Ben Tibbetts Studio: Piano Performances and Original Music

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Montague Falls and
Prayer in A major

Listen:
Montague Falls
Prayer in A major

Prayer in A major and Montague Falls were composed in the spring of 2020. Prayer is a simple, rather melancholy piece for violin and piano. Montague Falls is a flashy piece for solo piano that was inspired by the dam in Turners Falls, Massachusetts (where I was living at the time).

They were the products of a compositional technique that was new to me. The technique was inspired by my experiences recording music for UMass during the COVID-19 pandemic. For each piano part I would print the sheet music, set a metronome going slowly (at say quarter note equals fifty), sight-read it at that tempo on my electronic piano, and then micromanage the resultant MIDI data. The goal was to produce recordings that sounded musical, accurate, and realistic.

After doing that with sheet music, I tried it with improvising. This led to the Music and Ideas podcast. In those pieces, I improvised with melodies and sketches. Then I made Montague Falls and Prayer in A major, which were composed by improvising from whole cloth (again, very slowly). I began with almost no idea of what I wanted to do, jumping into each piece without much forethought.

This might be the best way to compose for me personally. By coming up with the material on the spot, the results feel organic. They feel improvised without being completely illogical, inconsistent, or random. At least, that's how they feel to me. They seem no more random than your average classical sonata. Not every motive or phrase is perfectly related, but each piece has a consistent overall style.

This workflow strikes a balance between two extremes I've struggled with in the past. On the one hand, I've had my piano improvisations. They've always felt satisfyingly expressive, but more unpredictable than my compositions. They've been less thought through, consistent, and logical. On the other hand I've had the music I've composed on the computer without reference to a piano. Those pieces have sometimes suffered from being too repetitive and minimalist. They've seemed logical in an uninteresting way, even at times computer-generated--which, you might say, in a way they are. I'm more tempted to repeat something exactly when I'm working on a computer. That's how the incentives are aligned because of the ability to copy and paste.

No matter what medium you're working in, you are in a way always collaborating with that technology. You are always potentially subject to the forces of that technology's incentive structure. That's why different mediums tend to produce different results.

Since composing Prayer in A major and Montague Falls, I've improvised sketches into Cubase at slow tempos and spent about an order of magnitude more time editing and revising that material. Generally, if it took me twenty minutes to record it I'll need about two hundred minutes to edit it. That feels about right to me. It's a pleasant way to work and I believe it's producing better results.

Although these two pieces are piano-heavy, I believe this technique is effective in writing for other instruments as well. The initial improvisation is on solo piano but that's really just a sketch. I can always arrange it for other instruments.

Because Prayer in A major and Montague Falls were composed directly from the piano into the computer, and because I haven't had them performed live, I haven't bothered to create sheet music for them. But if you'd like to perform either of these pieces live please reach out to me. We can negotiate the details of creating custom sheet music.

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