Tell me again the music of that Tale - VII Far away...

I cannot tell that every time I wrote for voice I started the same way. For example, in Courage…to follow the way for two Sopranos, Tenor, Baritone, wind orchestra and choir, when I was setting e.e. cummings poems, I was walking in circles, saying the text in a sort of rhythmical pattern synchronised with my steps. That made most of the text, but a big part of it was made in the process of composition. Far away…, the 7th song of my song cycle, was made in a total different way: in a first stage, I was playing on the piano a melodic line, using the harmony and melodies I created before, and with it a sort of vertical-harmonic accompaniment, which in fact was only one chord on the left hand. 

In a second stage, I was trying to find coherence between music and text. For this, I sung a few times and, every time I sung, I changed the way I set the text. In fact, to control and convey musical coherence to such a vast set of vocal behaviours, it is necessary to apply to the text combinatorial criteria that are analogous to those applied to the vocal gestures: it is necessary to break up the text, to demolish it, to scatter the fragments on different levels so that they can be reassembled and recomposed in a musical, rather that a discursive or narrative, perspective. It is not a perfect science, so every time it will be different.

Having completed the text stage, I scored the text and orchestrated the vertical-harmonic accompaniment. The orchestration plays a very important part in this process because it is necessary to make such a difficult and personal decisions, as for example: am I orchestrating this harmony in a vertical way, as I played on the piano? am I orchestrating this harmony in a horizontal way, creating a sort of second melodic line on the instruments? am I using the instruments to respond to the voice? or I am using the instruments to do a sort of accompaniment? am I using the harmony to create a sort of floor to build the house? or is it the voice the floor of the house and are instruments the rest? It is not like I know all the answers for all these questions. How many times you looked a the weather app in your iPhone and it says ’Stay dry. Today: Rain with a low of 6ºC', and during the day you had a dry and sunny day? Well making these decisions is like the weather, you never know what is going to happen, even if the app says "it is going to rain.” 

The following stage is like a sort of river current, pulling the water to a specific direction. It is composing without any barrier, almost without thinking, in the warm of the moment, to reach a sort of goal - a double bar. Then, you stop and return to the beginning. You add, you check or correct articulations and dynamics. You do reinforcements, liking different timbres with same material; or different timbres sharing the same motif in different sections. You delete or add bars, you make some repetitions, you make some rests. Then you reach the goal and you return to the beginning again. You transpose, you create new lines, new melodies and new accompaniments. You create new material - that you can use later during other songs or even in the actual one. You change the beginning, you change the end, you delete notes to add others. At the end, you still realised when you have been lazy and you have used technology to do copy and paste without thinking about it. So you go back and you correct it, because creativity does not resides in copy and paste. Creativity consists in copying, pasting, changing, returning, experimenting, trying to reach something you agree it is good enough to be there.