One Day Wonder #280

For 1 horn, 1 trumpet, 1 trombone and tuba.

I was really hoping to weave a little more polytonal magic for today’s piece, but it didn’t work out too well. Past efforts (all of them not very recent) have worked out very well, but only in a kind of melody-accompaniment kind of way. What I wanted to do here is to have four independent lines in as many closely related keys going at the same time. I wanted them to intertwine and clash and do all the cool stuff that happens in polytonal music. Well, it didn’t turn out that way for a few reasons. First, the ear is almost always drawn upward to the highest melody, which basically cancels out all the other tunes going on below. Of course, one solution to this problem is to bring everything into the same register. Not a great idea. What you get is a lot of mush. OK, so that was a technical problem. The other one was a pilot error on my part. From the start of this piece, I wasn’t thinking in a horizontal way, which was how I’d envisioned it. Instead, I was preoccupied with the vertical and making sure the harmonies didn’t clash too much with each other. In addition, the harmonic configuration doesn’t change. Well, it doesn’t until I decided to pack in this crazy scheme and write whatever the hell I want. It was a good salvage operation, but I’m disappointed that I have to scrap concepts at this late stage when I should already know what works and what doesn’t. I guess the reason I was so keen on making this thing work was that I’m planning on writing an opera that will employ a lot of independent polytonal lines. I’m just looking for a system or a practice or an approach that works. So far, I’ve got the basic elements down, but I’m still trying to get a higher level of understanding for both the theory and the finished product. So that’s what this piece was all about.