Now that I have “finished” my first composition project, it’s time to turn my attention to the next project.

I have no idea what the next project is going to be.

There are at least four different hymns by Dwight Armstrong that I can take some inspiration from.  He was not a great composer, but he did a couple of things very well.  His melodies could be catchy, if a little pedestrian.  But his harmonies were something else.  He was very jazz influenced, there are 13th chords, he loved using seventh chords in ways they really weren’t supposed to be used, and he was actually pretty avant garde for his time, especially when you consider that what he had written were four part “traditional” hymns.  What he wrote, while not necessarily works of art in any way, were quite…  unique.  And, if you grew up with them, pretty memorable too.

Put another way, Martin Luther might have spun in his grave if he’d seen what Dwight Armstrong did with the form.

And that could get me through a few more compositions, but then I have to ask myself, is this what I want to really do?  At what point does it turn from a memorial, a requiem, into a love letter?

These hymns were a major influence in my life and some of them make me feel very specific and highly charged emotions.  But I don’t love them.

I guess I’ll write what I’m driven to.

I have not started on the next piece yet.

The “Dream Requiem” kind of formed itself piece by piece.  I worked on the intro, got it to a place I liked, worked on the next section, got it to a place I liked, then worked on the third section (the fugue part took me ten minutes to write, and then another two weeks to figure out how to get out of it), and almost finished it there.  But it needed an ending, so I wrote that section too.  There was no cohesion to any of the parts save the thematic development, and I did not really have a cohesive plan going in.

In fact, the one plan I did have didn’t get written.  I originally went into it thinking I was going to write one stanza of the hymn as a kind of funeral dirge, between flute and oboe, swelling into the full band in the third phrase (think Saint-saens’ fourth concerto).   But that’s not what I ended up writing.  It would have been beautiful.  It never happened.

This next time, I don’t want to write it organically like that.  I want to plan it out.

I wonder if I can actually do that.

I’ve never been able to.  Not when writing, not when composing, not even when programming.  Things just write themselves.  It works out.  But I wonder how much better everything would be with even a little planning.

Also, I’m not sure if I want to write for concert band.  A part of me is thinking chorale.  But, we shall see.  I will not talk further about it until I’m far enough along that talking about it won’t sap my motivation.