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Apology for Two Toccatas
Except for private lessons and a few Viola da Gamba Society workshops and Conclaves, and two weeks at Oberlin Baroque 2025 (and a few informal jams with some local rock guitarists), I have almost always been completely alone with my music. Here at violinist.com I seek discussion where collaboration itself cannot be found.I’ve had about four years violin lessons in my almost eleven years playing (always focused on baroque), and have been again without a violin teacher for almost a year. I also had four years bass viol lessons out of my almost eight years on that instrument, with almost two years now since having a viol teacher. In this recent unguided freedom, upon returning from Oberlin Baroque last July, my musical journey has turned almost exclusively to composition. Somewhat unexpectedly, since then virtually the only music on my stand has been written by me, and I’ve become pretty adept at MuseScore notation software. Most of what I’ve written so far I’ve also thrown away as follies of learning, but I have kept two pieces and even had each professionally printed with nice cardstock covers from watercolors I did for this purpose. These are my two toccatas for solo violin, the first called Toccata Viviana and the second just called Toccata #2.
I only had 30 copies printed of the Viviana, and they are gone. But I had more of the Toccata #2, and because I want honest feedback from other violinists, I will send a copy to anyone who emails me the request along with their postal address. My email can be found on my user profile at this website.
Are these Toccatas hard to play? Probably, though maybe I'm just not yet a good enough player to prove them easy. There are some rapid shifts, many and varied double-stops, and chords not found in textbooks. But I played every measure many times in the many weeks of composing them, testing not just the sound but also the playability. Since I don't think I can play anything really nice, the fact that I can play these pieces through, however haltingly at moments where rhythm is interrupted by clumsy fingers, proves to me that a better player could play it right. Each of the two toccatas is dedicated to one then the other of the two teachers I've had, who studied violin performance at Yale and then Julliard, so I had no need to curb what I wanted to write to keep it easy. I'm sure they can play these pieces. But again, I truly have no idea if either player will like either piece. I only know that I like them both or else I would have kept revising or thrown them away. I did start all over a few times, revised hundreds, and this is what I finally kept.
I have a local friend who is a very high-level player of early music bowed string instruments (but alas, not violin!). Last week he sight-read the Viviana on a bass viol, which was not easy --not only because he had to play it down a clef but especially because viols are tuned mostly in fourths rather than fifths so it did not lay so easily on the viol. It was quite a pleasure for me because I'd never heard my music played by anyone else, nor so well. And it confirmed my bias that I actually do like the music! Whether anyone else will, I honestly have no idea.
For a few months I was playing weekly with him a few years ago. I like him a lot, he's a very erudite and experienced and artful person, but he's a very tough critic who frequently grew impatient with my low skills, so much that I quit playing with him and dropped contact for almost 2 years, until he invited me back a week ago. That's when he sight-read my Toccata Viviana. In the past he has expressed disdain for the works of a living composer of viol music who is highly regarded in the viol world and whose music I very much like, so I took it as a compliment when he said I'm a better composer than I am player, although he also said I have no idea what I'm doing. Still, I could tell he was genuinely having fun playing it, and liked it at least a little, at least for those minutes.
He’s right enough that I barely know what I'm doing, though I spent hours daily for 6-9 weeks on each of those toccatas, not starting the second until I'd finished the first. Each evolved through a few hundred reprints and revisions as I played it over and over on my violin with pencil on the stand, wondering if I'd ever actually like it or consider it finished, until I gradually stopped making revisions and my ear told me it was done. And so although I almost don't know what I'm doing, at the same time I can say every single note is exactly where it is quite on purpose, after much earful deliberation and experimentation. No doubt I broke some rules but also sometimes found my way aurally to principles I'd only read about without appreciation until I rediscovered them on my own and said "Aha! THAT's what I read about!" But never did any principle guide me, I let my ear and heart tell me where to go, indeed not knowing what I was doing but certainly knowing what I was hearing.
Really there can be no exact explanation for any of it. I found that by living with each piece for a few months it truly became an expression of me, though never a literal expression of anything. That might seem contradicted by the names given to the sections of Toccata #2, though except for the delirious “Daelirium” (there are times in life when we just don't feel right) they were arbitrary wordplay without musical meaning. Each section was soundplay, so the names were in that same playful spirit. Again, except for “Daelirium”, it is truly abstract art, without program or any reference to the real world. Totally self-contained, no references or rules guided those passages, cadences and chords except the way I felt when I played them, and those feelings were about nothing else than the feel-logic of those vibrations sequencing through time.
That sequential vibratory escape path from all outside reference is to me the most signature characteristic of (instrumental) music as art and composition. Unlike visual arts that are mostly perceived all at once and then open to focused and roaming inspection guided by the interest of the viewer, music (like literature) is sequential over time and each moment has meaning only in context of the other moments (or longer) of the piece before and after, in that exact order through time. But unlike literature (or opera), which sonicly means nothing in itself without the real world to which it points, “meaning” in absolute music is purely sonic, points to nothing else, signifies no literal thing, and yet takes us on emotional and perceptual journeys in its own world detached from every real thing we do or ponder.
Being transported to such places outside time and space and objective reality is for me a type of meditation that provides relief from the cares of worldly existence by removing me from all thoughts and awareness of that world and focusing my attention on an object complete in itself with no other reference or meaning. Some abstract paintings can also have this transportive effect on me, while others take me nowhere. Whatever the distinctions in such paintings, they are not logical or literal and are wondrous adventures in consciousness, like a personality test as different people will like different abstracts (or none at all –some people don’t care much for music either). Here there are no reasons. In some ways these transports by music or abstracts remind me of some LSD moments decades ago when I was taken to "unreal" places quite vivid and beautiful and, again, without reference to anything beyond the perceptions themselves. Obviously none of these are places where we can dwell continuously, because life demands we actively and soberly engage the objective world. But that would be unbearably tedious and exhausting if never relieved in pleasurable and carefree diversions.
After all this, I can say that now I do know just a little bit of what I'm doing, and certainly have a much more clear learning agenda for what comes next in my composition. I've started a few pieces, one in particular I've already spent three unsatisfying months on (including a few total restarts) and might still abandon, none of it regretted because I'm learning not just what I like to hear in a moment but reaching towards real architecture and planning in a piece. Obviously such larger form is fundamental to real music composition, but first I had to explore how to make moments I liked, letting each follow from the previous and then trying to push errant paths back towards something that sounded right over longer periods, though still relatively brief. Planning beforehand a piece with a longer arc of development and episodes that fit into a larger whole...that's my study right now. I'm working now in 2 voices, bass and treble (violin or flute, and bass viol or cello), aiming for a contrapuntal sound where the two voices have equal importance and each line could stand alone as a satisfying melody (with occasional fireworks or stasis), while of course fitting together into a single satisfying whole with that long arc of a satisfying journey. That has not been an easy study so far, I've thrown away a lot to again start again, trusting the hours they cost have brought me closer to something I will keep.
So there’s my Apology for Two Toccatas and I will send you the second one if you email me your postal address.
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I must admit I haven’t attempted Toccata #2 yet, I’m not sure where the shifting goes to. Third position? Perhaps I’ll show it Julie, my teacher. At least the key of G is possible for me at this point.
Your skills are at least nine years ahead of mine, but someday,hopefully , I’ll understand classical music more than just a rubes sideways glance at it.
I give you kudos for sticking your neck out and sharing your compositions with us. I hope that some of the skilled players here will pick them up and give us their best thoughts on them.