Action Piece - Composition Walkthrough Pt.6 - Bars 41-57

This part of the walkthrough is also available for the $1 and $5 Patrons as a thank you for your support over the last month!

The next section of the piece falls back on a little more traditional harmonic approach. The idea here was to create a steady pulse for a while and a sort of "fighting to victory maybe" passage before coming back to the key elements that have already been established in the piece before.

As always, I will use reductions of the piece here to keep more overview. You can compare those to the final score sheet attached at the bottom of the post.

Here is the (rather useless) playback of this reduction below:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/whtsto-bar-41-57/s-jnlXg 

Bars 41-48

This whole passage settles on a steady 4/4 pulse and a clear world of F harmonic minor. The reasoning behind this was mainly to give the audience a break from the constant unpredictability of the piece and settle in a rhythmical constant which however doesn't deflate the urgency of the piece. What helps tremendously in order to keep up the rhythmical momentum is the use of the ostinato in this case. This ostinato revolves harmonically around the notes of F, G and Ab with a chromatic passing note of F# setting a pretty clear F minor tonality. Personally, I often prefer otinati that are not too small musical chunks as they very quickly tend to become very static (unless this effect is desired). In this case I change the notes in count 4 of every other bar which makes the whole ostinato a little bit more interesting without losing the energy of such an ostinato. Instead of a repetition in every bar it repeats every two bars which makes it just a little bit more interesting to follow.

This ostinato is being doubled quite extensively in low strings and woodwinds but also higher strings have a staggered entrance which creates a building up effect.

The ostinato itself provides enough harmonic information that it is not neccessary to add harmonic support somewhere else to create a "complete image" of the harmony. However this is always depending on your choice of notes in the ostinato.

The main focus here however is on the melodic interplay between horns and trombones which start of in unison and divert into a pseudo contrapuntal dialogue. 

I cannot explain my exact motivation for this here other than that I thought it would be a cool idea to have a "slightly heroic" theme start in unison and then gradually split itself apart. The slight hint of heroism in this theme is caused by the ever raising top note of the horn line. The scale material used is a clear F harmonic minor (with an E natural rather than an Eb) here.

In order to create this contrapuntal feeling here, I rely heavily on complementary rhythms which become very clear particularly in bars 46 and 47 where one instrument always places a new note in the sustaining pause of the other instrument. This is of course a very commonly used procedure in polyphonic writing to set individual lines apart from each other in the perception of the audience.

In order to support the buildup even more, a high string line enters that roughly follows the contour of the trombone line however not exactly creating some sort of blur which I felt to be fitting in this context.

Bars 49-52

This whole buildup gets interupted by a rather abrupt entrance of a fanfare mainly carried by trumpets and horns. While the F pedal remains intact (this time provided by the high tremolo violins) the harmonic world becomes more instable again with a Cb (or B) major chord over this F pedal. The important rhythmical moments of this figure keep altering between Cb/F and Fm leaving it pretty unclear which tonality is dominating in this case. The general "large structure" idea here was to dissolve the clear harmony of the previous few bars again and create a gateway back to the "main idea" and at the same time modulate upwards to introduce some "fresh" notes.

Structurally speaking this fanfare repeats a two bar form with ending on different target chords. The first time it lands on an Fm chord in bar 50, the second time on an F#m chord in bar 52. In the second case, the former F pedal follows the step upwards and takes over the F#m as Bass note to establish the new fundamental in Bar 53.

From an orchestrational standpoint, the fanfare is pretty straight forward with trumpets doubling horns an octave higher.

However registrally I wanted to create a contrast here to the previous section by eliminating the quite strongly emphasized bass register for a while. I mentioned the effectivity of this approach several times already and also here it creates a considerable freshness to the sound. I use the sustaining first target chord in bar 50 to "sneak" the bass register back in again. 

As mentioned before, bar 52 shifts the whole tonality up a semitone to F#m. In order to smoothen the shift a bit, I rely again on the quarter note triplets that I used before in the piece and arpeggiate a F#m chord downwards in the lower register which also creates some nice momentum for the downbeat of bar 53.

Bar 53-57

This section brings us back to one of the main ideas of the piece as discussed in great lengths in the previous parts of this series. One difference here to the first occurance in bars 19-24 (except for the different "key" of course) is a rhythmical contraction. The inserted 2/4 in bar 21 gets eliminated here which helps to raise the tension a bit. Also, low strings/brass stabs in a rather unpredictable rhythm create more "edge" and help to create the feeling of a "ramped up" version of what we already know. Harmonically these "low stabs" source themselves from the harmony that is implied in the "main rhythm" as seen in the horns as they alternate back and forth between a Dm/D# and an F#mmaj7 chord. 

Another element that hasn't been there in the first instance but has been established in the developed second instance (bars 28-31) of the appearance of this segment is the double tongueing notes in the trumpets which as mentioned before create a more exciting effect than just sustaining these notes.