The Next Symphony

Posted on September 24, 2012

Last year, I spent nine months of my life agonizing over a 47-minute-long programmatic symphony following the story line of Jekyll and Hyde. The experience was an agonizingly slow process that was more involved than I had ever anticipated it would be, and included countless late nights of writing spurts, talking to friends about leitmotifs, what worked and what didn’t, etc.

Doing large projects has always been a massive hobby of mine, starting with writing Aeternum Vale before I even finished high school. The J&H symphony made me realize how much fun large forms are. THEREFORE: I’m begun working on a new symphony which will, in all likelihood, exceed J&H in terms of length and scale. The book is longer, I have more sounds to play with this time around, and in terms of content alone, there is tons to get through. And not a whole lot of it can be left out.

I’m in choir this semester (to my everlasting shame, but I need the credit, so I’m taking it), and so far a large number of people have expressed interest in singing for the choral parts. So many that I may have to split up the recording sessions this time, I don’t think we can fit everyone in the stairwell to record again.

For the next nine to ten months, prepare for little hints everywhere. I am officially “announcing” this right now, so here we go.