Playing Frankenstein in October
It’s hard to believe October is here. It’s been my favorite month for a long time—I love the crisp air, the changing leaves, and my rituals of listening to medieval and renaissance folk music and donning darker, cozier things. We still have to find a new spot to do our annual family apple picking and pumpkin patch. Also, Geoffrey and I always rewatch all the Harry Potter films in October, which is fun. It’s a bit disorienting being in a Kentucky October for the first time, though—it still looks and feels like summer, and the leaves are green. But when they do turn, I’m sure it’ll be gorgeous.
This October, life feels extra intense and difficult, so this blog will be more of a stream-of-consciousness thought-dump. One of my main projects lately is a new piece for Reading Week in January. Instead of just writing sketches, which would have been practical, I dove in and wrote an entire 8-minute piece. I didn’t start completely from scratch, though: for years, through move after move, I’ve carried two fragments of handwritten orchestral sketches.
The first, untitled, was written ten years ago during my master’s in Boulder. I remember sitting at a wooden table by a window in the library, writing this tiny but detailed passage full of microtones and layered rhythms. At the time, I was listening to Xenakis, Penderecki, Saariaho, and Haas, and felt pressured to write more experimentally, worrying my music was “too tonal.”
The other sketch, from 2019, was titled Sighing Thaws the Frozen Birch. It came from the idea of a character walking through a frozen landscape, full of painful thoughts—a bit like Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige, which I’m a bit obsessed with. It was all about timbre and texture rather than melody, though it uses an insistent “ti-do-re” motive that seems to beg for resolution, finally collapsing into an angry wall of cadential 6/4 that melts away. I was in a strange headspace then—the score is full of cryptic notes like “low push,” “high push,” and little drawings of lungs, crows, and trees. I think it was meant for Aspen readings that year, but I scrapped it and wrote a new piece instead—A Hidden Sun Rises, which the LO is performing this month. I don’t remember why I abandoned Sighing Thaws, but I’m glad to have both now.
Together, the two sketches made about three minutes of un-orchestrated material, so the big project was weaving them into one 8-minute piece. They actually fit surprisingly well. It was satisfying to finally bring these two collections of graphite-on-paper into the computer and give them new life. I felt a bit like Frankenstein—stitching them together and resurrecting them (‘tis the season!).
-Chelsea Komschlies, Active Creator in Residence