emilyhopebunny

[emilyhopebunny]

I've been on a bit of a submitting things to competitions spree lately. The first one I came across while scrolling bluesky:

I happened to have something I'd already written for SAB chorus and piano that I reworked for SATB chorus and organ, and sent it off. Then I started thinking it could be good to look into more of these competition things, and I remembered a site I'd heard mentioned in passing at one point, and decided to check it out:

That's where I found two other competitions...

...the first of which is for a short a capella piece, which I wrote in three days. Sometimes it surprises me how fast ideas can come together when I'm just writing for voices. That one's been sent off as well.

The third one, however, is more of a Project:

This will be for two vocal soloists (soprano and mezzo-soprano), chorus and orchestra, with a deadline in August, which I'm already a bit unsure about. It took me about a year and a half to finish codename canticum antiquum, and this project will be a little bigger than that, I think. But, you know, I do have some ideas beginning to take shape, and I figure I'm not going to worry too much about the deadline. If I don't finish it in time, it will at least be a start on a choral/orchestral work that I may try to find another way to get performed.

I know I've been a little quiet on here, but that's partly because I've gotten quite active over on bluesky. There's a really nice community of composers and musicians over there, including our friend Thomas Goss! I'd encourage you to check it out if you haven't already.

[emilyhopebunny]

Working on some smaller projects is allowing me to get into Dorico's engraving mode, which, like everything else, is very different from Finale, but I found one familiar little detail. When you click on a slur to adjust how it looks, the arrangement of little pull handles that shows up is exactly like Finale's smart shape tool. It's still different in that you can only change slur shape in engrave mode (whereas in Finale you can reshape a slur as soon as you make it using the same tool), but it's nice to stumble upon one small aspect of the UI that I already know how to use. :)

I hope I'm not giving the impression that all my time working with Dorico is spent thinking wistfully of how much easier it was in Finale. In fact, now that I'm really starting to familiarize myself with all the popovers (little windows you can pull up with keyboard shortcuts, then type into to set the key, meter, tempo, dynamics, and all kinds of other stuff), it's really streamlining the writing process better than I ever experienced with Finale. It just continues to be a steep learning curve, and sometimes I want to grumble about that, but honestly, the transition is going fine.

[emilyhopebunny]

I had a PR disaster this week, and relatedly, I am now quite sure that the canticum antiquum premiere will not happen. I don't think my PR disaster was the cause of the rejection, but it certainly didn't help. I knew I was playing with fire trying to promote myself while autistic, but this continues to be a case where playing with fire is necessary so I just need to get better at fire safety (if you'll excuse me stretching a metaphor).

Lately I've returned to a piece I started working on a few years ago, just chorus and piano, something soft and a little sad.

[emilyhopebunny]

The second movement of codename quasi cinis is structured in cycles, and there are three and a half of them. I now have most of the notes down for the first cycle, and even some of the notation shenanigans! However, some of the shenanigans will need to wait until I can get more into the engraving side of things.

In Finale, I'm used to starting on the engraving stuff very early, but I can't really do that in Dorico, particularly with orchestral music, since each individual wind instrument is on its own staff, and I'm not really supposed to condense all that down (for instance, to having both oboes on one staff) until I have all the notes in. Like all the notes. So I guess I just won't even be looking at page view for a very long time. That's weird to me!

But I can see the utility of doing it this way, so I think in the end, it'll be worth it for me to get used to it. I'll just continue feeling weird about it for at least a little while longer.

[emilyhopebunny]

Bass Amateur Shop

(bandcamp) (youtube) (spotify soon)

[emilyhopebunny]

[emilyhopebunny]

As I've mentioned, the choral/orchestral Psalm setting I'm working on (aka codename quasi cinis) is intended to transition from the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms to the Bernstein Chichester Psalms, and because of this, I decided on an instrumentation that's sort of an midpoint between the two.

Of course, no matter what I do, a concert featuring these three works will involve playing some musical chairs (lol) between pieces, but I want to try to streamline that as much as possible. Interestingly, the midpoint I arrived at isn't too far from a standard orchestral instrumentation, albeit with no clarinets and only one violin.

The situation with the choirs that I have listed above is, as I have learned, not quite correct. I had been aware that Bernstein had written the Chichester Psalms having children's voices in mind for the sopranos and altos. In fact, the chorus for which the work was commissioned was a choir of men and boys. I did not know until studying the score that Stravinsky had the same intention for Symphony of Psalms. Unfortunately, at this point, I've already structured my own piece around transitioning from the Stravinsky with no youth chorus to the Bernstein with a youth chorus. My inclination is to maintain this structure, even at the expense of dear friend Igor's intention for his own work, and I have a lot of complicated thoughts as to why, which I will try to explain.

The biggest reason for me is timbre. There is a distinct difference between the timbre of an adult chorus, which tends to have a richer and fuller tone with vibrato, and a youth chorus with a purer and brighter tone with little if any vibrato. (I make no distinction among youth between boys' and girls' voices because I firmly believe that where training is equal, no such distinction exists.)

Bernstein has written the Chichester Psalms in such a way that this timbral distinction has symbolic and narrative resonance. In the second movement, the serene, pastoral 23rd Psalm is contrasted with the rough, belligerent opening lines of Psalm 2, and Bernstein describes the setting of Psalm 131 in the third movement as "something like a love duet" between God and the people, exemplified by the adult tenors and basses being echoed by the youth sopranos and altos.

I don't see the same artistic need for a timbral difference between higher and lower voices in the Stravinsky. The four voices are treated pretty equally, often singing homophonic chords, or even-handed counterpoint (as with the fugue in movement 2), so it makes sense to use a chorus that is more timbrally homogenous. Also, the Stravinsky is more difficult than the Bernstein, and I think it benefits from being sung by a chorus in which all singers are more experienced.

To be sure, the Bernstein has plenty of thorny passages of its own, but in the places I've mentioned above, where the timbral difference between adult and youth singers is most meaningful, the soprano and alto parts are relatively simple, and I've heard performances of the Chichester Psalms with both a full adult mixed chorus and a youth chorus. My piece has separate parts for mixed adult and youth choruses, and in my pipe dream of a performance of all three of these works, this would also be my preference for the Bernstein.

All of this might be a long-winded way for me to say I'm taking some artistic license with these works because I want to, but I like to think my reasoning holds up.

(I also have a lot of gender-related thoughts, as from what I can tell, both works seem to have been written with a preconception that religious choral music ought to be sung by male singers (Bernstein is more explicit about this, but it seems to have also been true for Stravinsky, though I'll have to do more research to confirm) and, uh... I disagree! But I need to distill my thoughts on that further before I go into more detail, I think.)

[emilyhopebunny]

yippeeee !

[emilyhopebunny]

I managed one final tiktok collab before the ban. I've been following Stix mostly for nerdy LotR/D&D content, but he also has a lovely singing voice, and posted this farewell rendition of "Leave Her, Johnny" to tiktok a few days ago. I remember witnessing the sea shanty trend from afar when it happened, and it was one of the things that made me interested in joining tiktok myself. And I did, eventually.

It's been an interesting learning curve. You'll notice that in this video, for the first time, I've filmed myself recording the accompaniment on my keyboard. I was resistant to doing that all this time because I was afraid the process would be too difficult, but I don't think it was any more difficult than any of the notation or midimap visualization approaches I've tried. Maybe I should've tried it earlier, but it is what it is.

I think I've learned how to put together a decent video, and that's certainly a useful skill, and I do think that finding the occasional musical performance on tiktok that I feel like I want to provide accompaniment for using the orchestra on my computer has made me a better composer. So all of this is bittersweet, but I think at the end of the day, I'm in a better place now for my experience with tiktok.

video on tiktok - source video - Stix on tiktok

[emilyhopebunny]

In anticipation of the tiktok ban, many of the people I follow over there have let their audiences know where they can be found elsewhere on the internet, so I've ended up following more people on bluesky, and becoming more active there. Follow me if you want! I think bluesky will be my place for more casual daily observations, and I'll keep posting the longer more rambling stuff here on this blog.

[emilyhopebunny]

An open letter to my fellow choral composers:

Please learn Latin before you decide to set a Latin text to music. Or at the very least, have someone read over your work who knows Latin.

Signed, A Choral Singer/Composer Who Minored In Latin And Is Very Tired

[emilyhopebunny]

I've been poking around on YouTube looking for stuff related to Symphony of Psalms and Chichester Psalms, and I thought I'd share my findings.

First, a two-part lecture by choral conductor Rob Istad, going into a biography of Stravinsky in part one to provide context for the analysis of Symphony of Psalms in part two:

(our friend Lenny has a few cameos in these videos, as he was a great admirer of our friend Igor)

Second, from musicologist Paul Laird, a deep dive into Bernstein's compositional process for Chichester Psalms using sources archived at the Library of Congress:

Interesting stuff!

[emilyhopebunny]

I almost forgot about writing up a year in review, so here it is. My attempt to add something new to my previous New Year's resolution... failed. Notevember... failed. But I'm okay with this. Lately I've been more focused on working on my big choral orchestral project and also making myself known to some people in the orchestral scene who have crossed my path lately. Not sure if any of this will go anywhere, but I enjoy going in this direction so I'll just keep doing that.

My weekly composition goal (which is literally just to do any one thing that's in any way composition related every week) continues to work for me. It's just that low bar I can set for myself that often works to get the momentum rolling and trick myself into getting far more accomplished than that small goal requires. This year, I tried adding a new monthly goal, and that didn't end up working so well, so I'm just going to go back to what works. Maybe also I'll start the new year with a vague intention of making more inroads and connections in the orchestral world. Not a structured goal or resolution, just... keep an eye out for opportunities, and see what happens.

Happy New Year, friends! 🥂

[emilyhopebunny]

My wonderful aunt asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I asked for the full score of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms and/or Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. She kindly sent me both!

I asked for these because my work in progress, which I've been referring to as codename quasi cinis, is also a three-movement choral/orchestral setting of a selection of texts from the Psalms. In fact, my intention is for my piece to be programmed between the Stravinsky and the Bernstein. It will also be a complete work in its own right that can stand alone. I'm aware that asking an orchestra to perform these three pieces together would be logistically rather demanding, as they have different instrumentations, so I wouldn't insist on it being programmed this way, but I am specifically writing it to transition between the two works, both of which I've sung before and love very much.

So now it's time to study some score! 📖🎶👀

[emilyhopebunny]

I've been working on the second movement of codename quasi cinis, and I'm going Ivesian again, and this time it's definitely going to require some notation shenanigans, which I did mostly manage to avoid in codename canticum antiquum. Over the years, I've kind of developed a process for notation shenanigans in Finale, but now I need to figure it all out in Dorico. I'm moving slowly, reading up in the user manual and the forums, plotting and scheming in my head. The musical ideas themselves still require some time to properly ferment, so hopefully the execution will fall into place as the ideas come together.

The third movement has a fugue in it, because I like making things difficult for myself. I've put together a first entry that I really like, and even sketched out an idea involving the inversion of the subject, but I still need to figure out the overall shape of it and what key areas I want to visit and how I will get to them. That part feels pretty daunting, to be honest, but I will continue to ponder on it.

[emilyhopebunny]

Welcome to my blog! My name is Emily Hope and I am a composer of choral music, among other things.

If you would like to listen to some of the music I have written, check out my #playlist tag.

If you would like to contact me, here are some ways to do so.

I'm happy to have you here! Let's make some music :)

[emilyhopebunny]

I think I will go back through my blog and use a consistent tag for the posts with audio of stuff I wrote, and then pin a post linking to that tag, so people coming here because I gave them a business card or something like that can easily get my music in their ear holes. That sounds like a good idea. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow.