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   Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 03:09:26 JST Paul Cantrell

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   • David McMullin

   @mcmullin
   Something I heard years from a fellow composer (I think it was Ann Millikan, but not totally sure) that’s stuck with me:

   The problem is always just a little earlier in the piece than you think it is.

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     David McMullin (mcmullin@musicians.today)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 03:09:29 JST David McMullin

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     The passage that felt flat doesn't feel flat anymore, even though I barely changed it. In fact, if anything it is flatter now in comparison to the now-bigger gesture that precedes it. But because now you have different expectations when you get there, you can now feel it growing in a way it didn't seem to before. Even though it's pretty much the same music.

     Fix how one spot sounds by making changes somewhere else entirely. Little discoveries like this continue to fascinate me.

     5/5

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     David McMullin (mcmullin@musicians.today)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 03:09:32 JST David McMullin

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     Instead, I made both the opening gesture and the in-between peak a little bigger, more abrupt and more urgent. Instead of feeling like "Maybe that was the destination, but now what are we doing?", now it's more like "What the heck was that about? Something else has to happen to make sense of that, so this must be going somewhere, toward something at least that big."

     /4

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     David McMullin (mcmullin@musicians.today)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 03:09:34 JST David McMullin

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     I did add a few nervous-energy gestures, mostly quiet ones, and I filled in some spots where it felt like there could be more happening. But what mainly worked to create a sense of building, of expectation, wasn't anything I put in the passages where the growth is supposed to happen.

     3/

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     David McMullin (mcmullin@musicians.today)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 03:09:36 JST David McMullin

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     The section that bugged me is about 2 minutes long. It starts with an attention-catching gesture and has a subsidiary peak or arrival point about halfway through. But after and between each of those, it pulls back and gets relatively peaceful again.

     I didn't want to just make everything louder and thicker because I was worried about swamping the solo voices that sing very tricky things throughout the section.

     2/

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     David McMullin (mcmullin@musicians.today)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Aug-2025 03:09:38 JST David McMullin

     On my never-ending work in progress, I've now finished addressing the problem described in the linked thread from a few weeks ago. In summary, it's a 20-minute piece with a big climactic cadence at around 16 minutes, but the section before that didn't really build the way I wanted...

     1/

     https://musicians.today/@mcmullin/114886830766121936

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