Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

The revolution will be supervised.

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

He really is that stupid.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

We’re not going back!

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

You are here: Home / Artists In Our Midst / Frank Wilhoit – The Best Forms of Cheating!

Frank Wilhoit – The Best Forms of Cheating!

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Let’s give a warm welcome to Frank Wilhoit, for a return Artists visit, with a brand-new piece!

Frank Wilhoit

The concerto (from the Italian for “cage match”) is a musical form whose paradigm is that of a debate between unequal participants: one or some very small number of instrumentalists against an orchestra.  Being acoustically overmatched, the soloist(s) must cheat.  The useful forms of cheating include showing off, redefining the topics of debate, and digression.

The concerto became strongly standardized, as to form and rhetoric, soon after its invention in the Baroque period.  Google “ritornello” and “concerto grosso”.  Then the form was completely reinvented and lifted to a higher level by Mozart, whose mature concerti are essentially symphonies-with-a-soloist.  This did two things: (1) it established a fruitful model for later composers, but also (2) it blew the whole game wide open, because it showed that the form could be reinvented, even very drastically.

So from Mendelssohn onward, there was no longer a single concerto paradigm but a branching tree of paradigms: the symphonic concerto, the virtuoso concerto, the fantasy concerto, the small-but-beautiful concerto, etc.  These categories cross-influenced each other; by the end of the 19th Century, we may find elements of any of the various paradigms in any particular work, and we judge its integrity by how well they are integrated.

Now a quick sidelight on composition in general.  One principle that many (but not all) composers have adopted is “don’t repeat yourself”.  We admire Beethoven’s symphonies, not just because he wrote nine of them, but because he wrote at least seven different kinds of symphony.  Once he had pushed a particular meta-symphony to (what for him were) its limits, then that could not be revisited: instead he must do something different.

From what has been said, it should be clear that it is easier to invent a new meta-concerto than a new meta-symphony.  But: easy be damned; it is my job, and I may not shirk it (and it wouldn’t really save me much effort if I did).  Anyway, coming back to this forum and this evening, I am very grateful for the opportunity to show you my latest concerto and my latest symphony, each of which may earn your attention, not only as a object in isolation, but also as an effort to make something different.

First, fresh from the oven, Concerto for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra, Op. 41, in the YouTube below.  (If the score is not legible due to the video resolution, the separate score and audio rendering are on my web site.)  I just packed this off to its dedicatees (a pair of preposterously gifted twin sisters) Thursday evening; they will edit the solo parts, so this text is not quite final, though large changes are unlikely.  It is in two movements, totalling about 22 minutes.  The overall affect of the first movement is pastoral, with some symphonic elements; the one moment of virtuoso display has a recapitulatory function within the form, and I dare hope that, as a whole, the synthesis of these elements is original.  The second movement is fast and exuberant, even a little silly — but Mozart often got silly in his concerto finales.  There is a “big tune”, but it is not like, say, Rakhmaninov’s; it gets woven into the texture in symphonic style, and the soloists remember it at the end.

Finally, but composed earlier (2021-22), Symphony No. 7 (Sinfonia quasi una fantasia), Op. 40.  (There is no way to put this one on YouTube, the score cannot be shrunk that far.)  Three movements without pause, 28 minutes.  In terms of Classical expectations, the symphony and the fantasy are almost opposite.  The game here was to use the tactics of a fantasy within a symphonic strategy.  The way the ideas develop is more impulsive.  The last movement is really just one thing after another, held together by a tempo ramp: it gradually gets exactly twice as fast from the beginning to the end.

 

I look forward to continuing the conversation in the comments.  Remember, the only stupid question is the one you didn’t ask!

Reader Interactions

37Comments

  1. 1.

    Alison Rose

    I have no real knowledge of classical music, although my parents played a lot of it when I was growing up so I developed a fondness for how lovely much of it sounds. I have also always loved listening to knowledgable people talk about it because they are always SO into it, and I just like listening to people be enthusiastic about the things they love.

  2. 2.

    Frank Wilhoit

    (Thanks for WaterGirl for the opportunity and for the post title, which is cleverer than anything I was able to come up with.)

    I’ll be checking in every so often.  Enjoy!

  8. 8.

    Alison Rose

    The second movement is fast and exuberant, even a little silly

    I have to say, I like the idea of calling some of it silly, in a fond sense. There’s sometimes a sprightliness to  certain pieces that makes you smile when you hear it, and I assume must be fun to compose as well.

  13. 13.

    Alison Rose

    @Baud: One of my brothers is a musician and I’ve always wished I’d gotten a bit of those genes. I took piano lessons for about a year and, uh, was not good at it. I played flute in middle school band and I was actually pretty decent, but it wasn’t like I was gonna end up in the SF Symphony or anything. My brother, on the other hand, plays piano, guitar, bass, drums, can play almost any song after hearing it a couple of times, writes his own music, sings, and so on.

    I have deep admiration for anyone who creates music, whatever type

    ETA: I also cannot sing worth a damn, and God do I wish I could. I have mild hearing damage and also could not carry a tune in a bucket.

  14. 14.

    Burnspbesq

    So is “Concerto for Orchestra” an oxymoron? Because the Bartok might be my favorite piece of 20th Century orchestral music, and the Lutoslawski is my favorite of his.

  16. 16.

    Frank Wilhoit

    @Burnspbesq: ​
     Not an oxymoron but, I think, a bit of a deliberate paradox. The Bartok is the closest he ever came to composing a symphony, but in its scherzo (“Giuoco delle coppie”) he gives many of the wind instruments quasi-concertante parts. The Lutoslawski I would also call a symphony — and I think you can probably tell that its opening was in the back of my mind.

  19. 19.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud:  I may have told this story here before, but my mom’s voice was so awful that:

    #1
    In grade school, the music teacher said to my mom: “Blossom, please sing with your mouth closed.” (My mom’s name was Blossom, in case that isn’t obvious.)

    #2
    My cocker spaniel would only howl under two circumstances: a) if an ambulance went by with the siren going, but only with a door or a window OPEN, and b) when my mom sang.

  22. 22.

    Alison Rose

    @WaterGirl: I feel her pain. I’ve often thought that if police or whoever needed to get information out of someone and wanted to do so nonviolently, just put them in a room with me and make them listen to me sing. Especially something in an upper register, because I have zero upper register. Me trying to sing along with Joni Mitchell or something might be a crime in and of itself.

  25. 25.

    Baud

    @WaterGirl:

    Your mom and I would have made a good duet. We would have called ourselves WMD.

     

     

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Haven’t really started.  I’ve made a couple of attempts at perspective drawing and using the vanishing point.  Hoping to practice more regularly in the new year.

  26. 26.

    Gary K

    I’m assuming, since you’ve just packed off the music to the soloists, that what we’re hearing is entirely synthesized. It’s amazing how well they (whoever they are) can imitate the orchestral timbres. With careful listening, one can hear that it’s a bit square, doesn’t quite breathe, and that the timbres sound slightly inauthentic, but if you played this for me without mentioning the source, I would probably be fooled.

  27. 27.

    Frank Wilhoit

    @Gary K: The technology is amazing.  The notation is done in Sibelius.  Its output is a stream of MIDI messages and hints (this note had a staccato dot on it, etc.).  The VST that does the synthesis is called NotePerformer.  It is different from, and better than, all of its competitors because it does a little bit of randomization of pitches and attack times.  (The sample library is actually not that large and is extensively interpolated; that is why, for example, G below middle C in the bassoons sounds like an English horn.)  The result is, as you say, intriguingly realistic.

  28. 28.

    zhena gogolia

    @WaterGirl: Wow, your mom’s name was Blossom? That’s so cool. I’ve only ever heard of that with Blossom Dearie (an amazing singer).

    ETA: And as I expected, that wasn’t really her first name.

  33. 33.

    Warren Senders

    @Frank Wilhoit:

     

    It’s a pretty damn good sound you’re getting from this technology.  Very impressive.  I enjoy the openness and air you’re getting in your orchestration.

    Do you have a premiere date set?  My experience as a composer was that I spent at least as much time arranging performances as I did arranging the notes themselves.

  36. 36.

    Gracklefeet

    Thank you for this! I’m working my way through one of Robert Greenberg’s courses for the Teaching Company, called “The Concerto”. He made the course in 2006 and his most modern examples were from the 1970s I think. It’s wonderful to have an example from a contemporary composer to look at. I downloaded the score and will make a study project of this once the holidays are over (can I find motifs? what is the structure?). Have you written more about this piece (or your composing process)?
    I’m a beginner by the way — currently learning from people like David Bruce Composer, Jason Allen’s courses on Skillshare, Adam Neely / 12tone / 8bit Music Theory. Learning to use a DAW and fighting with Finale. I retired a few years ago and have the time & opportunity to focus on music now (my degree was in Entomology!)

  37. 37.

    Frank Wilhoit

    @Gracklefeet: I’m glad you like the work and I do (without boasting) think that it would make an interesting subject for analysis.  In the first movement, you could look at the points of contact with sonata form.  Throughout, you could look at the rhetorical tropes of the solo writing: why, for example, are they so often in rhythmic unison?  On more advanced levels, you could look at the motivic connections between the first and second movements (which one of my smartest friends failed to spot) or at the progressive tonality — how, and why, do we get from E to G to C?  Feel free to ask further questions; my email address can be found on my web site, with only a tiny bit of hunting.  (O and by the way, listen listen listen, to everything you can find, do at least as much listening as reading-about.)

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