Ready With a Downbeat

I breathed a lengthy sigh of relief this week when I was informed that I won’t have to conduct my in-progress chamber orchestra piece at the upcoming workshop I’m writing it for. I was aware of the possibility that I might have had to take the podium in a month or two and had tried to put it as far out of my mind as possible. It’s not that I’m afraid of conducting, exactly, but rather that I’m just sort of bad at it. Without making any extravagant promises about how well the piece itself will turn out, I can say with some confidence that my conducting would not do it justice.

My trepidation probably has its roots in my last conducting experience, which, as I’ve intimated here before, was not a success. But I don’t think my incompetence as a conductor was entirely to blame: My incompetence as a composer was also culpable. I wrote almost the whole piece in 3/4 at 60 beats per minute, which isn’t an especially granular scaffold; I didn’t have a whole lot to work with, and neither did the players, in terms of meter, because the musical substance of their parts had little relation to the barlines. The texture of the piece, which I’d hoped would be monochromatic but crisp, was ground into a kind of colorless gruel by registrally tepid orchestration, bland individual lines, short-sighted obsession with microtonal counterpoint, and of course uninformative meter.

I’ve taken steps to avoid these problems in the new piece. My metric strategy, specifically, is to write most of the piece in 4/4 at a moderately vigorous tempo and change meter every so often when I need to emphasize a structural or shared downbeat, of which there are quite a few. I think this could be a best-of-both-worlds approach that signposts important moments to both the players and the conductor without the overhead of constant meter and tempo changes. If anyone has advice to share about this, please don’t hesitate—now’s the time to figure it out.