Composition (2023, Q2): Cadenza
As a spoiled habitual soloist, I think cadenzas are the bee's knees. There are few things more fun than at the end of the piece, when the accompaniment drops out and you can just show off every which way you can or can't. It's a double edged sword, mostly. The parts that work well sound absolutely amazing the parts that could use some more practice sound like dog-water. Of course I'm not of the old-fashioned bunch, meaning I'm not nearly as talented as the fiddlers of yore, so I don't really write my own - well, until my teacher suggested I might try my hand at it. Oh, well. Here we go.
My approach this time around differs somewhat from the usual fare. This time I did most of the scribbling on paper, since I don't really play violin in the vicinity of my tech setup. It's also a much more active process, since I don't think as much about harmonies and do more improvisation and scribbling the parts I like. I don't usually do this, because my improvisation is kinda lacking still, but it feels interesting. It's said that the tools you write music with will influence the music you write, and I can definitely see that. Here's my first draft on paper.
I know that technically I should be comfortable with what I've written down, but because my notation is so scratchy and I also didn't bother to erase mistakes, I had to transfer it into a notation software regardless. Naming the document was slightly awkward, and I don't know the convention. I'll have to ask about that on occasion.
My approach this time around was a lot more oriented on the different parts of the original piece. Of course Frank0, the violinist whose cadenza is written into the score I got, had his own approach here, but I suspect he might have also just had some personal favourites that got sprinkled in here and there, so if I just pick out the stand-out moments of the concerto as far as I perceived them and variate over that, then that should add up to a cadenza. It'll come out as a reimagining of the piece, but that can be a cadenza, right? I wasn't feeling creative, so I just started with the theme. The first chord (and the way it's played) is already very recognizable in itself. I think most people will picture the rest of the motif, by that chord alone. I certainly did even before learning the piece. I went on stretching the motif into something that could go in the cadenza. Crucially, there is a bowing technique that Mozart famously used a lot, though I think that might just have been a popular phrasing at the time in general. I incorporated it into the passages where I could.
Bringing that whole thing to an end, I used the first two chords of the second exposition to start into the second part of the cadenza. I chose to place a fermata over both of them, just so it was clear where we were and what was going to follow. Honestly, the second exposition has a lot of already very tricky parts, and I probably wouldn't be able to come up with anything to make it more interesting, so I just did whatever I felt like. It had a tendency to be very fast, so I deliberately turned it around when I felt the segment was done.
By then I felt like this was probably going to be long enough very soon. The concerto doesn't end after the cadenza and I wasn't going to insist on keeping everybody else waiting for too long, so I wanted to return to the point where the orchestra would return. That was a bit of a problem, as I had made the key signature ambiguous while I wasn't paying enough attention to it. My solution to this was basically hiding a modulation in plane sight. It returns very definitely to G major when at that first fermata.
The rest is just set dressing until I get back to the first chord, book-ending the cadenza and the piece in general.
Now, in writing this first draft, I overlooked something. Something pretty important.
The piece doesn't end with the Cadenza, but it actually ends with the orchestral tutti, and it's a pretty energetic one as well, which does not work well with the slow-down at the end of the Cadenza I wrote, meaning that I had to revise it into something that could match the energy. I had these two bars hinting at a theme, that led into the last chord. I thought it best to continue that and lead into something that's not too dissimilar to the upbeats in Saint-Saens Introduction & Rondo Capriccioso.
I like how it came out. Both times. There's definitely some places where I feel like it came out too thin or too simplistic, but it's not overly romantic and it sounds like a piece composed on an instrument, which I've learned isn't always the case. I also feel like I've gotten a little more comfortable with improvisation, as odd as that might seem, but seeing as it was central to the process here, I think that's to be expected. Maybe I should revisit this exercise again in the future, maybe with a different piece. Cadenzas are fun anyways, what's the harm in learning an extra one?