On Tuesday I completed the piece for Sandro, fully engraved and looking beautiful. I emailed it over just minutes before I had to go teach.

I was quite nervous about how he would receive it.

I know, the most important thing is that I was happy with the piece. I put all I could into it and it is truly a notch above my previous efforts in many ways. And I would enjoy listening to it as well.

I know that being proud of my piece is the most important thing, but it is only natural that I want Sandro to like it, right?

So I was nervous. As soon as I came back from teaching I ran downstairs to check my email and… no note from Sandro.

At around 7 the phone rang.

I picked up and there was a brief silence at the other end after which a hesitant voice spoke, “Hello, could I speak to Mr. Alain Mayrand, please?”

I thought, man, not another damn telemarketer. My God, they call all the time! I had a cold and was not in the mood.

I almost burst out right away “Listen, I have no time for this right now, will you guys just stop calling!?”

But instead I kept my cool and answered in my most deadpan, don’t-mess-with-me voice “Yes, this is me.”

“This is Sandro Russo calling.”

My jaw dropped. Boy, was I ever glad not to have answered hastily!

What a treat it was to finally speak to this great artist, to add a voice to the emails and pictures. I was so relieved to hear how he was enthusiastic about the piece and couldn’t wait to get going on it. He said he considered it a major work (I would like nothing less, of course, but only time will tell.)

We had a great talk about many musical things and I got a glimpse of his quasi spiritual view of his role in music. A true pleasure.

So now that the piece is done, engraved and sent, it is time to pick up the papers strewn all over my studio. It is a strange feeling to finally take down the theme, which has been hanging over my writing board since March 10th.

There is a bittersweet quality to completing a project, and a great satisfaction as well, and nothing could have better ended this journey that receiving that surprise call from Sandro.

It is very hard to be objective when you are composing or playing through your piece.

So it’s a real benefit to be able to take the listener’s seat for a few minutes and listen to Finale’s playback of the notated score.

It’s true that the playback quality is not very good, but it’s enough for me to get a sense of how the architecture of the piece is working: the arc of the piece, the flow from one section to the next, the development of ideas, that sort of thing.

But is it cheating? I used to think so, but I have since realized a simple truth:

What seems good in your imagination may not be quite as exciting out in the real world.

Anyone knows this to be true, but simple things like this tend to get obscured when you are composing in the shadow of Mozart and Beethoven.

But now I know better.

After all, it’s a lot like how musicals do workshops to fine-tune the piece, or how screenplays get altered in the editing room.

And, who knows, if Bruckner had had MIDI playback, perhaps we would have only one version of his symphonies!

Today I begin engraving Sandro’s piece!

But that doesn’t mean it is finished, because it definitely is not. I have the skeleton of the piece in place, and I just need to fill it out.

Here’s an example.

This shows an idea for a line where I knew how everything else was supposed to go around it, so I didn’t stop to write out all the details, choosing instead to keep on writing the main line.

If I had taken the time to fill out every detail of note, chord, counterpoint, voice-leading etc… then I would have surely lost my flow of ideas.

This is an extreme example, though. Most of the piece is much completely fleshed out than that. Filled out enough that I am ready to begin engraving.

I like to start engraving at this stage because it is really exciting and motivating to see the piece start to take on its final, engraved look.

But I also start engraving now because it breaks up the work a bit: I fill out a page or two of the piece with paper and pencil at the piano, and then move to the computer to engrave them. Then back to the piano and so on.

It keeps it more varied and thus more interesting.

And because it is done digitally, once the piece is engraved I will still be able to make all kinds of changes, additions, deletions and whatever else needs to be done to get this piece as a fit as a fiddle.

Now, I need to start thinking about titles…

Since Sandro is a virtuoso, a goal for this piece is to showcase his outstanding technique.

A common feature of virtuoso works is the flashy scale or arpeggio run meant to thrill the audience with its super-human difficulty.

But it is soooo easy for these gestures to be all flash and no substance, a trap I am trying to avoid.

I want every gesture, even the flashy ones, to be part of the architecture of the piece.

They must be as exciting as possible while still being part of the development of the theme.

t’s like a good story; you use only what develops your character and storyline. No fluff.

As an example, here’s a sketch from my notebook. It’s a very cool idea that develops the main theme.

(Right now I am using it in the finale, but we will see if it stays there after the rewrites.)

This gesture has all the right elements:

• It’s flashy and virtuosic
• It is gestural (not just a melody, but it has a gestural “shape” to it)
• It’s different (you can’t just imitate Liszt, you know!)
• It develops the theme

Notice the the circled pitches, that’s where the theme is.

Accompanying each melodic note is also an octave, either above or beneath it, clarifying the melodic line.

I can’t wait to have the whole thing put together.

The piano piece for Sandro is coming along nicely but slowly, not because of a lack of inspiration but from a lack of time.

There is much to do in setting up the sheet music for sale on my website, a very exciting thing to do and to see it come together, but quite time consuming. The site is coming along nicely, however, and I should soon be done and able to devote my time to composition entirely. Well, almost.

The latest addition to the site is “Uriel’s Anvil” for alto saxophone and piano. The piece has been getting some very positive reviews from people, and I am very happy how the recording turned out. (The performers were Julia Nolan on alto sax and Sandra Joy on piano. They kicked.)

Back to Sandro’s piece.

Before I begin my daily work I usually read through a few pages of Liszt very, very slowly to put myself in that virtuoso mood.

That approach has been working well and I can see my writing getting more virtuoso-like every day. That’s a good thing but it means that the latest pages are better than the earlier ones, which also means I will have to rewrite a lot.

But I am ready for it! Bring on the rewrites!

This is very exciting. I am writing a piece for the great pianist Sandro Russo.

Sandro is a pianist in the tradition of the greats like Horowitz, Cziffra and now Marc-Andre Hamelin. To write for a musician such as him is a great honour.

An honour not without pressure… I have been watching Sandro play on YouTube, as well as other great pianists, and I made the mistake of wondering if my writing I could live up to that.

As a composer it is only natural to have self-doubt in your powers of invention, and it is healthy as long as it leads to growth. But doubt leads to judging your ideas, and judging as you write is death to ideas. That’s the truth.

But I caught myself early and fixed it.

I imagined Sandro walking to the piano, bowing deep as the audience applauded. He sat down, his hands lifted over the keys, hovered for a moment and then…

There it was. I heard music, my music in the hands of a master and I was no longer scared but excited!

Check out Sandro’s videos here.

And here is Sandro’s website.

Over the last four days I worked on two demo pieces for a film I am being considered for. (I am not sure if I can say the name of it, so I won’t.)

These demo pieces do not represent underscore but source pieces written by the main character, who is described in the script as a composer of genius.

No pressure, right?

The first piece was, according to the script, to be written in a Goth Rock genre. It had to be fast, intense, head banging stuff that sounded like it had been written by a genius.

So I thought, Bartok with distorted guitars! Party time!

But I was advised to not stray too far from the confines of the Goth Rock genre. (Which makes complete sense. My original intentions would have surely resulted in music a bit too …different, for a movie.)

I thought it would be a walk in the park, but it turned into a bigger challenge than I expected.

You see, even though I started out playing classical like most kids do, it was heavy metal and hard rock that got me practicing up to 10 hours a day during my teenage years.

But that was during the eighties and, since I don’t play much anymore and didn’t know the first thing about Goth Rock, I had to do some catching up and get aquatinted with the the mainstream Goth bands.

On Monday, after a half day of listening I had the gist of it down and was ready to go.

Then I had to come up with a musical concept that would make the style seem like a genius composed it without resorting to dissonant harmonies, odd time signatures or weird instruments.

My solution was to make the music flashy and virtuosic and more harmonically active, to write it in a driving 6/8 rhythm rather than the ubiquitous 4/4, to give it some smart-sounding counterpoint and an epic, orchestral feel with only guitars, bass and drums. (And a little bit of piano.)

And here’s the result!

Yeah, that was fun. I emailed it to the writer/producer and he was pretty jazzed up about it. (Or should I say “Gothed up”?)

The second piece was a bit easier for me to write. In the script there is an opera and this demo piece would be the climactic scene, an execution, also written by the genius composer of the story. Instruction was to blend the dark elements of Goth with a romantic-period lyricism.

So I wrote an epic, heroic march to the scaffold.

It’s big.

I delivered both pieces to the producers and director yesterday. Wish me luck!

I have just completed the piece for saxophone and piano. It is all composed, filled in, nipped and tucked and carefully engraved.It is called “Uriel’s Anvil”.

I was feeling a bit sentimental as I emailed the PDF by to the pianist Sandra Joy. Here’s the email I wrote as a preface.

To: Sandra Joy Friesen

The piece is done,

I present to you Uriel’s Anvil.

There should be trumpets, a parade, dancing, singing or something!

But instead I am just sending this computer file, sitting alone in my basement studio. It’s a bit anti-climactic really…

I feel like I should write you a long email, explaining everything that went into this piece. All the thoughts I had, all the clever things I put in, all the torments I endured. But that would take forever.

Still, I want to say something on behalf of this piece that has just now finished being born.

I think it is a good piece. I am proud of it. I worked hard to bring it to the point it is at. It represents a step forward, not just repeating myself. I built on the ideas I have developed while trying new things and grew a little bit for the effort.

I think it is an exciting piece, full of life and ideas, it should grab people and not let go. But I can only hope. I hope those who hear it will love it and be excited by it, but I have no control over that.

All I can say is that I, myself, am excited.

Now I’ll celebrate by cleaning up my studio…

Thanks Sandra,

Add a little here, take away there. As I complete the piece for saxophone and piano, it strikes me (yet again) how much small details make a big difference.

I just added two little empty beats before the closing section, it’s nothing right? Now the whole section feels 100% better, without changing a single note!

And scattering two or three beats in the introductory section was enough to give it a more natural flow.

A bigger change was inserting very short contrasting B sections just before important changes in texture. It creates a better ebb and flow to the piece.

It’s all about balance.

I still have to fix a few more things. I think the ending is too abrupt, and even though I generally like unresolved endings I don’t want to make it feel like the piece was cut off.

I am looking for the perfect form, and I won’t give up until I get it.

It’s going to be one nasty piece! It’s fast, showy and exciting. It has lots of cool textural and melodic ideas, some nice counterpoint, “solo” sections with big funk-meets-Bartok grooves, fast unison runs and even a canon!

I can’t wait to hear it played on October 27th!

The skeleton of the piece is done! It’s 4:40 on Friday! This was an intense day and I managed to write just over 5 pages. Not bad.It’s a skeleton because there are some headless stems and empty measures that need to be fleshed out.

“Laying down the bones” (as I call it) works great for me. It allows me to get a sense of the flow and worry about details later. Oh, I put details in if they come, of course, but I don’t force myself to fill up every measure. This allows me to keep up with the flow of ideas.

The details come pretty easy after that anyway, because I have a view of the whole now, I know what material is coming next, what pitch(es) I need to aim for— I have direction! And that helps give the music direction as well.

Another part of my “skeleton first” approach is to jot down a preliminary formal plan based on my initial brainstorm. (I mentioned that in the previous Journal entry.) I do this by picking my favourite ideas and deciding on an order for them.

The form is constantly shifting as I write, and so I keep paper handy to jot down other ideas and adjust what plan I have.

This really works well for me. It helps me keep a much clearer vision of a complex form. I can keep my head down and work at capturing whatever is coming, then and a single glance at that sheet of paper pinned above my board brings back that clear image of the form!

Doing this I can better pace the development of the material and create a better arc to the piece.

Next step: filling in the details, then doing the tweaks.