Compositional Process: The Melody of Life (Part 4)

Over the last three posts to this blog (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), I have been describing the compositional process behind my Nocturne No. 2 for Piano, a process which involved a blend of musical intuition and analysis.  I began by determining the emotional feeling I wanted the piece to project and translating that feeling into the piece’s principal melody.  That first stage was largely intuitive and driven by my subconscious, rather than by analytical thinking.  But when I examined the melody that I had just written, I discovered that its basic building blocks were three-note linear sequences, or “3-lines” for short.  In particular, the melody started with a three-note ascent through whole steps (notated below as “ascWW”) from scale degree 5 (in D-flat major), and closed with a mirroring three-note descent (descWW) from scale degree 3 to degree 1.  Having become consciously aware of those 3-lines, I began to incorporate them into the rest of the composition.  The secondary melody that started the piece’s B section was built from descHW patterns — that is, 3-lines that descend by a half step followed by a whole step.

These patterns are brought together in a remarkable way in the coda (mm. 54-59).

Note first the descHW patterns in the lower staff in the second beats of mm. 54-56, labeled (1), (2), and (3) in red on the diagram.  The pitch classes in pattern (2) are transposed down from pattern (1) by four half-steps, and those in pattern (3) are transposed down another four half-steps, so that the three patterns divide the octave into three equal parts.  If pattern (3) is transposed down another four half-steps, that completes the cycle by returning to pattern (1), and in fact the latter pattern appears in augmentation in bar 57.

Similarly, the descWW patterns on the fourth beats, labeled as (4), (5), and (6), trisect the octave in the same way.  Both of these trisections unfold over a tonic pedal point of D♭ (written enharmonically as C♯ in m. 55).

The melodic shapes in the upper staff of mm. 54-56 clearly derive from the first measure of the principal melody, and the descHW patterns (7), (8), and (9) imitate (1), (2), and (3) respectively from the lower staff, again trisecting the octave.

Starting near the end of m. 56 in the upper staff, the principal melody’s final whole-step descent from F to D♭ is heard one last time.  The whole-step descent idea is then expanded in the bass clef into a longer whole-step descending sequence, which includes all six pitch classes of a complete whole-tone collection, from G3 in m. 57 to A2 in m. 58.  (The last four notes of the sequence are shown in the upper staff.)  This whole-tone sequence links two occurrences of the fifth of the tonic chord (A♭3 and A♭2). The pedal is held throughout this sequence and changed only in the final measure.

The work’s coda begins at around 5:08 in this score video.