Rescoring Winged Witness

Winged Witness started as a piece for chamber orchestra: one of each woodwind, a horn and a trumpet, and strings. Over the past couple of months I've been expanding it for full orchestra, and it has grown by about a minute along the way. I expected this to be mostly a practical job though it ended up changing how I hear the piece.

I started with the books; most of my orchestration knowledge has come from listening and intuitive/assumptions. I wanted to get past that, so I spent a good while with Rimsky-Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration and Samuel Adler's The Study of Orchestration. Both were worth the time, and I can see why there are full college courses for this. I'll keep going back to them for reference, but neither really fit what I was trying to do here. They're great good at explaining how an orchestra works and how to make it sound full and balanced. I didn't need a general method so much as an idea about this particular piece. In fact, a slight feel of imbalance seemed more necessary.

The idea came from the melody. The melodic line in Winged Witness was already fragmented, and with more woodwinds available I started alternating the color from phrase to phrase: one phrase in one wind, the next in another, so the line never settles in a single instrument for long. What I wanted was the feeling of a cluster of birds, several voices arriving from different directions and passing the song among them rather than one voice singing it.

The new brass parts brought in something else. To me they became the human element: people, and the regimented activity that comes with them. Next to the woodwinds, the brass sound ordered and deliberate, and that contrast between the natural sound of the birds and the regimented sound of the brass became the center of the expansion. I liked to think of the French Horn as linking the two; belonging to both worlds though not entirely in either.

Only later, looking back over the score, did I notice what the strings had become. I didn't consciously plan it, and I don't want to call it an inspiration, because it came as an afterthought. But the strings seem to work almost as the ground under the other two and the space enclosing them, the place where the birds and the brass work out their drama.

Between the new colors and the added minute, the meaning of the piece changed, at least in my own head. It stopped feeling like a picture of one scene and started to feel deeper and more universal. It became less about these birds and these people than about something closer to the idea of each, and of the ground they share. It started to remind me of Plato's forms, or the definition of a scene without any specifics.

I had to pull myself back from that. A score is also a set of parts, and each part will be read by an actual person at a rehearsal. So I went back through the piece as practically as I could, part by part, checking whether each line was playable and whether it gave the player something worth playing. Material moved from one instrument to another in a number of places. I wanted to make sure no one in the orchestra would feel shortchanged, so that the tuba or the bass clarinet has as real a part in this as the first flute.

The larger meaning is still there for me. It just has to live inside something an orchestra can actually play.