The Making of Endless Ladders, Distant Stars
In late 2020, I was asked by Dr. Gillian MacKay (professor and amazing human at the University of Toronto) to write a piece for virtual wind ensemble (specifically, the virtual University of Toronto Wind Ensemble). Similar to my previous compositional romps, I was initially taken aback, but really excited to be asked!
Along with my colleague Michael Nunes, I was asked to compose something digestible for the ensemble to perform and record, and after a few months of hard work, the above video was created! This project was by far the most demanding piece I have written to date, requiring hours and hours of planning, drafting, and editing to make it happen. Below, I’ll try and explain the genesis of the piece, the process, and the struggles of writing ‘hit and record’ pieces of music. Let’s get into it!
legibility? in this economy?
Gettin’ goin’
As per my last blog post, I always start with some furious scribbles and drafts. Dr. MacKay left things pretty open: just write something we can do virtually! Pretty quickly, however, I ran into a problem… we’ve been doing virtual performances for months now, how the heck do we make things fresh?
Ever since about when the Toronto Symphony released their tear-jerking post-produced video of Appalachian Spring, I firmly believe that interest in ‘plug-and-play’ (PnP) premieres has been decreasing… and not without good reason.
I want to preface this section by trying to avoid sounding elitist or aloof, but I am viewing virtual premieres from the perspective of both a performer and a composer. On the composition side, we still have an obligation to be producing good works and furthering our own voices. But on the performer side, I put myself in the shoes of someone who has likely been asked dozens of times over the last year to chunk out a take with a mic and webcam, send it in, then watch a post-assembled virtual gig. I don’t think this is at all an invalid mode of performance or music-making—quite the contrary, as in the video above, it has provided much-needed artistic activity in an (apologies for the overused phrase) uncertain time. If you’re a music teacher, venue, ensemble, or any type of musician, what other options might you have?
That being said, I wanted to avoid yet another PnP, post-assembled and non-interactive glob that would be quickly forgotten, so it was time to hunt for info! While I was drafting and planning, the Wind Ensemble finished and premiered Michael’s piece, which you can view below. I really liked how Michael used Zoom as a medium of performance—smart cookie things like that really help distinguish pieces.
You’re stuck? Could I interest you in a phone flashlight?
Yes indeed, I was stuck.
During an academically demanding year, I unfortunately let this project sit on the back burner for quite some time—largely because I really wanted to get it right. When else would an undergraduate composer get a shot to write for a UofT ensemble? The stress of creating something meaningful was real, especially re: the above about how I feel about PnP performances.
I was languishing for some time, when after a percussion ensemble rehearsal one of my teachers Dr. Aiyun Huang suggested phone flashlights. Phone flashlights! Brilliant! In a percussion ensemble commission by Sean Griffin from 2020, we used phone flashlights to create really cool constellation effects, albeit in an aleatoric way. I took this idea and RAN (sprinted, galloped, zoomed) with it, with phone flashlights becoming the foundation for the yet-untitled work.
Something I saw several of the more interesting PnP performances mess with was simply the layout of the performers, less so the musical content. It was March 1st, 2021, that I speedily got the group’s instrumentation from Dr. MacKay and ended up with the pleasant surprise of a beautifully symmetrical diamond shape, which you can see below. This piece of paper ended up being the foundation of the entire work.
is that a pokeball in the middle?
Immediately, this piece was a change of pace compared to my older work. I realized pretty early on in the game that rather than being constructed around the music, the music had to be written around the physical layout of the piece. This was pretty weird… but presented a fun challenge.
Composition for me is all about the limitations, or perhaps parameters of a given piece. Someone coming up to you on the street and saying ‘write 4 minutes of music’ is, perhaps paradoxically, much harder than someone asking for a 8-minute string quartet, sonata form, neo-romantic style, F minor. By imposing these structure-driven constraints, I had a unique challenge ahead of me… and a lot of math.
Excel™, what is it good for? (alt. Excel™, Excel™ never changes)
Unfortunately, many of my original sketches of EL,DS were lost in an apartment move in April, but I do remember much of the initial time being devoted to planning out how to ‘grow’ the diamond and make some fun shapes. Essentially, the game plan was to start with Dr. MacKay at the center for the screen (see G, above) and gradually expand the number of players until the climax, then subtract in a slightly different way. Before even getting deep into the composition part of the project, I wanted to make sure that everything was feasible in the various programs I would be using. So, I sketched out two Excel workbooks of monstrous proportions to get the layout right, and also ran some trial videos through Adobe Premiere Pro to make sure everything worked. Premiere Pro is a beast of a program, and one I had used before but never to the extent of this project. Luckily, things seemed to work okay! You can check out some pages of the Excel books below (warning: music major attempting math ahead)
This part was tedious as all heck, but important to get done before writing got started, else I feared major alignment or cue problems. It is at this point in the process I should mention the invaluable help I got from Jonathan Wong through the duration of the compositional process. Not only was he a terrific audio editor towards the end of the project, he was also along for the entire project with eminently helpful production advice. This project would’ve been nigh impossible without his help.
After getting the ‘star book’ all glimmered and glammered, it was time to write! From the get-go, I knew that it would be ill-advised to write musically complex individual parts—the gracious and talented wind ensemble players would not only be juggling difficult academic schedules, but also what promised to be challenging lighting cues: modes of performance that would be unfamiliar to most players. Therefore, the music itself is really nothing to write home about—I anticipated that much of the interest would be generated at the intersection of the acoustic music, electronic track, and visual presentation, rather than with just one of the three.
Similar to the novelty of the above Excel sheets, I had to devise some atypical but clear notation in player’s parts to show lighting cues—you can check out the results below. Clear and simple wins the race! These notations, coupled with a descriptive document, ended up saving a lot of time in the editing room.
Electronics galore
After completing the acoustic score, I had some loose electronic sketches around the electronic accompaniment of the piece. Electroacoustic music isn’t exactly my main deal, but I was fortunate enough to take a few electronic music courses in high school taught by a wonderful instructor (if you’re reading this Ms. Reinhardt, thank you!!) that gave me something of a foundation for the electronic production portion of the project.
Realizing that manual computer keyboard entry would be too slow/cumbersome, I ended up renting a MIDI keyboard from Long & McQuade and re-downloaded the indomitable Ableton Live for mixing. Building a little nest in the basement of the UofT music building, I worked through an entire weekend to make an electronic canvas for the piece. It’s pretty cozy down there in a brutal, claustrophobic sort of way.
not pictured: 17 double-double cups and some extra-strength Advil
Down in the catacombs, the electronics track was finished! From there, I assembled it with a MIDI mock-up from Sibelius, re-notated the condensed score, and we had a product! From there, the condensed score had to be expanded into a full score with 48 individual parts, a perhaps unusual reversal of typical events in my process…
I desperately tried to condense parts down, but with each player requiring unique lighting cues, 48 individual parts had to be set and engraved. Most tediously, individual cues had to be imported from Excel into the large score, then checked over to not break any patterns—thanks Jonathan! In the end, parts were distributed to the Wind Ensemble with 2(-ish) weeks to spare, and it was post-production time!
It is also at this point I should vigorously thank the UofT Wind Ensemble players themselves for turning around a pretty complicated recording project in a short amount of time… at the worst time in the academic year, no less. Every tape I received, no exaggeration, was excellent and their attention to detail made my life so much easier in post production. Thank y ’all =)
Here’s a look at the most annoying page of the most annoying score:
at what point does Sibelius just light your computer on fire in protest? gotta be not long past this
Post-production and release!
Videos started rolling in around the end of March, and it was assembly time. Premiere Pro is an amazing tool, but sometimes an overwhelming and ungainly one. I quickly found that it was not happy to be constantly rendering 60 GB of video data at a time, and even with workarounds such as proxies and dividing up scenes, my computer still struggled. Unluckily for me, I also found myself video editing and corralling data the week before my recital, so things were a little bit frantic.
While I was working on video, the aforementioned Jonathan Wong was collecting audio and mixing things together; I probably would’ve exploded without his help on this, so thanks again. While we were both working through our separate parts, we communicated about fixes and preferences in the final draft. As well, Prof. MacKay was devising her ‘conducting’ role, which ended up being one of the highlights of the project for me. So much data flying back and forth! No musicians were harmed in the making of Endless Ladders, Distant Stars, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
I’ll admit that the work of wrangling Ableton, Premiere et al. over the 9 days of post-production was really rough, but it was also really rewarding to see the final product gradually assemble as videos were added and audio was scrubbed. First the video was done, then Jonathan and I frantically got the audio good to go in time for a self-imposed YouTube publishing deadline. And that was that! I’m not sure how to best estimate the number of hours spent on writing, production, etc, but the project certainly consumed 3 entire weeks of second semester as my principal project.
In the end, the work was well-worth it. I was really really happy with the final product, and the many smiles in the UTWE Zoom room made a pretty difficult week much warmer. More than anything, I think performances like these will serve as really interesting snapshots of these times, flies in amber for future reference. Why was everyone wearing a mask in their recital? What’s this wind ensemble doing in a computer? Where do I get the sick backdrop that Gabi uses?
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So there it is! For the 28,000th (and just as deserving) time, a million thanks to Gillian MacKay, Jonathan Wong, Sarah MacDonald, and the UofT Wind Ensemble for doing this! I loved the project… but it’s going to be really nice to get back to actual real person music-making.
Next time, we’ll be wrapping up with ‘Getting Commissioned—Part II’, covering Britton’s new piece! Thanks for reading =)
