I sometimes find that finishing a piece is even harder than starting. Luckily, for this set of pieces, once I had a concept for my past piece, it really took off from under me. I may need to backtrack a little here...
To start, I wanted to write a piece that balanced wonky tonalities with a folk-ish melody to start my three pieces for piano trio. Once that was done, I was inspired by Lutoslawski's scores to writing a piece that was intriguing to the eye and knew that I wanted to have this as a slower piece that focuses on the chords (from my original chord progression) and the sonorities that form from mixing the three instrument voicings. So that was all fine and well. Don't get me wrong- this certainly took some time, but overall it came together and I was pleased with the piece. Now what? Beats me I'll tell ya that much. When it came time to start writing my third and final piece of the set, I didn't quite know where to start. I would write something... and erase it. I would write something... and erase it. I would write something... and you get the idea.
Sometimes I've found that if you have a title in mind, it can help you take your piece where it instinctively wants to go; however, this also would not be of much benefit for me since I didn't have a title for my collection of pieces or a title for any movement. So I'm back to square one. I decided though that I would explore this 'naming' avenue first and maybe get inspired along the way.
To my surprise, this method actually worked! My train of thought actually went pretty fast here... I started with the first but couldn't think of anything immediately so went to the second. The second one had some homophonic movement like a chorale and some individual movement that was somewhat chant like. Chorale and chant... Church. But the sonorities weren't traditional. Everyday chant for the modern man. Translated to latin as it would have been and boom. Title created. Back track to the first piece. Something to go with chant. Chant happens on Sunday. Sunday? SUNDAY! Title for the set. My god! This is great! So back to the first piece... Hmm... What do I do on Sunday? I grocery shop on Sunday. "Off to the Market" it is. So now I've got a piece about a Sunday. The last piece from there was easy coming. It had to be something about dreams and sleeping and the mind rushing trying to fall asleep.
I was inspired by Tintinnabuli, a compositional style coined by Avro Pärt. To read a little more on this method, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintinnabuli (yes, I know Wikipedia isn't a scholarly source, but it give a good description of this technique that is extremely accessible to readers).
From there, I created a somewhat minimalist style piece with repetition of certain pitch classes, moving rhythms, different accentuations, all with the underlying concept of Tintinnabuli and of course, chords from my original progression.
Funny how sometimes, music comes together in a way that you least expect.
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