Ruth Lee Martin

Well I’ve just completed a piano piece for Joanne Polk from the Manhattan School of Music in New York. This work will be premiered both in New York and Canberra through the wonders of modern technology and video conferencing – so this is something very exciting. The work is called ‘The Winter it is Past’ and is dedicated to my Mum who died last year. The title is from a song written by the great Scottish Bard Robbie Burns whose poetry my mother loved (although not all of his poetry and certainly not his crude ones – as my mother used to say Robbie Burns could be ‘a very vulgar man’). As a compositional basis I’ve used the song Danny Boy as this piece of music was sung by my mother. The first time she remembers singing it was when she was four and her mother stood her on a chair to sing it for some visitors to their house in Edinburgh. So the piece is saturated compositionally by fragments of this song, and it provides the overarching melodic unity for the piece.

As I’ve been composing this piece I’ve been struck most forcibly by the craft of composition – to me it really is about balance. Composition is, in a very real sense, a balancing act between many musical elements. It’s about the balance between too much of one thing, and not enough of another; it’s about the balance between sounds and silence; memorable rhythms and memorable melodies; the balance between larger scale forms and micro structures; and it’s about the balance between pre-compositional material and material that occurs as you compose. This is the part I find very difficult. I usually begin composing with a rough idea of where I’d like to go – notice I say ‘the way I’d like to go’ – because often, in my composing at any rate, the material often wants to go off in an entirely new direction. This urge sometimes needs to be resisted, but at other times it needs to be listened too. For example, in this particular work a jig rhythm kept insinuating itself into the musical texture. I fought this impulse for some time – finally I gave in. But I fought the impulse for a reason – some materials are just so strong that they will entirely dominate a piece and then they leave you, virtually, with nowhere to go – it’s a musical deadend. So in order to counter this (and to continue my theme of balance) I allow this material in, but I break it up in places, and where musically appropriate, in order to lessen it’s impact. Now this sounds strange. Why wouldn’t you want a really strong section musically? Well, the answer is, as I said before it will totally dominate everything around it. So it all comes back to balancing these ideas, both pre-compositionally but also the ideas that occur that will take you somewhere quite different. Anyway, that’s what happened here, although for a time I did feel like I was herding wayward goats this section has turned out quite OK, and I’m please I listened to this impulse even though it had to be moderated.

Well that’s it for now. I’m going to have a thorough check through the score and then send it off in the next few days.