On Apr 14, 2005, at 6:23 PM, Ryan Beard wrote:
A few here have said that the composer I work with shouldn't compose a piece for viola because he's not comfortable writing in the alto clef. How preposterous!
While I wouldn't go that far, I would certainly question how well he knows the instrument if he doesn't know alto clef well enough to read and write it. How could he have checked out the standard repertoire? I would have advised him to bite the bullet and do his best with the best notation he can produce (which means alto clef for viola, more often than not), and he would get very fluent very quickly. Though I wouldn't say that if he didn't want to know, and was paying me! People pay me all the time to let them live in ignorance. They get a discount if they want to learn. 8-)
But why can't an inexperienced composer without a pedigree write for any instrument he "hears" in his head?
Pedigree is not the issue. If he doesn't understand the instrument well enough to understand the notation of it, does he REALLY hear it? This isn't a blues guitarist we're talking about here, where everything is passed on by ear, it's a viola, with a ton of written history behind it. I'm not saying that knowing all that history is essential to writing a good solo work, but at least a passing acquaintance DOES constitute an admirable start. Most of what I learned about instrumentation I DIDN'T learn in school, so my degree has little to do what I know.
Inexperience IS an issue, but only in that he doesn't know yet what he doesn't know, and he should approach the piece with that in mind. At least, I would.
This is a matter of notation, not composition. Would you object to a score that isn't transposed (i.e. in C) for the inexperienced composer/orchestrator?
Hmm, that's an interesting point of view. But I don't agree with it. I believe that the communication to the performer of the composition is inextricably linked with the composition itself, without being totally parallel. To narrow the gap between the composer and performer, in order to convey the work as accurately as possible, I think the composer has to think like the performer. One of the things I liked about the first orchestration book I read (Forsyth) was that he stressed that you weren't only writing for the INSTRUMENTS, but also for the PLAYER of the instrument. It has affected my writing ever since.
To wit, one doesn't just write for a viola, but also for a player who has spent a lot of time with standard works, and a lot of time practicing certain technical challenges, and spent a lot of time playing whole notes in first position in orchestras, and who has heard a lot of viola jokes that bug him, and hardly ever gets a solo in any of the groups he plays in even though he plays as well as the first violin. If you don't get that, and don't take advantage of it, you are missing a lot about violists. Tubists and trombonists are in a similar position. Berio understood that in a fantastic way.
In my composer's case, he hasn't had much of an opportunity to write for viola. Now, his violist friends who have heard his other compositions want a viola sonata from him. He wrote in treble clef because it's faster for him to get his ideas down. He told me to put it in alto clef and change to treble where appropriate when I engrave it. What's wrong with that?
Nothing at all, except as I said, I wonder whether he knows enough to write it as well for the instrument as he would like. I hope he learns a lot from this piece.
christopher
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