🎼 April 2025: Instruments
Conveying an idea musically is challenging; doing it with multiple arrangements far more so… which makes it fun, of course. Also: Dorico 6 and Austin Wintory!
Hello everyone!
It’s April 30, and that means it’s time for your monthly composing update from me: Chris Krycho, who just almost repeated the same riff on “friendly neighborhood Spider-man” as he did last month, because oh boy has there been a lot going on. New music and a new job in a single month, not to mention being only 2½ weeks out from my first full marathon. But we don’t have time for talking about marathons or new jobs: there’s a music essay to get into! Let’s talk about orchestration, just as I promised last month—
🎼 On the craft
(Note to email subscribers: the video version of this will be up on YouTube in a couple of days. Lots going on, as noted above!)
Holy Saturday is in a real sense both a single work and three different works. The EP has three “versions” on it:
- Holy Saturday (Version for Piano)
- Holy Saturday (Version for Violin, Viola, Cello, and Contrabass)
- Holy Saturday (Version for Chamber Orchestra)
I knew almost from the start that I wanted to compose this in multiple versions this way. A note I jotted down in my journal just a few days after I started on it tells the story:
Thinking about the sketch for “Holy Saturday”… What should I do instrumentation wise? I could sketch out multiple orchestrations, perhaps, after building out the actual tonal development. No reason it cannot work for several different kinds of instrumentation – a small string ensemble, a chamber orchestra, etc. – and that would be good practice too.
And again, from my Field Notes pocket notebook:
Some orchestration ideas for “Holy Saturday”:
- Piano, basically as is [i.e. how I originally composed it], but recorded
- Vocal and piano: could I record multiple takes of us? The pedal in piano, and the melody in the voices?
- String quartet? But w/a bass. or quintet?
- String orchestra w/harp? & timpani maybe?
- Chamber orchestra, similar to above?
- Symphony orchestra – again, similar?
One obvious question is how the work will work on those instrumental scales: it has precious little development, largely intentionally, because the static grief is the point. But even so, it may want a bit more.
You can see from that list what did, and what did not, make the cut—at least for this go-around! The piano, the string ensemble with a bass instead of a second violin, and the chamber orchestra with a harp—but no timpani! Perhaps in another “version” in the future.
Last time, I talked about how music represents: with instrumental music, always indirectly, coming at you sideways and by suggestion. Instrumentation is a big part of that.
One of the frustrations I experienced for a long time in composing was the disconnect between an idea in my head, how I could sketch it on the piano, and what it would actually sound like when translated into a non-piano instrument. A piano is a percussive instrument. It works by striking a hammer against a chord with various degrees of force depending on the way you touch the keys. You can modulate that with technique and with the pedals—as indeed I do extensively in Holy Saturday: the sostenuto pedal holds for the bass line throughout, and making that work easily informed the structure of the piece. But fundamentally, the fact of the piano’s percussiveness means it does not work the same way that a sustaining instrument such as a violin or a flute or a French horn works.
At the same time, I often hear a piece already (partially) orchestrated. I might ideate a fanfare played by a mix of trumpets and trombones. I might think of a melodic line and immediately conceive of it as something played by a viola or a French horn or a flute. I might have a rhythm and a sense of where it belongs a percussion line.
The challenge with a work like Holy Saturday was that I had the idea (a) without any specific instrumentation in mind and (b) specifically with the idea of different instrumentations in mind—but with the commitment that each instrumentation should convey the same sense, even if in substantially different ways.
The piano version is an easy starting point. It was obvious to me from the start that I would need to use a pedal to make the base notes “sustain” effectively the way I wanted. There is a repeating G2 on every single beat of the piece, but there are also occasional downbeat hits on G1. The effect I wanted was for those to blur together, emphasizing the way the “day” drags on interminably. I needed a pedal. At the same time, I did not want the melodic (and occasionally harmony) lines above that in the right hand to blur together that way, so the ordinary sustain pedal was out. I chose to use the sostenuto pedal with the left hand, so that those low notes would blend but the melodic lines above would not. This provided some fun performance challenges for the right hand, where I did want sustain—I think I might actually go back and add some suggested sustain pedaling for some of those trickier transitions. But the key was to get that effect, and sostenuto did the trick.
How to translate that into the string ensemble or the chamber orchestra?
In the case of the string ensemble, I gave the repeated G2 to the cello, pizzicato (plucked) and had the contrabass simply hold on G1 throughout the entirety of the piece, flautando (playing very lightly and quickly up over the fingerboard). That’s a technique mostly used for effect in higher strings but here it gives the contrabass a lighter quality that doesn’t end up making it overbearing on the rest of the orchestra, while still sustaining and thus “holding together” the low strings. Then the right hand parts I fairly directly gave to the viola and violin, but with small adjustments to the phrasing to give it a cleaner sense of motion than a pure “translation” from the piano part had.
In the chamber ensemble, I could have done just exactly the same, but with more instruments—but it would have lost the opportunity to make a really distinct version of the piece. I gave the plucked repetitions to the contrabass and the harp instead. Unless dampened, the harp resonates and rings out a bit more like the piano does though it is much quieter than a piano. Then I placed tubular bells striking G4 on the downbeats where I had the piano playing the G1 in the piano version. That provided the sustaining through-line I needed. Because of the rich overtones in the tubular bells, that accomplished the same thing as the low piano or the flautando contrabass in the other versions. Then the melodic lines I spread throughout the other instruments, often doubling them across the wind and string families to make the texture richer and thicker—and very occasionally bringing in the whole ensemble to provide emphasis in a way that is impossible in the smaller ensemble or solo versions of the piece.
The key was that each of those versions needed to do the same basic work, but differently as appropriate to the ensemble.
When I first shared the string and chamber orchestra versions with my wife, she asked, “How did you know or decide to use the non-traditional string ensemble [i.e. not the usual string quartet]?” As you can see in the notes I copied out of my Field Notes notebook, I knew from nearly the outset that I was going to need to do it that way—but that only pushes the question further back. The answer, as I told her after a bit of reflection, was basically “practice”. I knew that if I wanted that low sustained and blended sound, two violins and a viola and a cello would not be quite up to the task, because I know the ranges of those instruments and how they sound, because I have been writing for them off and on for two and a half decades now.
There is plenty more I could say about the rest of the orchestration, but I think that serves to illustrate the work involved. I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments, or questions on this!
🎵 Other notes
A bit bigger section here than usual!
Music
Austin Wintory’s Journey is one of my favorite video game scores of all time and a genuinely excellent work of contemporary composed music in its own right. His latest, Towerborne, is not Journey, but it is very, very good, and I think it is substantially his best work since Journey. Give it a listen! I linked iTunes so you can buy it, because, well: see the next section.
Spotify
I read Brian Green’s  Accepting the Spotify “problem” a few months ago, after publishing my own note about music services, and after Spotify finally (!) became profitable. Green summarizes at the top:
- There are exactly 2 ways Spotify can be useful to small indie artists: (1) as an unpredictable marketing channel, and (2) as a barometer for your audience growth achieved in other ways. It is not something to “work on” outside of occasional marketing activities.
- Streaming in general is not viable as a primary revenue source for musicians; do not think of it as one.
- It is not worth my time as an independent artist to fight for or expect Spotify’s downfall; expect it and the streaming model generally to stick around for a long time.
- It is respectful to a potential listener to have your music on Spotify or any possible place where music can be heard; not doing so is a missed opportunity to find a potential fan.
If you care about the economics of music at all—which is to say, if you care that the musicians you listen to can keep making music—, give the post a read: it’s worth your time. I don’t endorse every word, of course, but the big picture view and advice of how to relate to Spotify is exactly right in my book.
Dorico 6
Dorico 6 is out today! Dorico remains one of my very favorite software tools, and every major version I have used (3, 4, and 5 to date) has been meaningfully better than what came before. This is “insta-buy” territory for me. (Literally: I already bought it and downloaded it!)
Dorico’s already-great those capabilities look to have gotten that much better in Dorico 6, along with some significant new capabilities for advanced/contemporary notation needs. One of the additions I am most looking forward to trying is a new built-in “proof-reading” capability. I work almost entirely alone1 so having proof-reading tools that can catch common mistakes that I might miss just from being too close to the music will be a big win for me.
Typography nerd that I am, though, this might be my favorite note in the announcement blog post:
Dorico 6 also introduces support for OpenType features, which is something that we’ve wanted to add to the software for many years. It’s now possible to use lining figures, old style figures, small capitals, discretionary ligatures, swashes, and other glyph positioning and substitution features built into today’s sophisticated fonts, directly in text paragraph styles, font styles, and character styles. Together, these features provide significantly enhanced flexibility in the presentation of text in the score.
If you haven’t tried Dorico, I do encourage you to (a) take advantage of the 60-day trial and (b) use that time to learn Dorico. Many folks coming to Dorico from other software (Sibelius, the now-discontinued Finale, MuseScore, etc.) find it a bit surprising because its model for how music works is quite different from the others—but once you get your head around that, it is astonishingly good. Its engraving capabilities are particularly noteworthy. I had just gotten used to Dorico’s output as a fairly credible baseline, and then someone sent me a score exported from Sibelius, and… it was rough. You absolutely can make great-looking scores with Sibelius; many professional engravers do just that! But the baseline quality you get with no effort out of Dorico is much, much higher, and that matters.
No one is paying me to say this: I just love the software and have enormous respect for the team behind it and want to see them succeed.
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🎤 Links, updates, &c.
The big bit from this month was the release of Holy Saturday, of course!
Other updates:
- After getting Holy Saturday out the door, I picked back up work on the symphony, kicking off with some revisions on Movements I and II. I still expect to be able to finish the first draft of Movement III this year, and that’s a good feeling.
- I then put that on pause until mid-May, because starting a new job and preparing to give the opening keynote at a tech conference are enough…and then some. Unlike previous short pauses, though, I am quite confident I will pick things back up quickly and easily, having found my rhythm for this late last year.
👋🏼 Happy April!
I hope you enjoyed Holy Saturday as well as these thoughts on it. Thank you especially to those of you who have listened to Holy Saturday this month, and extra especially to those of you who bought it. As ever, thank you for your attention. I don’t take it lightly.
I’ll be back at the end of May with: something new and different!
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Shoutout here to a couple joyful exceptions to that rule: my friend Bryan Levay for mixing and mastering both The Desert and Holy Saturday and to our congregation at Holy Trinity Anglican Church and our music leader Terri Moon for making the recording of Sanctus for Epiphany! ↩