Symphony No. 1 "World War One"
Notes On Symphony No. 1 "World War One", Op. 55
The Second Movement: Aerial Warfare
The Third Movement: Menuette For The Empire
The Fourth Movement: The Hundred Years
Symphony for a Hypothetical Musical Played In the 1920s
(TM writes:)
I am happy to release this just after Remembrance Day / Armistice Day / Veterans Day or whatever you call 11 November in your country.
From the very beginning, I had a crystal clear picture of what this would be. This is an orchestral suite especially for a fictional musical played in the 1920s. The venue must be a newly opened theatre in Broadway in New York, the United States, booming at the time.
The play is about World War One, the first world-wide war that broke out 100 years ago (1914 - 18). I wonder why the early years of the 20th century attract me so much, including music by Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie and Claude Debussy as well as the history of how the European empires ended up or collapsed, the rapid growth of Americas, especially the United States being super-powered, the rapid changes and sufferings in Asia, etc.
A hundred years is just a hundred years. It's quite recent; just a little bit before my grandmother was born. But there were empires then amongst which the borders and power balance were so different. I was feeling the 100 years is something.
I do not prefer to talk that much about the war here, but in brief, international alliances and other agreements were popular from the security perspectives, which made the impact of one assassination in Sarajevo eventually diffuse to all over the world. That was the first experience the world had seen. The wars broke out here and there, and our country Japan was not an exception under the alliance with the United Kingdom, France, Russia and so forth. Weapons with a lot of technological development caused great damage, like battleships, submarines, fighter aircraft, tanks, poisonous gas and machine guns. Furthermore, the communism revolutions began in 1917 in Russia. The fact that this war did not end cleanly led to the next world war.
This Symphony picks up musical scenes of the turbulent war in four Movements as I explain later.
(TI writes:)
I started working on this piece at the end of 2020, and completed the whole piece in the middle of May 2021.
With MuseScore, I completed the first movement, then the second, and so on, one by one, in order to create the piece. However, in terms of tone creation and mixing in Studio One, the first four movements were created side by side, and the completion time (mid-May 2021) was almost the same for all the pieces.
Immediately after the completion of the suite, I was skeptical about the degree of completion. Is there anything more I can do? Is there anything I missed?" But as time went by and I listened to it again and again, I became more and more convinced.
Not only with this track, but also with the tracks we created ourselves, we listen to them over and over again (because we created them to listen to them ourselves), and we often think, "I should have done this part better," or "It could have been better. But this was the first time I felt that the more I listened to the piece, the more I was convinced that there was nothing to fix.
When I think about why I felt this way, I think it's probably because I had no reference music for this track. Since I had no music to compare it to, my judgment criteria were not fixed, and I was constantly shifting depending on my mood at the time, which I think was a big factor in expanding my tolerance for music.
In other words, if I listen to (judge) a track from a fixed point of view or sense of value, if that standard changes for some reason or other, I will find something unacceptable and want to correct it (or lose interest in it if it is someone else's work), but by constantly moving, I can say that what I can tolerate has expanded.
"In a Way, Steampunk..."
(TI continues:)
TM had a clear concept and image of this group of works before the production, but I myself didn't have such a strong image and started to create them in a groping way.
For me, even though the theme was "an orchestral suite for a musical circa 1920," it was not an attempt to recreate the music or the atmosphere of the 1920s (I think the same is true for TM. We never created music to recreate anything).
Music around 1920 would be "live acoustic instruments played and sung" and "recordings made with condenser microphones or newly developed dynamic microphones," and as for recording and broadcasting, gramophones, radio and talkies are just beginning.
It is probably only in recent years that we have come to have a fixed image of the sound produced by these devices as "the sound of the 1920s. For the people of that time (1920s), it was "the sound and music of our time," and at that time (1920s), they would not have labeled the music that was released at that time as being from that time, just as we do not clearly identify the music that is popular today as being from the 2020s. In the same way, we do not label the music that was released at that time as "music of the 2020s.
Also, the sounds of the 1920s that we can identify now are only the sounds that we can perceive from the atmosphere of the recordings of that time. In other words, the sounds of that era can only be perceived through the recordings.
Naturally, I don't think that the sounds and music of the 1920s were filtered and noise-laden. It's just that such sounds were made through the recordings and radio media of the time, and cannot be considered music of the 1920s.
In addition, the sound of orchestral music for musicals is not that different from the sound of a live orchestra playing in a hall today. I believe that the sound of a live performance would be the same if the instruments were the same whether it was 100 years ago or perhaps even more than 1000 years ago. The sound of an ancient percussion instrument should sound the same if it is played in the same way today.
However, the sound of the recording would be completely different in each era, and the reproducibility of that sound in the modern era would be rather poor. For example, equipment that can play back recordings from the 1920s is now very limited, and it is impossible to reproduce the sound of a recording from the 1920s (even if you could get a close approximation).
The DAW we are using now will probably have a new version next year, and the sound quality and methodology will probably change somewhat. In fact, it's been six months since I made the file for this song, and now that my effects pedals have been updated and my own PC has been renewed, it's impossible to play the file in the same way.
Also, as for the song itself, this kind of music probably did not exist in the 1920s. In that sense, the sounds expressed in this piece are not the sounds and music of the 1920s, but rather the sounds of the 1920s that exist only in our imagination.
In that sense, I myself am not very conscious of the 1920s period. Rather, I tried to create a sound from the present to the future, with a touch of the past as a fake image. In a way, I feel that I am creating music that is similar to, or the same as, the field of "steampunk" in novels and movies, which expresses a past that never existed.
Composition and Mixing
(TI continues:)
Most of the phrases and basic structure of all four movements were created by TM. I was involved in developing and fleshing them out musically.
Specifically, I rearranged them to fit the range of live instruments, or wrote counter-melodies to phrases written in single melody. I also wrote some phrases that I imagined would be appropriate according to TM's requests.
In terms of tone, TM had a clear image in mind, and I followed it to the letter.
In the mix, however, I don't try to reproduce the sound as it is, but rather create something unique by expanding my own imagination in terms of tone, sound image, and dynamics.
The First Movement: Naval Warfare
TRACK DATA
The First Movement: Naval Warfare
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 92(1st), 23(2nd)
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Jan 1 2021 - May 15 2021
(TM writes:)
When I was writing the First Movement, I had no intention to write up to the forth movement. My image was just “something symphonic (to some extent) played when a musical (theatre) begins, which could be extension from our track called ‘Cyber-Excavating The Ruins’ but completely different in style.” Or something more dynamic with sudden shifts to colourful sections.
I love so much how ballet gets started with richly omental prelude. I love theatre arts, which must be (or have been) struggling with COVID. And moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it’s not just an orchestra, but surprising and effective development from it. That is what I wanted to create.
Especially, this Movement is hypothetical; if a musical played on World War One what would it be like? When I wrote the main motif that appeared at the beginning of the movement on the Hypophrygian mode, it felt something related to a war. Then, it seemed great to create a prelude on a hypothetical musical taking up World War One as its subject. Yes, “Hypothetical with Hypophrygian”!!
What happened 100 years ago is a part of history but directly affect our lives today. I vividly feel as if it was happening right there, but at the same time there were circumstances so different from now, as I discussed above: the existence and disappearance of Austro-Hungary Empire, the United States booming like recent China, control over colonies and other nations, communism revolutions and so forth.
Whereas I focus such political aspects in the Third and Forth Movements, the First and Second, especially, focus on new features of warfare at that time. The First picks up naval warfare, in which battleships and cannons were made even bigger as well as telecommunications were exploited.
Naval warfare reminds me of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s paintings, which I love a lot. He is much older as he died in 1851, though. But I hoped to include landscape aspects in the First like his works.
We use the drum kits in the orchestra intentionally here and at the same time you might hear a rhythmical noise, ie morse codes, meaning “Head to battlefield. Must win naval warfare.”
. . . . . . --- --- . . --- --- --- --- --- . . . . --- --- --- . --- . . . . . --- . . . . . --- . . --- . . . --- . --- . --- --- --- . . --- . . . --- . --- --- . . --- . --- . . --- . . . --- . --- . --- . . . --- --- . --- . --- . . --- . . . --- . --- . . . --- . --- . ---
What if a real orchestra plays this? Well, it’s almost impossible, obviously. This is a digital orchestra with a lot of extra instruments, which is enabled only with digital music.
As I often write in the other notes, I basically regard any type of music quite neutrally. It could be a sort of more luscious if electro DJs play Romantic symphonies, rock musicians play latin, jazz players play baroque, classic pianists play regional folk songs, etc. The music history will probably show applications beyond genres often generated something new and attractive.
(TI writes:)
In terms of music, TM had written MuseScore in an almost complete form, but for the individual parts, since the notes were written in multiples at the same time, I broke them down in a more orchestral way, and made them into multiple phrases of single melody on live instruments, and then rewrote them to fit the instruments of the orchestra.
In the first movement, I tried to create a more steampunk-like image, more aggressively incorporating electronic sounds to give it a classical image, while creating an elaborate sound image that would never be possible in real life.
Specifically, I created eleven different WAV files from four different types of sound mixes: clear, filtered, scratchy, reverbed, and dry, and then mixed them together in a project file for the final master mix. These files were then mixed together in a project file for the final master mix.
The reverb, delay, etc., could have been applied to individual tracks in the final mix file, but I didn't do that because I needed to have a file for each instrument sound, with and without reverb, in order to switch the sound image cleanly. If you use reverb or other reverberation effects on the final mix file, the reverb component will remain even when you turn it off, and it won't switch cleanly.
The first movement was a bit of an exploration, but as I worked on it, the way I created it became more and more sophisticated and simple.
The Second Movement: Aerial Warfare
TRACK DATA
The Second Movement: Aerial Warfare
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 46
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Feb 9 2021 - May 4 2021
(TM describes:)
After I drew the naval warfare of World War One in the First Movement, I wanted to take up the aerial warfare at that time. Very straightforward. I wrote this up as the following movement from the First.
But, furthermore, I doubt there are many symphonies in general that include the features of the minimal or ambient music. Minimal but something in which sections drastically shift.
The shift from Section 1 to 2 has no tempo change, though it seems to have. In Section 2, it is as if six 16th notes are treated as one beat, which sounds like a tempo change. But on the notation at least the BPM does not change at all. I have not heard symphonies with such a trick. A later section uses a different rhythmic trick, treating four triplets as one beat, overlaid with the high-tone minimal phrases.
Again, this Movement is atonal and has no particular scale, either. It is hard to express chords as well. Fighter aircraft are nearly free three-dimensionally. There are repeated high-tone minimal phrases and it feels there is vast space below them. It is not complete repetition and changes modestly and irregularly. Those features are all about such feels.
(TI explains:)
In the second movement, the minimalist glockenspiel phrase at the beginning was originally a single phrase, but the pitches of the phrases, the harmonies of the phrases intertwined with each other, and the time each phrase sounds are gradually shifted and developed. Somehow, I feel that I expressed the various movements of airplanes in formation, some flying straight ahead, others dutch-rolling due to engine trouble or attack.
The brass and strings were also one phrase, but I shifted the pitch, harmony, and time of the phrase in the same way.
The mix is much simpler than the first movement, with an 80's compressed rhythm section layered on top of an old-fashioned sound with Vinyl and distortion all over. The morphing of each image is also simple. The ending synth and vibraphone are gently filtered and delayed.
The Third Movement: Menuette For The Empire
TRACK DATA
The Third Movement: Menuette For The Empire
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 52
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Mar 2 2021 - May 16 2021
(TM explores:)
After writing the First and Second Movements I thought of making it up for a symphony and wrote the Third and Fourth almost simultaneously. Basically the symphony is to include one or more sonata movements but the First Movement is not. That’s fine. Leave it as the first and take the sonata form into consideration for the forth, no matter how much to break it.
Especially to create a Symphony interesting enough to me, I listened to a variety of music in the 1910s and 20s, including popular music as well as symphonies at that time like Arnold Schönberg and Maurice Ravel. Much younger Leonard Bernstein as well. I don’t know if there was influence on me from them at all. Anyway, I love them very much.
It interested me a lot that a symphony almost always includes a minuet or scerzo as the third movement. I listened to many of them like Frédéric Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven and it was a great surprise. Minuets were originally played for light dance, basically in the ¾ signature. I willingly followed that, rather than broke. To me Chopin’s minuets are tremendous. That is far beyond light dance. How experimental it should have been at that time.
Similarly, Beethoven’s third movements are extreme. He used the scerzo style instead of the minuet form, often on triplet 2 or 4 meters, as far as I heard. Very experimental and quirky. I aspired something with triplets, full of odd groove with polyrhythms.
I also researched a little on the history of the musical theatre and operetta. It was great coincidence that the musical was born in that period. I had a lot of fun to watch Puccini’s La Bohème.
The research was so fun and I found FMT-esque aspects interesting enough when adapting them to minuet or scerzo.
In terms of World War One, I picked up here the breakneck expansion from its trigger, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo to a world-wide war. Even though it must have been a big news, just one incident was linked to international military alliances. Such a structure still persists to some degree now, I suppose, and started around this period. Yes, it’s a good example of direct influence on today from 100 years ago. I intended to put some digital errors, which hardly to occur in real orchestras, multiplied rapidly.
(TI writes:)
For this track, I even wrote a part that responds to a phrase that TM created. I wrote a minimalist pizzicato phrase, and a violin phrase with a ball-like atmosphere and a wind instrument phrase in response to the phrase that he created and developed according to his request (such as the exaggerated violin phrase that starts around 2 minutes and 40 seconds).
I did the same thing with the acoustic instruments, applying Vinyl to give them an old-fashioned sound.
However, Vinyl is also applied to the synths and rhythm machines in this movement to create the impossible impression of a "rhythm machine from 1920.
In the latter half of the piece, the sound image gradually switches from old-fashioned to modern, albeit old-fashioned, sound.
The Fourth Movement: The Hundred Years
TRACK DATA
The Fourth Movement: The Hundred Years
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 74(1st),11(2nd).
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Apr 22 2021 - May 14 2021
(TM illustrates:)
It took the longest. Whereas composing the First to Third Movements were quick to some extent, this was not the case. The Fourth should have been taken a few months. I felt somehow that there are not many subjects left to cover, but I feel at the same time that there is an important part missing...
Many people could have fun with theater music once they understand the gist of the play. We have no clear story, of course, but this Movement is related to crucial aspects of World War One, which is that it involved the world spontaneously, that it ended with too negative effects to cease World War Two, that Japan provided humanitarian support to France, etc. I would say such aspects are a connection with The Third Movement.
Other than those, I tried to make the piece reflect the super power of the United States commencing around this period, the Russian Revolution, the destruction or dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the exhaustion of Western European nations that had been the center of the world until then, the direct involvement of Asia like China and Japan. I have no intentions to express any political message, though.
The composition took time also because I have contemplated how to deal with the sonata form. Beethoven and many others have already challenged it. What I did here after all is to virtually forget the sonata and embed the sonata in the one-way on the time axis, which I think is the most accurate expression. "One-way on the time axis" is one of FMT's unique features, I believe. In other words, it's not a sonata, strictly speaking, but it can't be said that it's completely not. I intended an ambiguous position around that.
As I wrote in the Notes of Cyber-Excavating The Ruins, we do not write the main phrase and spread it like butter at all for our orchestral works. I just open a blank sheet for the orchestra score and just write on it. I call it "inductive composition" and now I do so as a matter of course. (But since I do not really think about the registers for physical instruments, TI always fix them.)
Having said that, I could say it is a feature of all these four Movements that it is not a typical orchestral score. The piano, bass, and drums are sometimes centered to some extent, and that is also changing little by little.
All in the end, will I make Symphony No. 2 ...? It's hard to imagine now, but in truth, every time you try something big to you for the first time, similar things tend to happen, in my thought. You would have done it through trial and error, then you would be exhausted and might not feel you could do it once more. But actually, the next time, you could do better. The more you do, the better you could do. Even Pyotr and Ludwig seemed similar, didn't they? (-- even though they were extremely good from their first ones.)
Well, then will I do it again? I don't feel like that yet... :)
(TI adds:)
I think I've gotten pretty comfortable with this piece, both in terms of the music and the mix, after creating three pieces so far.
Compared to the other three pieces, the musical arrangement is quite normal, or rather, it takes a clean counterpoint approach. Although it is atonal, I don't feel much discomfort with the arrangement because of the clean counterpoint approach.
As for the tone, except for the sound of the drum machine, the sample tones of acoustic instruments are used orthodoxly. Also, I was able to produce a sound quality that is very much like a "black and white movie soundtrack".
The fourth movement is also mixed by setting up a separate track for mixing. I think this is the effect of a file on the master track that emphasized the midrange (around 500Hz) and cut the low range (around 100Hz) and wide range (above 5kHz).
This was then layered and mixed with the original flat characteristic file. So when you listen to it, it sounds old-fashioned at first listen, but I think you can hear some phrases with clear sound quality hidden in some places.
The drums completely mimic the low-bit (but at the time, top quality) sampled drums of the 80s.
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