This is an ongoing blog delving into the process of composing ‘Orchestral Evolution’ a piece of music for an infinitely sized orchestra of all instruments and abilities.

The piece has been written by The Chris Woods Groove Orchestra in conjunction with Soundstorm, the Music Education Hub for Bournemouth and Poole. The project is for young people of a huge range of ages from schools in and around Bournemouth – Funded through support from Arts Council England.

If you are a teacher wanting your school to be involved, or you have any questions you can email contact@chriswoodsgroove.co.uk or direct to Soundstorm rachel.Sene@Bournemouth.gov.uk

In this instalment of the blog Im going to be revealing some of the processes involved in composing this piece…

I want to create a piece that unites and inspires those playing and listening, overcoming the various challenges of the pop-up orchestra. So the concept behind this piece has two very specific important points.….

 1. Be emotive and powerful –  to help draw the players and listeners together

 2. Be minimal/simplistic at heart – to bring out the best in, and play to the strengths of, each player.

This is the foundation and subject of the work. No images of lakes or political statements here… this is a piece of music to bring people together and to bring out the best in the individual and the orchestra.

Point one, be emotive and powerful, is going to be relatively musically straightforward. Although I will delve into that a little in this blog, the main challenge is point two, how to bring the best out of each player. In other words, rather than simply challenging each player within an inch of their ability how do I create a piece of music that allows each player to flourish and develop whatever their skill level. Crucially, without loosing sight of creating something musically emotive and powerful.

After thousands of cups of tea and hours of gazing thoughtfully out of my living room window, I have borrowed a simple principal from my previous ‘Guitar Revolution’ project. The principal is to work with incredibly repetitive and simplistic patterns, which enables players of all abilities to reach a ‘state of flow’ and to enable all abilities to focus on articulation and detail in a near macro way.

Sound complex? – In other words…. base the piece on a simple idea that gives everyone the space to play it amazingly. – by the way I recommend looking up ‘flow state’.

Borrowing from ‘Guitar Revolution’ I took a basic repetitive quaver pattern alternating between two notes. Now the choice of those two notes is quite important at this stage. I’m looking to create something powerful and emotive (remember point one), however many of the instruments and players I will be working with may only be able to manage a few notes. In the case of clarinets and trumpets for example this is likely to be D,C,Bb and E. So I need the repetitive pattern I am basing things around to create a tention or emotional feel when placed with these notes….

To cut a long story short I settled at the repeated pattern of G to A#. Of course, at this point I have no idea if there will be a clarinet player or ten…oh the joys of the unknown! 😉

Once we have this simplistic pattern we can then begin to play with the articulation. Experimenting with what notes we accent, and really bring it to life.

Here’s an example of the part played with accents on  the ‘and’ of 1 and the ‘and’ of 3. At this early stage of composing I tend to use ‘Guitar Pro’ a programme as powerful as sibeliues but a bit more user friendly….Its purely for perspective to get a feel for how things might sound – it also only costs about 20 quid.

So, if you can hear past the terrible midi sounds, you would have heard a repeated pattern with a pulse that is more interesting than 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Now… This would be very achievable for most levels of player (Im thinking guitars, ukuleles and keyboards here!). But we can really start to have fun by using the orchestra to our advantage and have opposing accents from a different group of players. Like this example…

Suddenly we have something more interesting, and definately working towards a phillip glass intensity and something that would create a state of flow in even the most distracted of players.

By sharing the complexity within this part between two groups we give each player the room to really focus and flourish without being overwhelemed. In other words it gives them room to think…whilst making the music even more powerful.

Of course we can take things further and share this simple part out amongst for sections all playing different accents… like this:

At this point the complexity has literally taken away that beautiful quality we previously had, or atleast not added to it. Interesting how simplicity can even become too complex. If you look at the notation you will see that the accents have begun to in some cases cancel each other out, so without introducing a crazy and possibly unachievable pattern which goes in and out of phase, it just wont work!- so two parts it is then.

With my foundation riff in place, my next stage is to head to ‘Logic’ and quite literally begin playing. Using Logic gives me a bit more flexibility and a bank of sounds that are a little more realistic, but remember this is only here as guide for me to take to the real life players. In my next blog I’ll delve into how I did this…and how everything is focused on being modular in order to be flexible. In the mean time, here’s 30 seconds of a sketch for you. Hopefully you can hear our foundation riff that I have been exploring in this blog, played by two sections of the orchestra.