³ – requires composers to think about the body.

As mentioned earlier, the voice centres around breathing, with its own naturally repeating rhythms, and working ‘with’ the breath is the foundation of fluent vocal writing. Traditionally this idea has been synonymous with lyricism: employing linear flow to shape melodies like inhalation and exhalation, keeping phrases to either one breath or finding natural ways to punctuate them, and avoiding short, staccato notes apart from in brief ‘characterful’ songs and arias. Whilst compositional practice has largely moved on from the style of Verdi or Puccini, linearity of phrase is still valuable to think about. Moving the voice around its full range to flex and rest the laryngeal muscles, for example, ensures that voices do not become tense, strained, or tired. ‘The voice needs stretch and release, motion and flow,’ notes Fraser. ‘Asking a singer to deliver sustained high pitches for pages and pages is like asking a dancer to balance on tip-toes with arms stretched above their head for several minutes – it’s fatiguing.’²⁵ It is also important to consider rhythmic and melodic density. Fast-moving and complex vocal writing is unlikely to be clear and accurately pitched for all but the most specialist performers, and music with clear harmonic polarity or repetition is generally easier than completely atonal writing.²⁶

It is important to remember here that a singer’s voice is also part of their personal identity and the same ‘voice’ they speak with and hear in their internal cognitive processes, so their vocal technique will be inextricably linked to their individual approach to communication. Where possible, try to help singers access the ‘feeling’ (i.e. affective aspects) of vocal delivery by choosing the most helpful vocal quality, range, articulation, and dynamics for a musical gesture. For example, rising lines remain the most effective way to drive climax and tension in the voice (and falling phrases, the opposite), since ‘the muscular movements [required] to support breath … in a rising phrase generate physical and emotional response[s] in singers’, helping them to characterise a gesture.²⁷ We can see this approach in Betsy Jolas’ Quatuor II (1965) for soprano and string trio, which shapes the voice around a vocalise-style text (i.e. consisting largely of vowels), working ‘around’ the singer’s instinct and physiology in a careful interplay of elasticity and flow, despite the largely atonal idiom. Remember too that there is no such thing as neutral for a singer: even a mid-range, prosaic mezzo-forte phrase will be interpreted in an expressive way (e.g. ‘bored’) to communicate with the listener.

In general, the composer needs to think about clarity and efficacy of expression as one of the ways they owe a ‘duty of care’ to a singer. Linda Hirst is clear on this matter: ‘composers have a responsibility to make their music possible to vocalise or else to accept practical suggestions that make performance feasible. The fact that some composers choose not to make a particularly idiomatic distinction between the music they write for voices and for instrumental forces can generate tension.’²⁸ The composer needs to take care around what support the singer needs – musically, notationally, and interpersonally (when applicable) – and ensure that any difficult passages are approached carefully and have moments of vocal rest nearby. It is always helpful for composers to sing through their own vocal writing and try out the music in a pragmatic way. Evidence of understanding is a guaranteed way to develop trust with singers and a willingness to collaborate.

Technique II: ‘Extended Techniques’

Much contemporary vocal music has moved away from ‘traditional’ modes of singing towards alternative methods of delivery that blur the boundaries between speech, song, and sound, exploring the musical possibilities of a full range of vocal timbres and performance techniques. There are three areas in which vocal experimentation can occur:²⁹

1. 1. Pitch

   1. ○ Intonation, pitch bends, and melismas

   2. ○ Range and tessitura (including belting, falsetto, etc.)

   3. ○ Vibrato and tremulation

   4. ○ Agility and motility (e.g. ornamentation, coloratura)

2. 2. Prosody

   1. ○ Phrasing and breathing

   2. ○ Metric placement

   3. ○ Consonant articulation (glottal or ‘soft’ onset and aspiration)

   4. ○ Percussive effects

3. 3. Timbre

   1. ○ Vocal resonance (e.g. nasal, warm, shrill, and so on)

   2. ○ Loudness and intensity

   3. ○ Phonation (tensed = throatiness and growl; relaxed = breathiness)

   4. ○ Paralinguistic features (sobbing, whispering, humming, shouting, etc.)

To think of these techniques as ‘extended’ (and therefore radical) is erroneous, since many of these sounds are the most natural things a voice can do. Martha Feldman observes:

Outside of Western classical music, many of the vocal sounds of avant-garde art music are commonplace in a range of popular and indigenous musical cultures, such as beatboxing, South Indian konnakol, death metal screaming, Appalachian eefing, and Tuvan overtone singing. Helmut Lachenmann’s temA (1968) for example – a vocal composition built around variations in breath sounds (inhaled sharply, held, exhaled normally and through the performer’s teeth, etc.) – has similar sonic characteristics to Inuit katajjaq (‘throat singing’) – a rhythmic breathing game between two performers – despite both experiences being achieved through different methods, and holding very different social significance.³¹ István Anhalt draws a comparison between Japanese Bunraku recitation (known as gidayu-bushi) and a range of experimental works of the 1960s – especially Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) – noting a colonising force that seeks to transfigure the ‘rich expressive domain’ of a global vocal tradition into a ‘pathological expression’ of alterity and mental illness.³² Even within the Western art tradition, there is a long history of neglected expressive gestures outside ‘standard’ post-Enlightenment singing; for example the stuttering trillo from the seventeenth century, which we find given new life by Hans Abrahamsen in his song-cycle Let Me Tell You (2013) (Example 8.3).

Example 8.3 Hans Abrahamsen, Let Me Tell You (2013), bb.6–11, soprano part. Copyright © 2013 Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen.

Reproduced by permission of Hal Leonard Europe Ltd.

A more helpful way to frame ‘extended techniques’ is as a re-negotiation of language, where duality between speech and song can be questioned, disrupted, or dissolved (Figure 8.2). This strategic rupturing of language is particularly evident in works like Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III (1966), where the score focuses largely on physical and gestural instructions for the performer’s voice and body in lieu of more ‘traditional’ parameters like pitch and rhythm. Like many other composers of the time, Berio adopts the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA] to cross linguistic borders, focusing on sounds rather than words in an attempt to ‘decolonise’ the voice to its universal essence. ‘From the grossest of noises to the most delicate of singing’, he writes, ‘the voice always means something, always refers beyond itself and creates a huge range of associations. In Sequenza III, I tried to assimilate many aspects of everyday vocal life, including trivial ones, without losing intermediate levels or indeed normal singing.’³³

Figure 8.2 The Speech-Song Continuum, after Barker and Huesca (2018).

Linda Hirst and David Wright suggest that the re-negotiation of language is not so much a destruction as a revelation. ‘With the disappearance of a conventional syntax and semantic framework,’ they write, ‘so an alternative theatre emerges, based upon the unconventional juxtaposition of phonemes and vocal gestures, all depending upon the performers’ ability to set out this alternative communication and the quality of his or her engagement with its vocalisation.’³⁴ This notion of a ‘theatre of the voice’ is key: works that explore alternative vocalities must necessarily engage with a rich history of vocal dramaturgy and embodied performance in the twentieth century, from artists like Cathy Berberian (herself inspired by the vivacious cabaret style of Marlene Dietrich) through to Elaine Mitchener today. The deep sense of drama and exploration that typify these artists is a final key to understanding ‘extended techniques’, in this case as a vehicle for challenging traditional performer-audience and performer-composer relationships by bringing the artists’ creative agency and embodiment to the fore. In a more recent example, the composer-performer Jennifer Walshe, who acts as the charismatic ‘chansonnier’ in many of her own works, centres compositions like The Site of an Investigation (2019) around her own hyper-sensory view of the (post)modern world, employing the full gamut of the speech-song continuum to depict the vivid strangeness of our modern era with cartoonish intensity.

It is important to note here that whilst many of the extreme-sounding techniques that Walshe and others employ can be used safely, others might be impractical or even destructive for repeated performance. Techniques that involve tensing the vocal cords (e.g. singing on an in-breath, coughing, long passages of whispering, loud breathing, exaggerated vocal fry, and so on) are unhealthy for the voice and should be avoided or kept to an absolute minimum. Whistling is also difficult to do accurately, and again, many singers will not be eager to engage in this for long periods. A singer’s voice is their instrument and livelihood, and they will be unwilling to do anything which might damage it, especially in scores without adequate recovery time (i.e. rests) between more extended or vocally taxing material. Vocal production requires a mental, musical, and physical effort that is more closely linked to the performer’s personal confidence than in other mediums, and it is our job as composers to help give them that confidence. If a performer is overwhelmed or uncomfortable with a score, they will likely have ‘a “fright and flight” reaction. The score will simply be closed, put aside, and never performed.’³⁵ For this reason, it is often helpful to think of vocal music as a script to be interpreted rather than a determinate text, facilitating interpretations that can be tailored to the performer’s individual body and artistic sensibilities rather than being completely prescriptive. The singing body needs to be supported, rather than disciplined, to communicate the score’s intentions as powerfully as it can.

Posthuman Voices

The voice-body relationship and its ability to construct and challenge meaning has become something of an obsession for vocal composition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.³⁶ Jelena Novak argues that opera’s response to experimental staging practices, developing theories of gender, and new media (particularly film) created a space for creative re-invention of the vocalic body, allowing composers and performers to question the rules and protocols around what a singing body ‘does’ and should be expected to do. A particularly fertile thread here is of ‘desynchronization between what is seen and what is heard’³⁷ by ‘sharing’ voices between either multiple performers, in works like Louis Andriessen’s Writing to Vermeer (1999), or multiple manifestations of the same performer ‘reproduced’ through technology, like Michel van der Aa’s protagonist in One (2002) who hockets melodic lines with herself in an uncanny duet.

One of the most important developments has been ‘extending’ of the voice through amplification. Beyond simply increasing the volume of a voice, the microphone liberates the mouth by making ‘audible and expressive a whole range of organic vocal sounds which are edited out in ordinary listening; the liquidity of the saliva, the hissing and tiny shudders of the breath, the clicking of the tongue and the teeth, and popping of the lips’.³⁸ Being able to hear soft, close sounds affords an intimacy with the singer that is far removed from the operatic voice’s technology of power and projection. Out of these ‘close sounds’ comes whole new genres; for example, crooning, a singing technique developed in the 1920s by jazz vocalists such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, which ‘depended on the microphone’s ability to capture seemingly vulnerable voices that could not project as loudly, or sing as high, as sturdier souls’.³⁹ A more contemporary example of this is Rebecca Saunders The Mouth (2019–20) for soprano and binaural amplification, which sonically projects the interiority of the mouth cavity into an entire concert hall through its extreme amplification of tiny, fragile sounds.

The disembodied voice appearing from somewhere other than the singer (a form of ventriloquism) allows for a re-imagining of our relationship with our bodies and selves. ‘[T]here is the chasm between inside and outside’, writes Saunders, ‘a dichotomy between the inner and outer voice, between our secret internal monologue and the voice sent into the world and that is heard … [and] the mouth is at this threshold’.⁴⁰ Recording technology also lets us explore this voice-body-self relationship, with technological mediations allowing us to manipulate the quality and identity of the voice (through distortion, compression, filtering/EQ, and pitch manipulation devices like auto-tune and vocoders) and to create the sense of multiple or displaced voices (with spatio-temporal effects like delay, reverb, panning, multitracking, and looping). The use of this toolbox of effects is endless, ranging from the beatboxer Beardyman turning his voice into a ‘one-man-orchestra’ through live looping, to Björk’s 2017 bio-political album Utopia (co-written with the producer ARCA), which melds voices into field recordings of arctic landscapes to explore an uncanny fracture between nature and technology.

In Utopia, Björk and ARCA are both literally and figuratively ‘giving voice’ to nature, reminding us of the social empowerment associated with voice ‘as a metaphor for power, difference, agency, textual authority, and expressive subjectivity’ in marginalised and oppressed communities.⁴¹ Rosie Middleton’s voice(less) project (*2019) for example uses electronically mediated vocalising to present narratives of voice damage and loss – literally and metaphonically dealing with finding one’s voice and having one’s voice heard – whilst FKA Twigs’ LP1 (2014) imagines the vocality of a gender-less, posthuman alter-ego through pitch manipulation. Themes of gender and race are also ubiquitous in the work of Pamela Z (Figure 8.3), who employs live digital processing to transcend the body like a form of prosthesis. In ‘MetalVoice’ from her multimedia work Voci (2003), Z extends her body by singing into amplified sheets of metal. By blurring together voice and metal, Z is attempting to ‘strip language of its meaning … and baggage’⁴² and allow the voice to queer and transcend the politics of the body, manipulating ‘both internal and external technologies in the service of a radical politics of resistance through and against technologies of power’.⁴³

Figure 8.3 Pamela Z performing at ‘On the Boards’ in Seattle, WA.

© West Smith 2018.

As society moves towards increasingly hybrid and avatar-based lives (e.g. with Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for us to inhabit a digital ‘Metaverse’), exploration of digitally manipulated voices and disembodied, cybernetic vocalities are becoming more prevalent. Whether in the experimental works of Pamela Z or the posthuman hyperpop realm of Björk and ARCA, ways of reclaiming and repoliticising the performing body (particularly away from the norms of white, male, and non-disabled) requires a new set of musical values and approaches. I would invite anyone working in vocal composition to think about what types of humans we might be in the next few decades – what kind of bodies and voices we will have? What types of communication and interaction we might want to invoke and shape? – and let these questions steer us towards a new phase of composition for the voice.

Listening List

https://shorturl.at/otyW5

This chapter is intended as an introduction to the choral medium, fulfilling a similar role to that of a guide to orchestration. It considers the forces involved, techniques, traditions, notation, and the avoidance of common errors. Works from all periods will be discussed and the techniques used therein will be considered as all equally valid to the contemporary composer.¹ Let us begin with a short overview of some of the styles and textures that appear in the repertoire and are available to the contemporary composer. The choral medium is one deeply linked to history and tradition, both real and mythologised. It is also one continually open to imagination, and whilst the ‘instruments’ are the same as those used in the earliest choral pieces, languages and styles evolve continuously.

Historical Foundations

Modern Trends

Modern trends in choral music (as in all contemporary music) are hugely varied, and the ones mentioned here are by no means exhaustive but serve to give some indication of the range of approaches. A prominent and continuing trend has been that of the ‘ecstatic style’,⁴ which Gary Cole suggests has its origins with Randall Thompson’s Alleluia (1940), although elements of the style are suggested by earlier works such as Olivier Messiaen’s O sacrum convivium (1937). These works use traditional technical methods to achieve a sense of stasis and luminosity which is particularly successful with voices, including use of ‘soft dissonance’ and added notes which lends a glow to what are often triadic harmonies. Thompson uses considerable imitation and counterpoint throughout, and the use of the second inversion chord as ‘home’ to develop a structure which seems to unfold constantly whilst never developing in a traditionally linear fashion. Messiaen achieves the sense of magical stasis through his distinctive modal harmonic language, added note harmony, and extremely slow tempi. This is combined with a sophisticatedly constructed melody line to reach a carefully built climax in what is a largely homophonic texture.

The choral medium seems particularly suited to the evocation of mystery and the eternal, at least in part due to its historical and religious associations, and its regular performance within cathedrals and other large buildings imbued with ‘the immemorial sound of voices’⁵. Overlapping voices invoke this well; for example, including two or more choirs in canon as in John Tavener’s Hymn to the Mother of God (1985) or the creation of a sense of endless movement by voices moving between different notes of the same chord in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1961–2). The use of repeated fragments or chanted words independent to the other singers is a highly effective texture within even a tonal context. The rapid chanting of a single note very quietly can create a strong sense of unease – for example James Macmillan’s Tenebrae Responsories (2006) – whilst the overlapping of phrases created by the voices moving off at different times can create flowerings of great ecstasy, as in Gabriel Jackson’s Requiem (2009). Jonathan Harvey’s Come Holy Ghost (1984) is a masterful combination of Gregorian chant, fragments, aleatoric writing, and complex harmonic textures to create a soundscape which is completely at the service of the text with its evocation of the tongues of Pentecost.

The term ‘Choral Orchestration’ has been applied to large-scale works such as Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-night Vigil and is an apposite term for the evocation of chant, bells, echoes, and organ-like blocks of sound, combined with the frequent octave doubling of melodic lines. Something of this work and others continues to inspire many works from the Baltic, with composers such as Rihards Dubbra, Uģis Prauliņš, and Vytautas Miškinis. This might involve theatricality and spatialisation, maybe including two or more choirs singing together or antiphonally, or smaller units and separate groups. This spatial separation can be immensely evocative in larger buildings, with the semi-chorus placed in a gallery or even out of sight. In these cases, the composer must consider questions of ensemble and balance, and consider how well the two groups will be able to sing tightly together. The final movement of Macmillan’s Tenebrae Responsories avoids this issue by requiring the soprano soloist to gradually walk off stage during their final monody in a gesture that fits well within the theme of the piece.

A common feature of modern writing across all styles has been the occasional use of extended techniques. These might include use of wordless choruses, whether hummed or vocalised to prescribed sound, speech (rhythmic, free, or semi-pitched as sprechgesang), the occasional shout – as in William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1931) – non-pitched vocal sounds (e.g. clicks, whistling, whispering, shouting, and breathing) or body percussion (e.g. stamping, slapping, and clapping). The gamut of extended techniques can be as wide as the imagination and the human body’s capabilities. Perhaps more than any other type of music-making, choral singing throughout the world is largely an amateur pursuit: the composer who wants a successful performance, and ideally a second performance, is wise to try and ensure accessibility. It should be remembered that most such techniques may be unfamiliar to less experienced groups and require considerable clarification and co-ordination: an older group for example may struggle to stamp rhythmically and quickly in time, and clapping will require a choir to be singing without music. Nevertheless, choirs generally do enjoy and appreciate challenges.

The ‘Holy Minimalist’ school of composers such as Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and Henryk Górecki – who each have highly distinctive styles – has provided routes for modern composers who have chosen not to embrace rigorous pitch ordering (e.g. serialism) and atonality exclusively; here, the purity and sometimes extreme simplicity of harmonic language, combined perhaps with orthodox chant and trance-like repetition, is deeply suited to the expression of religious ideas. Alongside this, composers such as John Rutter, Bob Chilcott, and Malcolm Archer have forged a path writing highly crafted music in a style that is accessible and rewarding for choirs, often being performable by groups of different abilities and from different musical backgrounds.

Voice Types

The choir should be considered very much as a unit, and one of the key aims of any group is to achieve a convincing blend between individuals and voice types. Whereas with solo singing chief considerations will include the distinctive characterization and colouring of lines and individual moments and notes, in a choral context this is a group effort and individual voices should not emerge prominently. If there is more than one singer to a part (and this is usual in all but the smallest groups) these voices may occasionally divide for chords or longer passages. Choral singers will often consider themselves to be ‘1’ or ‘2’ within the standard voice types – soprano, alto, tenor, and bass – in the case of any one part dividing, the seconds will take the lower note and the firsts the upper in much the same way that a desk of string or woodwind players will treat divisi passages. The use of occasional divisi is a standard characteristic of much choral music, and immensely thrilling effects can be achieved when a divisi moment allows a chord to blossom into something fuller and richer. Conversely, the deployment of unison (or far more commonly unison at the octave) is hugely effective and sonorous when applied judiciously within the ranges of the voices. The spreading out of the voices subsequently is a highly idiomatic use of the medium.

As a general rule, voices are at their warmest and most lyrical in the mid-part of the range, becoming progressively more penetrating in the upper reaches but projecting less strongly lower down. This is an important consideration when it comes to scoring chords, particularly when these are widely spaced. Chords which would work well on orchestral instruments can be difficult to balance if the parts are widely separated unless there is a considerable ‘filling-in’ of the harmonies in the middle. More perhaps than with any other medium it should be considered that the extremes of range really are that, requiring stamina and technique at the upper end. It is also entirely possible that the extremes of range will not be achievable by all groups and composers should consider providing alternatives for use if needed; even within a section not all singers may have the extreme notes and so it is worth providing options for those voices which do not extend to the limits.

There can be considerable physical and technical effort involved in achieving the notes at the upper part of the range, and this adds to the visceral excitement of powerful climactic points; however, it is important to remember this to ensure that stamina is not exhausted and that these really are ‘stand-out’ moments rather than the regular tessitura. It is also possible for singers to ‘float’ notes in the higher part of the range, and in a choral context the soprano voice is particularly adept at this on suitable vowel sounds. It should be noted, however, that sustained very quiet singing is very taxing (as is loud singing). The same is also true to some extent for extended writing in the lower part of the range, particularly for higher voices.

Text

The question of what makes a suitable text is one which is highly personal, and virtually any text can be set to music: Harrison Birtwistle’s Moth Requiem (2012) for example includes the Latin names of various moth species as a key component in the text. Usually, the composer will feel some attachment to a text (or at least part of it), which leads them to compose the music. Gerald Finzi rather beautifully described this connection with texts as ‘[shaking] hands with a friend across the centuries’,⁶ and was scathing of the view that some texts were complete in themselves, saying that the composer ‘is driven to composition by the impact of the words’.⁷

One of the key challenges is reconciling musical form with textural form; the narrative arc of a poem may result in a final destination far removed from the opening, whereas much musical form is reliant to some extent on return and repetition. Some composers take the ‘Wagnerian solution’ of the leitmotif and its infinite processes of permutation, whilst for others, musical material completely follows the text with the mood alone dictating the form. Herbert Howells’ Stabat Mater (1965) is an example ‘that achieve[s] homogeneity through concentration of a single emotional mood’⁸ to create an immensely powerful and dramatic work governed by its prevailing mood. Gabriel Jackson’s Truro Service, on the other hand, is a deliberate attempt to write ‘an “objective” setting [of the mass], the chord movement in the homophonic verses being generated by the number of syllables in each word and their speech rhythm stresses’, although the composer allows himself ‘a whiff of word-painting at [the words] “to be a light”’.⁹

Key to the success of these and any other settings are considerations of moments which might prove suitable for musical colouring, word-painting, textual repetition, and those moments which are important structurally and rhetorically. A text as read or spoken aloud is likely to be considerably shorter than a satisfactory musical outpouring, and so a composer will often need to consider points for extension and tension building. This may include the return of material, direct repeats, mantra-like repetitions, or a single word or phrase extended polyphonically. Another decision to make is around how much of a text to use, and whether the ‘purity’ of the original is observed. For some composers, fidelity is a matter of principle, whereas for others the text is purely at the service of the composer and can be changed and cut to fit their aesthetic vision.

A text read in silence is inevitably shaped by the reader alone, whereas the composer is placing a mood, structure, and view on the words. Textural clarity is therefore another element which must be considered, although again the view on this will be a very personal one. Texts which are very well-known or in another language¹⁰ (e.g. in Latin) may be suited to settings in which individual verbal clarity is subsumed by structure, general mood, and effect. A little-known text or one with many moments which catch the ear is likely to require a great clarity of presentation, as the listener may become frustrated in trying to follow small fragments which then become buried. An approach like this will usually require musical material inspired directly by the meaning and shape of the words. Other approaches may require a consideration of what the music will be required ‘to do’ in the work, and in this instance may almost be created in isolation to the words. In a work like György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna (1966) a singular sonic effect is created by the use of the idea of light (‘lux’) and its illustration through separated vowel sounds. The ultimate consideration for the composer should always be a sure and clear understanding of what they intend to ‘say’ about the text, and what they consider it to mean.

One mundane but important practical consideration is the copyright status of any proposed text. Laws vary, but a composer should be aware that it can be expensive and difficult to set any text which is in copyright, and it is always best to investigate and clarify this status before beginning a setting.

Word-Setting, Melisma, and Vowels

When setting words more ‘naturistically’, try to maintain the text’s natural speech-rhythm as much as possible. It should be noted that mis-stressed words are likely to stand out, or even become part of the composer’s aesthetic – for example like Igor Stravinsky’s angular and playful text-setting in his Symphony of Psalms (1930) – so it is important to make such things deliberate rather than accidental. Melodic shapes can be dictated by the images of the words (word-painting), the mood of the line and its rhetorical content, and by the desire to create a satisfactory musical line. Composers should also consider the particular sounds of the words and their vowels and consonants; the placing of these will have a strong impact on how the music is heard, and also how easy and effective it is to perform. Vowel sounds will affect the entire colour of a note, and these sounds modify in many languages with context; in other languages they are always sung to the same sound. Open sounds will tend towards brightness (ah, e (as in ‘air’)), where the more closed (oo, u) will tend towards darkness. The placing of much emphasis on longer and darker vowel sounds will create a more sombre mood, with the opposite for brighter vowels.

Unique to voices is the melisma: a placing of more than one note to a single syllable. These can be greatly extended, and some of their great outpourings are in the ecstatic works of the Renaissance, and even the earliest settings of four-part music such as Pérotin’s Sederunt principes (c.1199). For other composers, the syllabic setting has been a hallmark of style with its strong emphasis on textural clarity. Melismatic placing should be considered carefully along with word stress and vowel sounds to enable singers to negotiate lines in the most musical manner. The placing of these will usually feel natural in a well-written setting but will nevertheless require considerable thought. The word ‘alleluia’ for example has four syllables, all of which are equally suited to melismatic treatment, but which will each create a different sound and thus timbre. Consonant placing also needs consideration; particularly the hard, spoken consonants of ‘s’ and ‘t’ as sibilants can be very prominent in a musical texture. This is likely to occur when several parts have an ‘s’ in close succession, or where breathing is essential.

Breathing

All voices will require the opportunity to breathe, both on a small and a large scale: voices should be regarded as more akin to brass or woodwind instruments than strings. Large groups can ‘stagger’ to create seamless lines, and this can be indicated or left to discretion. This is more usually for special effect rather than for entire pieces. Composers should note that if they do not indicate breaths in the score (with rests or the placing of clear commas above the stave, as in instrumental music) the director is likely to make decisions themselves based on musical and verbal considerations. Dovetailing between the parts can also be considered as an alternative, with lines passed between different sections or divisions of sections, to achieve seamless results much as in orchestral writing.

Dynamics and Balance

Balance should never be simply left to dynamic instruction, although the clear use of markings is important. Balancing widely spaced chords is difficult and unsuccessful unless there is considerable reinforcement between the extremes; a bottom C is almost impossible to project with anything like the penetrating power of a top C. In a well-scored example of a full, rich chord, the lowest notes will provide an audible bass which will add to and be reinforced by the higher harmonic levels above. A solo line in an inner register (i.e. not on the top of the texture) will benefit from ‘textural space’ around it, and remembering that other voices may compete if they are placed in a stronger part of their range than that of the soloist. A singer is likely to project more prominently when given a solo line.

Difficulties and Limitations

There is a great proliferation of choral groups of widely varying abilities, and more perhaps than with other mediums the composer is likely to write for amateurs and semi-professionals. One of the most important first steps should be careful consultation with the director about the strengths and weaknesses of the group; take these considerations seriously during the writing process. Many choral composers have been able to adapt their demands to fit a group’s ability without losing their integrity, and James Macmillan’s Strathclyde Motets (2005–10) are wonderful examples of highly characteristic works written with simplicity and performability in mind. A number of works continue to suffer neglect, as they were too difficult for the choirs which first performed them and so have fallen into disuse.

Because singing is such an intensely personal means of production requiring great stamina and attention, it is best as far as possible to limit the difficulties in composition to as few areas as necessary at any one time; for example, a highly rhythmically difficult passage will be eased if the melodic and harmonic content is easier. Chromatic scales over long stretches and at speed are particularly disliked and difficult to negotiate with accurate tuning and are best avoided; such a melismatic run is considerably easier if it uses pitches familiar tonally or modally. Glissandi can be very effective but become difficult over large stretches due to the vocal passaggio; start and end points should therefore be considered carefully. Large and angular leaps are challenging for a similar reason, particularly if many of the leaps are in the same direction; whilst the rules of ‘Bach chorale’ style writing are not essential by any means, they are worth recalling in this regard – a large leap up is easier to negotiate if followed or introduced by a move down, particularly if this is by steps. Octaves are easy to negotiate for tuning but again likely to cross between different parts and strengths of the voice. Large leaps become particularly difficult to tune when they involve chords which are unrelated in familiar harmonic terms; as each note must be placed by the singer alone, the methods of pitching differ to other instruments.

Tuning is a prerequisite of good choral singing, but even experienced groups can find extended highly chromatic passages difficult in this regard, as each note will require meticulous tuning by the individual singer. Most singers pitch notes relatively, by interval or approximate musical feel rather than absolutely (i.e. they will not simply sing an E♭ for example, but will find it relative to the other notes and musical contexts, and many will sing even atonal music through some sense of tonal centres and the reading of intervals). Uncertainty is the enemy of choral pitching, and so it is essential that composers consider how singers are to find their notes. In general, close dissonances are better reached, if possible, by preparation and step – it is particularly challenging for, say, two soprano parts to jump to notes which require them to land a semitone apart; the natural temptation will be to reach a matching interval.

Practical solutions include the artfully placed ‘gathering’ moment where a choir can regroup – a recurring chord, or an easily found unison where things can be recalibrated if necessary. A difficult passage followed by an entry together on an unrelated chord is one which may well prove immensely difficult and create terror in performance. Tuning may slip over longer periods, and this becomes an issue when introducing other instruments. In addition, a piece will nearly always require a starting note to be given to the choir as a whole; if a piece begins with an extended section which is non-pitched, then the composer must consider how a choir is to enter on a chord which may be some time after the opening when there have been no other cues. A solution to this can be to ensure a soloist enters first who will have a tuning fork and thus ensure the pitch is established. A golden rule for more choral composers is to sing through each line of the score before handing it over to a choir or vocal group: it is often quite an eye-opening experience to find that what works well on the piano or on instruments presents some great difficulties when sung.

Notation

The key element of choral notation must always be clarity and readability; even more so than the instrumentalist. The singer will need to feel safe and confident in a score and able to provide what it requires. Elaine Gould’s Behind Bars¹¹ is a superb ‘go-to’ guide for choral notation, but here are some broad issues and ideas. Firstly, singers are unique in having to read lyrics as well as musical notation, and to avoid confusion, lyrics are placed directly under the notes to which they refer, and all other markings such as dynamics are placed above the stave. Hairpins are preferable to words such as ‘cresc.’ as they seem to have a greater psychological impact on the singers and help to keep extraneous words to a minimum. Syllables should be divided logically to prevent any ambiguity in the vowel sound which might arise before the full word has been read. If a final syllable is sung on more than one note, then the underscore extender is used. Groups of notes which are sung to more than one syllable should also be slurred to remove any ambiguity. Note that slurs are not commonly used to indicate breaths in choral music unless the music is wordless; some composers do use them to indicate specific phrasing or breath groupings, but in general these are suggested by the words.

The clearest notation is to provide one stave for each vocal part. However, very simple passages can be notated on two staves in ‘closed score’ (N.B. the tenor voice is combined with the bass voice in this notation, in bass clef). In two-stave notation, words should be placed between the staves, and dynamics are placed on either side: occasional differences to underlay may require lyrics to be placed over or under notes in the short passage to which they refer; but if these passages are at all frequent, it will be clearer to use open score. Tail directions are crucially important in this layout, particularly if there is part-crossing at any point. If a voice part divides, then the complexity of the passage will dictate whether the two parts coexist on the same stave or whether a separate one is needed. As with orchestral scoring, simple chords may be written as just that as the lower note will be taken by the seconds and the upper by the firsts. There is no need to indicate ‘unis.’ when a single line returns in this instance. If the division is more complex but still on one stave, then tail direction is essential, and if only one part is singing, rests should be provided or an instruction such as ‘Sop. 1’. ‘Unis.’ should then be used when the music returns to a single line. If the divided voices will occupy two staves, these should be sub-bracketed together with ‘div.’ placed between the staves and the division arrows appearing at the end of the previous line. A return to a single line should be preceded by the opposite arrows and the instruction ‘unis.’ to remove doubt.

The notation of accidentals and intervals needs special consideration, as singers will generally read linearly and intervallically rather than by single specific pitches. It is very important to note that singers usually sing from the full vocal score and will use the other parts as cues for their notes and entries, so it is important that each part be notated in a way which makes sense for the other voices. This will often involve making decisions on enharmonic notation: as many singers will have a strong sense of ‘home’ when singing, so key signatures are useful if a tonal centre is clearly defined and will guide enharmonic writing. If this requires frequent chromatic alteration, it may prove better to write without one.

In music which is intended to be performed unaccompanied, it is standard practice to provide a keyboard reduction unless the music appears on two staves and therefore can be read simply, or too complicated for a reduction to be practically useful. The composer should make a decision as to whether this keyboard part is optional and for use if required, or purely for use in rehearsal. These reductions should never contain lyrics, and if the latter is the case, it is often best to include only the notes and no dynamics. If the reduction produces some passages which are unplayable due to large reaches, then the composer can decide whether to bracket these notes, add vertical rolls, or simply leave them to indicate what is there rather than what can be played. If this reduction is to be playable if required, however, the composer must make decisions on moments like this and also include dynamics.

Some works include spoken moments. If these are to be entirely unpitched and spoken as a narrator, then they can be simply written out. If a spoken moment appears in a vocal part, it should be clarified that this is spoken, as well as whether it is by a soloist or the section. If the section is to speak, it then must be made clear whether this is to be with a sense of ensemble or with every performer doing it in their own time. It is probably still worth marking such moments as ‘normal speaking voice’ just to avoid confusion. Notated speech which is purely rhythmic should use accurately notated rhythms with cross-head notes. More unusual sounds require clear instructions on both delivery and extended effect as well as clear indications on when to return to a normal singing voice. The presence of noteheads which appear to show specific pitches is a very powerful pull, and if these pitches are not intended, then it is best to notate them with crosses or headless notes as mentioned earlier in this chapter to remove this ambiguity. The same applies to aleatoric sections and their notation – the composer must be as clear as possible in their instructions as to what is required and the desired outcomes, and precise instructions on how and when the performers return to the written score.

Conclusion

As one of the most ancient of mediums, choral composition continues to prove itself capable of infinite rejuvenation. The voice possesses the unique ability to express and describe concrete thoughts and ideas and bring a depth of feeling through music which can create a fusion of unrivalled visceral and emotional power. Each voice is unique, and even through the blend of choral sounds each choir maintains its own identity, and this also helps to refresh the medium and inspire the composer with fresh ideas for different groups. Each performance of any piece varies, but choral performances are likely to be more divergent than other mediums due to this individuality. Closely tied to this and worthy of a final iteration is that singers will do their utmost to take care of their voices and be unwilling to subject it to damage. In addition, the personal and entirely self-contained form of production of sound requires singers of all abilities to be confident about what is required, and confident of their abilities to deliver it. This, and the provision of clarity should be the highest aim, regardless of style, difficulty, or scale.

Listening List

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A danger when talking about writing for the stage is the pervasive idea that if a composer does something one way, it’s a manifesto on the way music for the stage should be written: a philosophical stance rather than a combination of skills, techniques, and decisions which, ideally, come from the idea of theatrical storytelling. Although writing for the stage harnesses the power of instrumental writing and non-dramatic vocal writing, it is, in many ways, a very different artistic and practical ecosystem. One kind of story might suggest a small, amplified ensemble and two singers, whereas another might require a grand opera house with a full chorus, orchestra, and live horses clopping around. Each project has its own rules, and telling one story one way should not preclude another story being told an entirely different way. Just because I have written three operas with linear narratives does not mean I won’t write an abstract one at some point; some of my favourite operas are ones where the plot is secondary or tertiary to the experience; the Philip Glass trilogy operas – Einstein on the Beach (1975–6), Satyagraha (1978–9), and Akhnaten (1983) – have plots only in the biggest, bird’s-eye sense, but that doesn’t mean that Glass hasn’t written purely narrative operas, like Appomattox (2007).

You will find that people who write about music want to generalise about composers’ intentions and processes; it’s understandable because of course detecting patterns is a way to predict trends and analyse the ‘state of things’. This is their job, but it is not composers’ jobs. If you open up the newspaper or, god forbid, the Internet, you will find a lot of chaotic shorthand: ‘Why write Grand Opera?’ Or ‘The future of opera is scrappy black-box productions’ or ‘operas which are workshopped feel corporate’ or ‘we’re seeing a resurgence of operas based on myths’ or ‘there are all these operas based on movies’ followed by the writers’ opinions about the same observations. Ignore all of this. Write the piece that makes sense for the company who commissioned it and, most importantly, for yourself as an artist at that time in your life. Writing a grand opera with six million people on stage doesn’t mean that you can’t then write a one-woman site-specific opera in a supermarket lit entirely by smartphones. This is the most crucial task: negotiating your own interests and obsessions as an artist with the restrictions and specific possibilities of the ‘situation’ of the commission (which includes everything from the size of the house to the types of voices to the budget and rehearsal time and so on). Composing for stage is a constant dance, and each situation is different; the process, in turn, will change, and you will change as an artist. Whilst you do not – and should not – have to worry constantly about each restriction, having a bird’s-eye view from the start will help enormously.

Any collaborative process requires a constant negotiation between its collaborators as to the hierarchy of creation: ‘does the dance come first and then the music or the other way around?’ is something one often hears when writing a dance. ‘Does the music come first and then the words?’ With an opera, for instance, the primary document for hundreds of people is the piano-vocal score. It can be a few hundred pages long, give or take, but it is the common language and origin story of all of the practical documents which then emerge: the costume-mistresses’ notebooks, the stage managers’ giant binder, the spotlight operator’s cue list. It is a document memorised by however many singers and covers there are, and a document whose shards are on the individual stands of the flute players in the pit, or the on-stage marching band. The score is so important, and so scrutinised, and yet very rarely seen as a whole. The flute player, for instance, won’t necessarily have studied your intricately worked-out plot, and so the storytelling has to be imbued, in some way, into the instrumental writing. While some directors work off the score, others work only from a libretto and others in combination. No matter what comes first, the score is, for better or for worse, the Bible.

Big Shapes, Tight Collaborations

The three larger operas I’ve written – Dark Sisters (2011), Two Boys (2011), and Marnie (2017) – were created in tight collaboration with their librettists (Stephen Karam, Craig Lucas, and Nicholas Wright) and directors (Rebecca Taichman, Bart Sher, and Michael Mayer respectively). The basic process was one of starting broad and zooming in together as a team. This is only a fraction of how it worked, but, in essence, once we knew the basic restrictions of the piece (fewer than a dozen people, a chamber orchestra), we came up with a single-sentence description of the plot of the piece: A woman born and raised in a polygamist environment decides to leave after the family’s children are taken away by the government. A young boy impersonates a series of different people online to seduce an older boy, who eventually stabs him. A woman steals from her bosses, changes identities, and gets caught, forcing her to confront the horrors of her childhood. From there, we zoomed in: what happens in each act? How tightly linked to a real story should this be? How do we meet all the other characters and when?

From there, Stephen started providing me little pieces of text in isolation, which worked because we all knew more or less the overall arch of the plot. That way, starting in the penultimate scene (as I did) didn’t feel inappropriate. In the case of Dark Sisters, the music director and conductor, Neal Goren, was, from the beginning, helping figure out precisely what voice type would belong to each character, which in turn helped me think about the kind of text that would set best for a coloratura versus a dramatic soprano, and so on. With Two Boys and Marnie, the Metropolitan Opera’s dramaturg, Paul Cremo, was always available as an extra set of eyes and ears and a guiding hand through the process in all its facets. All of this occurred before I wrote a note.

I’ve found that starting with a large shape helps keep me focused. If you’ve come to an agreement with your collaborators about the general thrust of the thing, smaller amendments and additions feel much easier when they’re happening on the fly. I always liken large-scale structure to an in-flight map. In its most zoomed-out form, you can all more or less agree that the flight is going from London to Singapore. Then, you can zoom in and see which countries you’ll fly over, and then zoom more and see major cities, and then zoom yet again and be above undreamt-of towns in Uzbekistan. If you and the librettist are both in agreement about the large flightpath, and keep that, in some way, in view at all times, it will be easier for you to each zoom in on more obscure areas of concern.

It is crucial to make sure your personal relationships with the artistic team remain under control. History is littered with fights between librettists and composers, or composers and directors, and trying to keep a constant sense of empathy and understanding is crucial in this process. I’ve scored a fair amount of film and am completely accustomed to random people giving me notes and suggestions. Whenever I write articles, I am used to getting them back covered in red ink. Other people are not accustomed to this or are indeed offended by it: if you find yourself setting up defences against what can seem like a fusillade of comments from singers, the director, people you have never met from the music department, and what can seem like people off the street, see if you can coordinate with your collaborators to calm the seas.

A good example of this early in the process could be if somebody points to a scene and says, ‘I don’t get what’s happening here.’ Any number of things could be causing this hang-up: is the text telling rather than showing? Are the text and the music too entwined, almost cartoonishly making a point? Is the text too abstract? Is the music cluttering the text? Or is it something which will only make sense when perceived visually, with blocking or a prop or a scene change? When you get a note like this, it’s easy to think it’s some existential problem with the libretto or the music. Often, though, these seemingly large issues (presuming you agree, in some way, with the note) can be resolved by delegation. ‘Let’s try a different word’ or ‘Let me see if I can have them deliver the line in the clear’ or ‘Maybe instead of the scene changing right after, we let the moment sit before the transition.’

An issue that arises later in the process is a famous one: ‘I can’t hear the singers over the orchestra.’ There are countless ways to solve this issue, and sometimes ‘play quieter’ and ‘sing louder’ are not the right solutions, either practically or artistically. Look into orchestrational details: the odd ways in which sometimes doubling a vocal line makes it pop out, and other times can have a muffling effect. See if there’s a way the director can move a singer farther downstage, or closer to a surface which will reflect the sound. You can also investigate diplomatically to see if an individual singer is saving their voice (known as ‘marking’) or has the habit of singing a bit quieter when getting used to blocking and staging.

It is not the composer’s job to create an easy production for a director. Some operas are director’s dreams, such as Glass’s Satyagraha, which, for instance, was a perfect playground for Phelim McDermott’s production at ENO and the Met. Other operas have very difficult staging issues built into the plot: what do you do about a dragon in Richard Wagner’s Siegfried (1857), or the ocean in Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd (1951)? How do you depict real people saying invented things, like in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (2000)? How do you get a giant choral number to work if they’re all facing the side of the stage because of how the set works but need to see the conductor? I feel like these puzzles can draw the best out of a director: Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) is such a tricky opera to get right because it takes place in a variety of different settings (a castle, a forest, a cave, etc.) but the music is so shimmering and quiet that having a giant cave-mouth wheeled onto stage would never work. I saw a production directed by Katie Mitchell that was so brilliant because she had screens framing different parts of the stage, and in the transitions, closed-off areas would open for the audience to realise that a set change had happened silently in secret. The solution itself became part of the structure of the production, and the whole thing held together because of it. Whilst it is fun to imagine what something could look like during the compositional process, it is good to keep in mind that directors and designers have spent as many years in the trenches of creative collaboration as you have and can often find a fiendishly clever and direct way to communicate the score through theatre.

On Musical Material

Wagner looms large over operatic composition; even people who’ve never heard a note of Wagner will recognise his techniques from even a minimal knowledge of how the music in Star Wars functions. Every opera requires some form of decision-making about whether musical material will ‘belong’ to a character or not, and it certainly isn’t composer-specific so much as work-specific, with a work like Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954) having character-specific instruments. I have never worked with leitmotifs, but mainly because I’m not sure I’d be very good at it. However, I try to create ‘space’: specific musical connections between the atmosphere in a room where something is happening. Instead of Marnie having a theme that follows her around, she has an oboe who functions as an interlocutor to her music. Her childhood home has a unique sound world, and her mother is shadowed by a viola, but as a timbre rather than as a vessel for thematic information. Two Boys functioned, in some ways, like science fiction in which there is an initial amount of world-building that has to happen; Craig Lucas set this up brilliantly in the libretto, where there’s a clear ‘offline’ style and a clear ‘online’ style, which eventually come together at the very end.

Visually, it is a simple task, albeit also a complicated one where the designers have to essentially invent what a chatroom looks like on a stage. Musically, what does that look like in terms of harmonic language, in terms of orchestration? The version I avoided was where ‘online’ was all synthesisers, but it took me a while to land on something fruitful. I was thinking about the last page of Britten’s Death in Venice (1973), when we have the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach looking out to sea, and the music turns into this kind of highly ‘Brittenised’ Balinese gamelan music, reminiscent of Tadzio’s music but somehow romanticised and infinite. For me, imbuing our story with Britten’s sense of how you would treat the world beyond, of his own memories of his trips to Bali, felt like the right way to imagine the drug of talking to strangers online, of projecting yourself from one space (in this case, a teenager’s bedroom) into another much more unknown, alluring, and dangerous world.

Some of the best moments in operas are, for me, when you have an ecstatic, climactic meeting point between text, music, and direction. Of course, these three things should always be working in counterpoint, but occasionally a giant unison can have a huge emotional effect. The moment when Miles dies in The Turn of the Screw and the Governess then sings his song (‘Malo’) is one such moment, where you have the indelible image of her in a kind of Pietà pose, holding a dead child; a musical callback to a previous theme but orchestrated grandly; and a textual reference to something which had been obscure before, but is now revealed and amplified. A more subtle moment is to be found in Die Walküre (1856), where Siegmund pulls Nothung (the mythical sword) from a tree, which of course is visually thrilling no matter who’s directing, and a nut Wagner has made us wait rather a long time to crack: only then do we realise that this music connects us all the way back to Alberich and ‘fulfils’ the operatic prophecy. These are amazing moments, which stick in the mind and the eye and the ear.

You cannot have too many of these things, however, or the work starts feeling overbearing, cluttered, and bombastic. Moments where we’re seeing something we’re hearing in the music and the text all at the same time can be dramatically unhelpful, particularly in plot exposition, when it’s much more interesting if the oboe knows that the tenor is cheating on his wife rather than him taking a moment to tell us the same. Having something firm requires other things to be supple. Sometimes, teamwork is about all doing different things to get one big thing completed: think about a restaurant kitchen in which a single dish requires four people doing four different things; it would not flow if four people each did a little bit of the same thing all at the same time.

One final point on material: in stage music, the physical stage is itself a miracle and an obstacle to crafting the piece. Impressions of depth (an off-stage chorus, or a villain way upstage, muttering to himself in Italian and watching our heroine undress) are also practical and musical challenges for the singers: if you’ve worked out an elaborately detailed, rhythmic vocal line which sounds so fantastic in the rehearsal room, wait until the first rehearsal, when you have the same singer miles away, on a raked stage, in stilettos, walking backwards with a spotlight tracing her every move and a scene change happening with video projections all over the floor. This does not mean ‘don’t write anything complicated’ so much as if you ever have the opportunity, do a walk-through on the stage during a technical cue-by-cue, when you can see how stage-space itself becomes a dramatic partner in the production and bear this in mind in your writing. Many of these concerns are the director’s responsibility, of course, but it doesn’t hurt to bear these things in mind, no matter how subliminally.

Working with Singers

The first time that singers are likely to encounter and inhabit your work is at a workshop. A key question in the process is whether a workshop can happen, and, if so, is it necessary and what kind of workshop will it be. There are some which are four days of people just learning the music and then singing it from the start to the finish without pause, and some that get to basic blocking and a more detailed sense of physical space – sets, props, rakes, and so on. Some composers find workshops a bizarre process where essentially the creative team’s work stops, and a bunch of people from the opera company are suddenly watching the show in a completely unrealised way. I have found these workshops or sing-throughs or whatever you want to call them useful for the obvious practical reasons of ‘this note sounds crazy on that vowel’, but also for the – absolutely necessary – process of seeing if the piece ‘works’ in real time. When I am writing, it is very difficult for me to check my work solely as a function of time passing, and in a sing-through, the director, composer, librettist, dramaturg, and singers can get a real sense of flow, of architecture, and of breath, with the idea that there is enough time to fix it before the wheels of the final production start churning too vigorously. I would recommend some version of this to any composer, particularly if a goal is to experience the piece in real time, in front of a few other people besides the creative team. Even if it feels like somehow there is a committee judging you, you cannot put a price on experiencing the piece as a single gesture.

Sometimes you might want to start reimagining the performance. I have learned that the use of vibrato is a meta-conversation worth having maybe one time per project. For a variety of reasons, individual singers have different relationships to singing without vibrato on stage. Some are happy to do it provided the space isn’t too big. Others basically will not do it; it’s not been part of their training and they’re not going to stand in the middle of the stage and do something uncomfortable. Some will do it but not on purpose, and others are obsessed with doing it and cannot wait to be asked. Singing without vibrato really is a special effect in most pedagogical contexts, and being asked to do it at length on stage is something so outside of the embrace of most singers’ experience that it’s a giant ask, and not always a welcome one. I find that it’s alright to ask one time, but not to press it too far. For singers who are uncomfortable doing it, their professional and artistic desire to follow the score and the composer’s directions comes in direct conflict with their own instrument, and this is not an energy you want in the rehearsal room. My recommendation, if you find yourself really wanting this sound in your life, is to think about using amplified voices (as in Steve Reich’s Tehillim (1981)) or writing for groups who specialise in early music. The one thing I have had success with regarding vibrato is encouraging singers to treat it as one of many elements of their expressive toolkit. I’ve met many young singers whose dynamic range, subtlety with diction, and rhythmic flexibility goes from 1 to 100, but whose deployment of vibrato of any kind hovers in the 40–60 range.

During the learning process, synthesised demo tracks are helpful ways to support singers. Not only do I make them, but I try to be extra accommodating. If a singer wants music-minus-one (which is to say, the score with their part left out), I’ll make it. If they want the score but with their part banged out on a piano, I’ll make it. Not all singers have the luxury of a repetiteur to hand at all times, so anything I can do to make their lives easier is helpful. However, there is a great danger in artificial versions because everything is always in focus. This is more of a problem in dance, but it’s easy to learn where to get your note from (‘oh okay it’s the same as the bassoon’); on stage, however, you won’t hear that bassoon at all. Another danger of MIDI is the flexibility of tempo that makes live performance so delicious; this is also a bigger problem in dance (a dancer once told me ‘you can’t go ANY faster than this because I can only fall down so quickly – you can’t conduct gravity!’), but if the conductor decides to luxuriate in a tempo when the MIDI has been tick-tock rigid, it can create a dramatic disconnect.

When the singers are off-book (i.e. have their parts memorised), you need to stop making structural changes unless it is vital. In Marnie, we cut a four-minute aria at the end, where it was so clear what was happening from the staging that having her stop and sing about it shut the entire flow of the opera down. I would never start cutting dramatic beats once they’ve been memorised. Then another thing I do (and this is a slightly luxurious thing to be able to do) is that when the singers are off-book, I go off-book. I don’t open a score in rehearsals once the singers have stopped looking at it, because I think it puts them at ease a little bit about the difference between doing it Right with a capital R (i.e. note perfect), and doing it right, as in communicating properly with the audience. Once the singers have learned it, they have internalised it in a far more intimate way than I have. I will almost never tell somebody they sang a wrong note, because they either already know or will get a note from the conductor or repetiteur. As the author of the thing, a statement from me has an inappropriate power in the vulnerable rehearsal process.

Putting the Work ‘On Its Feet’

To me, the biggest question at any point is ‘whose rehearsal is this?’; and it’s the hardest thing to learn. Whose rehearsal is it and for whom is it? Whom is it helping? You realise that there’s a technical truth, which is ‘this is the conductor’s rehearsal. This is the director’s rehearsal,’ but then there are also many sub-strata of who needs to get what out of the rehearsal. In general, music-only rehearsals belong to the conductor. Staging rehearsals belong to the director. Once you get on stage, it gets a little bit more complicated, and suddenly everybody has different needs. I, for instance, am always most nervous about structure. I am therefore much more interested in running sequences: let’s run three scenes in a row. Of course, the singers think, ‘oh no, I got that wrong,’ and they stop; or the director says, ‘oh no, that’s not going to work’; or the conductor says, ‘no, we need to go faster’. None of that is helpful if you’re worried about structure, but it’s incredibly helpful for the singers and the director. There are a lot of divergent agendas, and that’s something that you have to be mindful of. The composer doesn’t necessarily get a rehearsal. There’s just not the time for that, which is why you have to use every rehearsal as yours, but quietly, and think about exactly when the right moment is to say, ‘excuse me, Maestro, do you mind just running straight through this transition without stopping?’ If you hear something strange and you are thinking, ‘she will never be able to get that note’ or ‘I need to add a note to the bass clarinet’, remind yourself afterwards instead of asking the director or conductor to stop. Little things like that need to happen in the background.

There must be a latticework of tasks that everyone is doing, even if the actual business of the rehearsal is running at variance to your desires. Some, if not most, issues fix themselves. Chances are, the video team knows that they’ve missed a cue, or the flute player knows that it’s a C♯ but just misread it because the lights were lower in the pit than in the rehearsal room. Light in the pit is a sidebar which could take up many pages; I inadvertently found myself in a situation where the musicians’ union was at loggerheads with the projectionists because of the divergent needs of being able to see the notes and being able to see the projections given the bleed from the pit to the stage. We had a half hour in which the pit lights were adjusted by single percentages until everybody was not so much happy as less unhappy.

A practical necessity but a missed opportunity, I feel, is that the creators of a stage work tend to sit in the expensive seats to work on a piece: the ones with the best views and cleanest acoustics. In a grand opera house, it is worth a quick hike up to the gods to see if you can actually hear that vowel on that note from that far away. The singers have spent months on that note, and years preparing, and they can’t tell how things are landing in the hall, which can create a sense of unwelcome uncertainty. Always bear in mind that even the conductor can’t always hear how well things are balanced. As the composer, unless you’re conducting or performing, you don’t have much to do (aside from buying everybody granola bars), so running around the space to reassure everybody that it sounds great is a positive way to engage. Remember that everybody in the house, from the lighting spot operators to the electricians to the stage-managers, is in a constant state of compromise and motion. The wigs-mistress might have to change a beautiful wig last-minute because the clip-on microphone won’t properly adhere. You might need to totally get rid of that bass drum because even though it sounded great in the sitzprobe, it is dominating what should be a subtle moment. The video team might need to completely re-write a cue on the fly, if a projection surface can’t slide into place quickly enough.

One of the scariest moments in my life was during a stage and piano rehearsal which was the first time I’d seen Two Boys on stage. I was worried about everything, of course, but most specifically: ‘does this thing work?’. The point of the rehearsal was for the director to sketch things in on stage, so there was endless stopping and starting, and over the course of a day, we never ran a single transition. For him, this was totally normal and productive and useful, and the singers were delighted to be able to work the same passages over and over; meanwhile, I found myself sitting in the audience, biting my fingernails and debating the merits of a 10 a.m. Bloody Mary. Learning to let go of that tension, and to trust the slow and collaborative nature of this stage of the process felt like a milestone in my development as an artist.

Another oddity is that the only time you will see your piece from start to finish in real time with an audience is opening night, or maybe the dress rehearsal if it’s an open dress. Some scenic and costume elements are added at the very last minute, so sometimes it really is the case that you never really see it until it’s happening right in front of you and everybody you know. It’s terrifying, but there is nothing in the world like the moment 10 minutes before curtain when you realise how many people it’s taken to get to this one single point, and the one single moment when music and theatre come together in a necessarily imperfect but beautiful dance.

Listening List

https://shorturl.at/dnrRT

In this chapter I will talk about some of the ways that a film composer works and think through the issues we need to consider when bringing a story to life through music. I will begin by outlining the main stages in the compositional process of a screen composer, before thinking in more detail about techniques of characterisation and world-building. I will finish by outlining some of the practical skills needed to work in film, focusing particularly on how to develop a successful collaboration with the director.

Understanding the Process

Writing music for a film or television always begins with a story. I tend to start the writing process by reading a script or original novel to get a sense of what the project is about. This often happens during the time the film is being shot, so that by the time I start to work with a director there will already be a rough first assembly of the film, which we can sit down to watch together and talk through. The next key point is the spotting session, which is where you sit with the director and decide where the music is going to start, where it’s going to finish, and what the character of that music is going to be. Identifying where to place musical cues is critical in understanding music’s role in the film. Finding the pivotal scenes that require strong musical support – whether that be in dramatic confrontations, action sequences, or moments of plot revelation – and understanding the rhythms of a film can unlock where music will fit into the overall jigsaw puzzle; but conversely there are times when having little or no music might be even more powerful.

In the ideal scenario you will have a blank canvas to play with here, but increasingly often a director will already have some temporary (or ‘temp’) tracks from other sources in place to mimic what music you might write as part of their own process of finding the language of the film. I tend to listen to these tracks once and then get rid of them to start afresh, so they do not get in the way of my creativity. It can be the case that directors get used to the sound of something and they want you to simply recreate the temp track (often to get round the licensing issues of using the original track), but if you are able to unlock what the director finds special about the music they are using – for example, the emotional tone, intensity, or pacing it might be offering – you can then find another way to achieve the same response. Something that has worked on numerous occasions is to pre-emptively make some temp tracks myself, to offer the director a variety of ideas early on and start to instil my sound world into their heads even before they start shooting. That is helpful because you at least know that the music that you’re starting to write is going to be getting used in the edit suite.

Once you’ve finished spotting, you can begin writing and planning. I tend to sit at the piano for this stage with just a normal pencil and manuscript paper, but any instrument that you feel comfortable with would work. Where some composers might start with an instrumental ostinato or atmospheric sound, the first step in a film or television score for me is nearly always finding a melody. It doesn’t have to be the grand tune of 21 bars; it can just be as simple as three or four or five notes, but it’s a hook. It’s a musical identity for that particular show. I like to know that I have something to hang on to musically that is more than just a series of sounds or colours. Whilst this hook is often the main theme or something for the opening titles or end credits, it can be other moments, such as, for example, a montage sequence where the music is going to be heard significantly or another point of the film that feels inspiring. I would be unlikely to start with a scene where there’s lots of dialogue to concentrate on, since those aren’t moments where the music has much agency in telling the story.

From that melody I might then think about the orchestration: is it going to be something that’s played on the lower instruments (cellos, bass clarinet, basses, etc.), or is it a top-line tune? I usually do this sort of orchestration and motivic development on the computer, so I have the flexibility over, say, adding in an extra bar here or there to make sure the pacing matches and the music doesn’t get in the way of dialogue. It’s a technical process as well as a creative one, and other practicalities such as finishing on time (especially when the orchestra are already booked for a certain date) are always in my head alongside any artistic considerations. At that point I’ll probably try out the material on the director to see if I’m heading in the right direction – usually just on the piano – because ultimately without their support, whatever you write is unlikely to end up in the production. When it comes time for the first formal playback, I will make a demo using virtual instruments in a digital audio workstation (DAW) and spend a considerable amount of time making sure that the mix and balance is right, and the sounds are as good as they can be to ensure it is going to give the director a realistic feel for what is going on. I don’t want the sounds to be too realistic though, as they need to feel like they are going to be replaced by the real thing. It has to be almost believable as an orchestra, but not so believable that they say, ‘that’s great. Let’s leave it like that. What do we need an orchestra for?’

When the director comes over to my studio to watch the first preview, I will also run dialogue and sound effects to try and give as clear a sense as possible of how everything fits together and demonstrate how the tempo and synchronization of key moments work. Since this process is typically alongside other elements of the film’s postproduction, such as the creation of foley/sound effects and automated dialogue replacement (ADR), the dialogue and sound effects I am including are likely to be fairly rough, but good enough for the director to see whether or not the score is working and to make comments and changes. If you have worked closely with a director through the whole process it is unlikely that they will completely write off what you have done at this stage, but it is still important to be open and flexible to their suggestions no matter how tough their criticism of your material might be.

The final stage for me is to get the instrumental parts and score made before going into the studio to record the music. The whole joy for me of making music is to collaborate with real live musicians and performers that supply the sort of light and shade, dynamics, and phrasing that bring the score to life. I conduct my own scores so that I can interact and co-create with musicians, coaxing out the sort of performances that I want. That is what the studio work should be about, not about spending valuable minutes making last-minute edits. Then once you’ve delivered the music, that’s pretty much it: it’s down to the director to lay it up against film or the TV show, mix it with dialogue, sound effects, and your work is done. Even if changes are made in the final mix that you might not like – for example, sometimes cues are moved slightly from where they were originally intended to be, or even dropped completely to balance the final dialogue – the trick is not to be too precious. The director (and to some extent the editor) have the final say and it’s now out of your hands.

Characterisation and Storytelling

Central to the entire process of writing music for film is an ability and desire to support and enhance the storytelling that underpins filmmaking. This begins by trying to capture the tone of the film’s worlds and trying to build the world as a sonic atmosphere, just like the director is trying to do visually. For me, the most important tool a composer has to be able to do this world-building is to create a theme or motif that is instantly recognizable for a certain character or environment. That’s very important. This can happen in lots of different ways: for example, with Wilde (1997) – a film about Oscar Wilde – it was a sense of the protagonist’s tortured soul that inspired me to write a theme that was quite chromatic and never settled harmonically in any particular way. Other times it might be a rhythmic gesture that offers a route into the musical language, for example in the syncopated feel of the theme I wrote for the long-running documentary series Children’s Hospital (1993–2003).

I personally want a theme to be memorable enough that you can sing it away from the film and know what it is. This is particularly important for television. I remember one of the experiences that made me want to write for film was when I saw the Mark Rydell film On Golden Pond (1981), which begins with a gorgeous open piano melody composed by Dave Grusin that draws the viewer into the film in a very delicate and poignant way, which remained in my mind long after leaving the cinema. Instrumentation is also important in transporting us to a musical world and giving us an insight into the character. For instance, with Judge John Deed (2001–7) – a contemporary courtroom series centred around a very powerful central character – I wanted to have a feeling of majesty and pomp, so I turned to a sound that immediately conjures up ceremony: a brass ensemble with a hymn-like movement and pacing. It was immediate, and clearly not written for a comedy series or something light and romantic.

Where you go from there depends on what the storytelling requires. Music has so much power over the image, but you really need to understand the characters’ journeys – their thoughts, feelings, actions, past, hopes, dreams, and so on – to be able to underscore those journeys. For me, I often return to my themes to help with these transformations, almost like leitmotifs. It is a great gift for a film and for a director to have something that is unique – a memorable and melodic signature – that is used in different ways to help drive the narrative. A theme might start quite small but as the film develops or the story unfolds, you can develop and unfold your melody in more complex or more interesting ways, taking it through twists and turns by breaking it down into fragments, or creating melodic variations on its shape that reflect how the characters’ stories are developing both internally and externally. How, for instance, do new perspectives or environments change the musical language of a theme? What does the theme sound like when underscoring dialogue in comparison to the film’s climax? How can it develop into different tempi or intensity?

I always try not to put anything in the scene that is already there, so if there’s a romantic scene playing out and the actors are doing a great job on screen, then there is no need to double up with the music. Overstating what is already on the screen, for example by overlaying lots of romantic music, will over-sentimentalise it and take the audience out of the journey. Instead, I think about subtext a lot so that there’s always at least one other thing going on in every scene, such as unresolved tension or a foreshadowing of future drama. Playing something that isn’t already happening on screen adds another dimension to the scene. For example, an action scene (say cars or motorbikes racing down a road) would work fine with rhythmic chase music, but if we think about what else is going on in the scene – are they fearful that they’re going to get killed? Is there an ulterior motive? – this layers the scene, pushes forward the storytelling, and makes it more exciting and interesting to the audience. If you get it right it can be wonderfully effective, but if you get it wrong you can completely kill a scene with the wrong music. You have to constantly keep checking yourself; that you’re not being over-sentimental, pushing the drama too far, getting in the way of the dialogue, or telling the audience what to think too much.

One of the most enjoyable qualities of film music for me is that it makes an audience believe what it tells you, whatever the scene. If we see something innocent on screen, but the music is evoking tension and fear, we believe what the music is telling us. It goes straight to the heart of the emotion – straight to our hearts – and you know that something bad is going to happen. But as well as helping an audience to feel what they cannot see, it allows us to be clever in how we play with an audience’s expectations. This is particularly the case in murder mysteries. I have fun with Father Brown (2013–22), based on the G. K. Chesterton novels, where sometimes I might throw suspicion on an innocent character by adding ominous and sinister music over a scene involving that character, setting them up as the ‘bad guy’ to throw the audience off the scent. Conversely, I will deliberately make sure that the character who is guilty never gets any dark music to avoid giving away the murderer’s true identity till right at the end. That’s how powerful music is.

The Language of Collaboration

As I’ve alluded to throughout this chapter, filmmaking is all about collaboration. Your relationship with a director in particular is one of the most important professional relationships you’ll have on a project and working effectively with them is key. When you are brought on board to start composing, you’re chosen by the director because they feel that you will be able to deliver the score that they require for the film. It is likely that they have either heard your music before, or maybe they chose you because you’ve worked with them before and you have an established relationship, or perhaps they are just taking a chance based on your portfolio or recommendations. Either way, they like the idea of working with you because they’ve heard something in your music that they think will complement their approach. A successful ongoing creative relationship with a director is the key to not only a positive artistic experience on a film but also potential future employment on multiple projects.

Once you are hired, your job is to work closely with the director and follow their creative lead. That means listening closely to their ideas – particularly the nuances and subtexts in their storytelling approach – and watching the film with them over and over again until, between you, there is a shared creative and musical vision. Understanding this vision underpins nearly all the decisions I make during the writing process, whether that be which scenes need or do not need music, or how the harmonic and timbral language of my music matches with the visual world (e.g. the camera angles, shot types, or colour palette used by the director of photography). Nevertheless, music can be a notoriously difficult thing to describe and discuss, so communication is key. Translating words and ideas into music is central to the job of being a film composer, and learning how to use the conversations you have (which may be quite abstract and metaphorical) to inform how you shape the music is a hugely important skill to develop.

Finding a way of working that opens up these conversations is crucial. For some composers, this means preparing mock-ups of multiple options in advance to present to the director for feedback, but I find that being able to improvise allows for a really fluid and collaborative exchange of ideas. An example of this is when I wrote the music for Wolf Hall (2015). I had worked with the director Peter Kosminsky already, so we knew how to talk about music. I read both the novels and the screenplay before we started our conversations. Peter was very specific, saying that he did not want to have ‘Tudor pastiche music’ to avoid feeling as if we were looking at that world through a stained-glass window, and suggesting that the historical setting or location should not exclusively influence the choices in the score. He wanted it to sound quite contemporary because of the way Hilary Mantel writes, making it feel as if the characters are experiencing everything in the present day. I sat with Peter in my composing room and played through various themes at the piano, just improvising, until after one particular melody I played he said, ‘I think that’s Cromwell’s theme’. It was a mixture of me trying out different things in real time, trying to come up with something that was immediate, arresting, and contemporary whilst still alluding to Tudor times, combined with Peter’s instinct for what felt artistically correct to him. Although, in the end, in the final score, I did end up using some Tudor instruments – recorder, lute, and harpsichord – the thrust of the score was really a string quintet and oboe: just contemporary instruments playing music with a feeling of immediacy.

Sometimes a director is not so clear about what music fits their creative vision though, and this needs to be teased out. Directors nearly always have a clear sense about what they want with the lighting, the camera work, the script, and the acting, but for some, when it comes to music it is a mysterious world of black dots that they do not understand. What I like to do is to find a way of discussing what the score should be in non-musical terms. The minute you start talking crotchets and quavers or hearing ‘I don’t really like saxophones, but I love trumpets’ you run a strong risk of not fully understanding what a director wants from the score. Those conversations limit what you can do creatively and risk being caught up in technical jargon or ideas. But if you can talk instead about the atmosphere, the story, the characters, and the drama, then you will likely draw a lot more out of the director for you to then translate into music. Comments like ‘this is a bit bright’ or ‘it’s not heavy enough’ offer far more scope for musical exploration than ‘I would prefer this in the minor’ or ‘I feel it should be scored for oboe instead’.

Sometimes though, even this sort of oblique conversation fails to quite ‘spark’ or work first time, and then it’s the composer’s job to keep trying alternative approaches until something does work. If you get very hung up on the theme and you think that’s the only theme that’s right for that particular story, but the director does not like it, then there will be conflict. It is also important for us not to get too caught up in our ideas and to be open to some of the happy accidents that come out of sharing the creative process with others. I’ve been working with a director on a film recently called To Olivia, about Roald Dahl and his rather turbulent relationship with Patricia Neal, his wife. I was struggling to come up with the theme for the film’s protagonist, Dahl, and spent a lot of time trying different ideas that were not quite right. That hook that I was talking about earlier – that little phrase – or idea – just was not coming to me, until the director John Hay sent me something he was listening to that was very uplifting and inspiring, and crucially, unlike any of my other approaches so far. I went to the piano to improvise and almost immediately came up with a theme, even though this was a new direction that we had not talked about. It is these completely different approaches that sometimes are what you need to steer you into unlocking your creativity.

Conclusion

Being a screen composer is a wonderful and rewarding job, but it is not without its challenges. I want to finish by going through three qualities that I believe you need to develop. The first is being disciplined. It is crucial in this industry to be able to work fast and to a deadline, and when an orchestra is booked in for a recording session in three weeks, you need to be efficient to write, revise, and orchestrate in time. Everybody always wants something by Friday! You must be able to come up with lots of ideas imaginatively and efficiently, which means trying over and over to come up with something that’s right. As a film composer you should never run out of ideas, and the best way to do this is write something every day and keep your compositional juices flowing. When I’m sitting at the piano or looking at a blank page of manuscript paper, I will come up with an idea no matter what. It may not be the best idea in the world, and I might throw it out at the end of the day, but at least I’ve got something. If you have nothing, you’ve got nothing to change, nothing to develop, nothing to build on or get better from. Maybe you will only use the first three bars or take just the melody line and find a new harmony, but either way, it is something to work with.

The second is being able to adapt. I have already talked about the importance of adjusting and reshaping your music to suit somebody else’s vision – often the director’s – and this also means being good at writing in lots of different styles. Being a film composer is a job for a chameleon. One moment you’re writing for a big costume drama with lavish costumes and sets, the next it’s an intimate two-hander, or raucous comedy, or intense action film. You have to make sure that you write music that is in your own musical voice, but also to understand how that voice is adapted into different worlds, locations, and atmospheres. You also need to adapt to practical limitations, for example different timeframes, budgets, or ways of working. Whether you have access to a 40-piece orchestra for a week or two musicians for a couple of days, you need to bring the same problem-solving and energy to get the most out of the situation, whether that’s by keeping the complexity of your score in check or being more creative about the ways that you are using your instruments.

Finally, you need to be persistent. Collaboration inevitably means negotiation, which also means taking criticism. Understanding that it’s not personal is key: criticism is (usually) not intended to upset anyone, but rather a way for the creative team to get back in sync and find what’s right for the project. As long as you can keep coming up with ideas, avoid being defensive, and not get too attached to anything you will always get there. By experimenting and getting it wrong, you learn – then you try again, and get things (hopefully) more right than you get wrong. It is all down to percentages. When you start out, you might only get things right fifty per cent of the time or even less, but the more experienced you are, the more you tend to get things right. You also need to be persistent in building up your networks. When I started out, I didn’t know anyone in the business. I made some recordings of my music when I was at college, and after I graduated, I sent my showreel to all the production companies, directors, and producers that I could find. Nobody in this industry advertises for a composer, so you need to be very proactive in finding work and develop a thick skin. I had to put a lot of effort into reading through all of the trade papers (like Broadcast, Screen International, etc. which list productions that are coming up) and broadening my network to know who to approach.

Even then, it took about two years of lots and lots of rejections before I finally had a production company reply saying, ‘I like this choral piece that you’ve got on your showreel. Do you want to come in and have a meeting?’ In that case the director was brave in taking the chance on me, which allowed me to get my foot in the door and start building up credits – and obviously from then on, the more credits you have, the better – but this method of getting work is becoming increasingly rare. Whilst it might be easier now with the internet to build a website or have a SoundCloud page, you still need to put time and energy into getting people to stop and listen to it. With so much material out there for a director or producer to hear, standing out from the crowd is increasingly difficult, so as well as developing an online presence you should also spend time and energy mixing with as many filmmakers as you can. Building up real friendships with directors and producers is a great start to developing the professional relationships that you need for continued work in the industry. And as all of this shows, being a screen composer is fundamentally a lifestyle choice. You have to love writing music more than anything else and give it 100 per cent commitment, no matter how demanding a job it is. For me, this often means missing social events or parties, and having friends and family who are supportive and understanding when I say, ‘I can’t make it tonight because I’ve got to get this cue finished.’ You do it because you know it is what you want to do and that is your passion. You want to make music for films, and you will do everything you can to achieve that.

Listening List

https://shorturl.at/kuEZ6