Sketch for Strings

This really deserves a better title, but during the time I worked on it, nothing satisfactory came to mind -- which is weird, because I'm always coming up with neat titles for things that I haven't yet written... and yet none of those fit this one. Go figure.

It started with the initial idea of a slow, chant-like theme consisting of four phrases played over a drone, initially with the cellos (theme) and basses (drone); I wanted a full string section rather than just a quintet, both for the texture and to be able to maintain longer-held notes than single instruments could do. It's in G minor; close to Aeolian mode apart from a handful of F-sharps (but no E naturals)... and a single C# in the first violins almost exactly halfway through the piece; what a coincidence!

Both the theme and drone (which is prevalent but not continuous throughout) are passed between the sections of the orchestra, and the theme is varied, split up between the sections, fragmented, and toward the end telescoped, each of the four phrases starting before the end of the preceding one. I really like that part. And then the first half of the opening phrase makes a return in the final cadence.

This was started sometime in 2015, and had been close to being finished for some time now, with just the ending and a few small details to finish. I had the ending mostly done earlier this week, then just this morning it occurred to me that it would be really neat if I could shove some of the opening theme right into that final cadence, and it just happened to fit right in. Another one of those coincidences; it's almost as though I planned it that way! Maybe I did. Actually, I did try using even more of it, but additional notes, while pleasant enough in themselves, seemed to undercut the sense of finality, so my first try ended up being it -- knowing what not to say can be as important as knowing what to say.

Another thing that slowed me down on this is that I kept hearing timpani in spots, and then trumpets and horns in other spots (particularly the 16th notes in the violins), even an entire brass section... and woodwinds... so I set it aside to ponder whether it should remain only for a string orchestra or to add in the rest. What removed this particular roadblock was the realization that it's my piece, so if I want to I can do a rewrite for full orchestra, which will be even longer than the seven minutes of this one. Here it is: