Composing 'The Hollow Island'

On the evening of 5th December 2021, I was fortunate enough to attend the world premiere of a new piece that I had written for symphony orchestra. It was played by the Sheffield University Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Dr. Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey as part of their winter concert.

The process to get to that point was a very intense one with a lot of learning curves attached, many of which I had literally no idea about before embarking on this journey. The orchestra was kind enough to allow submissions for pieces to be workshopped by them in the autumn, but there was a very tight turnaround for the first drafts of pieces. I’d not really written much for symphony orchestra before (although I had certainly had a go, fortunately deciding the previous summer that I would begin a study into orchestration) and there was about two weeks to conceive and write down first ideas. I was, I’ll admit, initially fairly reticent to take part - I was moving house, beginning teaching again after the summer and also doing modules for an MA in composition at the same time. I was persuaded, though, and so set to work. 

Usually, when I intend to have a proper go at a piece, I’ll spend quite a long time thinking of a concept which usually births some kind of method or system that I’ll use to write the piece. This time, I thought that there really wasn’t time to come up with a complex system to start with, so I began to think of ideas that I could make into a reality, and that would take comparatively little time. Now, excuse me for getting ‘political’ (whatever that’s supposed to mean), but during this period there were news stories about the UK government turning away boats filled with people desperately trying to reach safety. This angered me, and the piece began to take shape in my mind around the idea of approaching something hostile that a person knows is their only chance at safety, no matter how overwhelming. I thought a little bit about Rachmaninov’s musical interpretation of ‘The Isle of the Dead’ - a big imposing mass of terror but with some sense of desperation and yearning under the surface. 

I also thought this would work well in the time that I had - the piece had to be around 5 minutes in length, so I could write something slow and foreboding that can feature an increasing sense of dread and terror achieved by the repeated use of similar but building chords. Then, I began to think more about the detail - how would I construct these chords? The eventual answer lay in creating layers of suspensions, where chords are one note away from resolving. Sometimes in the piece, certain parts will resolve their chord, but most of the time they do not and often new further un-resolved chords are built on top of them - this helps bring a sense of anticipation to the piece, and unresolved frustration, perhaps.

Using the same philosophy, other parts throughout the music fight for prominence - some melodic lines are initially masked and then rise through the texture so that they become more audible, others do the opposite - there is a purposeful sense of forced conflict in the score. Furthermore, all of the melodic passages come from warped ‘national songs’ or tunes, almost as if the instruments playing them feel they have to, rather than as if they feel any sort of genuine patriotism or emotion from the melody they are playing. They are, perhaps, competing to see who can be the loudest and the greatest without any real substance to the action. 

I loved composing the piece - what I loved a bit less was getting my engraving software (Finale) to do what I needed it to do. I originally wrote the piece in a very slow 7/4 and attempted to include false bar-lines in each bar, dividing them up into 2, 2, and 3 beats. This looked great on the score, but getting the same effect on the parts for the musicians was a different story. Because of the way I had set the score up to begin with, all parts which share a staff on the score (e.g. woodwind, brass) would not behave when I tried to edit their individual parts. The end result was me spending literally days on end micro-adjusting everything and flicking back and forth between documents to get something that looked somewhere approaching acceptable. I have now, of course, figured out a better way to set things up for future reference. It was then suggested to me that perhaps I should re-bar the music so that it was in alternate bars of 4/4 and 3/4 - something which I had to agree might be beneficial for a performance, but there would not be time to do this before the workshop. Throughout this project, I became increasingly aware that a lot of composing is unfortunately making compromises and sacrifices in order to get the piece off the ground, especially when short of time.

After all that work, the day of the workshop came, and a I got a message saying that the printing of all the parts had got lost! When I signed up for the experience, I have to admit I hadn’t imagined phoning my poor mother up and asking if she wouldn’t mind printing everything out on her printer because my printing equipment hadn’t arrived at the new place yet. At the time it felt like I was a character at the behest of a cruel sitcom writer.

Parts eventually printed, I was truly exhausted by the time it came to the workshop. In the short 20 minutes available, it was difficult to ascertain which parts of my orchestral writing were indeed problematic, and what could simply have been improved with more rehearsal time. After a discussion with the conductor about a potentially difficult rhythm, I went away and began simplifying the rhythms from quintuplet- to triplet-based (so as to make it easier for performers to unify in a potential short amount of rehearsal time) and re-barred the piece as advised. Much to my shock, as I was half-way through this process, I was informed that my piece had been chosen to be played in the winter concert!

After getting the parts ready properly this time (and armed with my new skills at showing Finale who’s boss) I attended a couple of rehearsals with the orchestra. There really wasn’t much time for them to rehearse the piece in the end, and I suppose this is something that will always feel the same for any composer, any orchestra and any piece unless there’s lots of time and money involved (which there often isn’t). I have to say though, my piece being chosen was not the validation it sounds like - it lead me to suffer from some of the most severe imposter syndrome I can remember. This was partly because of what the opportunity meant to me as a composer, but also probably partly to do with how the piece was talked about prior to the performance - both with me and by way of introduction in the actual concert - to the point where it felt, at times, I was being ‘cut down to size’, which was unfortunate and in my opinion unnecessary.

That’s the other thing nobody warned me about - aside from how much work creating an orchestral score and parts are outside of the composition process - having a piece played by a large number of people, in front of a large number of people, feels very exposing and a little terrifying. What gave me the right to interrupt a concert of music by Dvorak and Price and force people to listen to my music? But the thing is, a little further away from the experience now, I realise that even a couple of years ago I could only have dreamed of having a piece of mine played by an *actual* orchestra - and now I have done so while learning a host of new skills and tricks which I will take with me into future projects. Yes, it wasn’t the smooth and glorious ride I had perhaps imagined, but when does anything great and important ever go smoothly and gloriously?

So really, the piece was born out of frustration and crafted under pressure, but I’m immensely proud of the finished piece, and am hoping that I can both encourage other orchestras to perform it and compose new orchestral pieces in the near future. My next step in this field is to conceive a piece for large ensemble that’s more complex and involved, makes purposeful use of the different orchestration techniques I have been picking up in order to create interesting timbres and interactions, and something that is crafted over a longer period of time. No pressure, then!