Action Piece - Composition Walkthrough Pt.1 - The Concept

Welcome to Part 1 of this series. In the coming articles, I will dissect some parts of this piece and explain my reasoning behind it. I will address all aspects of this production from concept to mockup as well as give you access to audio and midi stems in later articles.

But first things first.

I wrote this piece for no particular project. As I recently changed some things around in my DAW Template (for instance including the new JXL Brass by Orchestral Tools), I wanted to try out and adjust a few things and needed a suitable piece for that. So it needed to have a lot of brass.

My general workflow is and always has been to write a score sheet first and then export that to a DAW and create a mockup there (if needed). I will go into detail about my reasons for that in another article.

Other than many pieces I write that center around a melodic/motivic idea, I wanted to center this piece around a harmonic idea. Particularly a specific chord sound:

 https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/whtsto-chord/s-iJfbW 

As you can see (and hear) this is a pretty dissonant chord. Main reason for its dissonance is the major seventh between the bass note D and the Db. Due to the fact that the Db is the third of the chord, we react even more sensitive on the dissonance it creates with the bass note as it disturbs our perception whether it is major or minor.

This chord alone is pretty ambigous whether what tonality is supposed to be transported. We could look at it from the perspective of D and understand it as sort of Dm(#5maj7) and therefore imply a harmonic minor scale:

However, from a harmonic standpoint, I found it way more interesting to look at it as some sort of Bbm scale with that rubbing D in the bass. There are not many scales that include the major and the minor third (as needed here) in it. However there is a set of slightly more exotic scales which however are pretty common in action scoring and create a wonderful set of instable and dissonant chords in itself. The octatonic scale:

The specific properties of that scale (besides of it having eight notes per octave - hence the name) is that it is a so-called symmetrical scale, which means that it can not be transposed to all 12 keys without being identical (just with different starting points). The consequence is that its tonality always stays ambiguous which is great for the piece that I wanted to write.

The octatonic scale contains quite a few chords that create a very special harmonic world that this scale implies. So besides the mentioned Bbm triad, we can also find Dbm and Em as triads in that scale.

I used that as the starting point for this piece by writing an octatonic "fanfare" that opened the piece and set the tone for what is about to come by introducing the Bbm/D Chord right at the beginning:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/whtsto-opening-statement-piano/s-LoUqP 

There are two things to be noted here:

1. There is a brief moment of Cm/D which is not part of the octatonic scale that I used. This is a chromatic sidestep from the Dbm/D which surrounds it

2. The target chord of G#m changes the tonality as it breaks out of the octatonic world and presents a straight forward minor chord which in the context of the predecessing octatonic world sounds pretty bright in spite of being minor. Also, it moves a tritone up from the predecessing "root" of D which was sustaining like a pedal point throughout. This creates a considerable lift without turning the piece harmonically upside down by introducing a cadential chord progression like a V-I which would have disrupted the harmonic feeling I set up with the first few bars.

Notice how muddy and unfocussed the low register in the piano example sounds (violating several low interval limits). So in order to create enough transparency but also keep the dark colour I needed to make sure that the individual tones don't have too many high harmonics (which interestingly are the reason why we think something sounds muddy in the lower register), so I'm starting off with really soft trombones that make this chord plenty transparent.

Here's the passage from above fully orchestrated how  it ended up in the piece:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/whtsto-opening-orchestra/s-X9QW8 

Stay tuned for the next part of this Walkthrough!