Two hard and slow days working on the third Christmas song for this sonata. The second is about a lonely woman beneath a tree and the fourth about a tree itself, so it seemed a logical idea to connect these with the tale of Otesanek, a tree which is treated as a baby but grows into a monster.
This fun idea makes for a complex song, it's narrative heavy so has to be reasonably long, and I wanted a different mood from the other songs. I spent all of yesterday working on different musical options. I wrote a chorus in D-minor quite early on, partly because the former song ends in D-minor as a deliberate drift into this one, because the 4th song also starts there. I spent some time playing with a D-minor to C-minor, Bb-Major, C-Major progression but it didn't seem quite right. The song also has many different parts, 3 or 4 depending on how I split up the words.
The second iteration used a fast latin rhythm, a bit like the one in Sympathy For The Devil. This didn't seem to fit the mood of the narrative. No matter how disjointed, the music can always fit in the end, but for me the sound of the music should match the story too, and this monstrous story seems to require something lumbering and Frankensteinian, so a regular 4/4 beat.
Today I decided to shift the chorus up to E-minor, but keep the verses in D, which adds enough variety to some bridges and links. The song is pretty loaded with chords, but that's fine, the key part is keeping the image and the emotion. The song starts in the woods at night, so I've decided to paint some creepy sounds.
Even in this draft sketch of its outline, the song is 4 minutes, and will probably longer. One reason these songs take longer is that live parts, like guitars need to be in there to balance the timbres. Composition at the production stage needs experiments, which can work or not, and discarded work is wasted work, though might come in handy in future. I'll save the latin beat, it might come in handy for a totally different song.
I doubt I'll finish this song this week. Next week I must prepare the artwork for Neorenaissance and do a few other visual art related things.
