Monthly Archives: July 2026

Belkin ch. 3

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Main divisions of ch 3
Writing for the voice
Setting words to music
Recitative vs Aria
Musical form and the text
Composing for choir

Personal reflections on ch 3

I composed a 20-min piece for soloists, choir, and instruments called “Cantata for Lent”. A cantata is (usually?) religious in nature and is like an opera but without costumes or action. There are actors, monologues, dialogues, and reactions from a crowd. Some sections are like opera recitative (exposition) and others are like aria (“I’m going to stand here and emote for a few minutes”)

In my cantata, most of the lyrics were taken from a modern translation of Psalms and other passages from the Bible. The melodies followed the rhythm of normal speech. I often used “word painting” (voice raises in pitch when joyful, lowers in pitch for grief).

I had been a member of this choir for several years while working on the composition and so I knew what the choir was capable of. Ex. splitting the choir into male and female sections singing an octave apart was a lovely way to change the timbre without taking up a lot of rehearsal time.

I used a variety of textures:
solo voice
unison choir
unison in octaves (women, men)
3 parts —     soprano & alto, male
4 voices, homophonic (” 4 part harmony”)
rarely — 4 voices, polyphonic (voices moving with complete independence)

I wrote for 4 soloists:
“Wisdom” — a “matronly” alto
Prophetic voice — a soprano with dramatic, brassy timbre
The Devil — a spoken role
Jesus — a tenor

When I wrote the parts I conferred with the soloists and changed things to suit their voices.

There are many more things I would love to write about this experience. I feel very grateful to have been given the opportunity. It was terrifying, and joyful, and included moments of skin-crawling humiliation which I still shudder to recall. Afterward I was completely burned out and did a 90 degree turn away from church music and was seduced by a bamboo flute that I found at a Rennaissance fair. This led to several years of Irish Trad music. But that’s another story 😉

 

 

The Belkin Project

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Some friends and I have been reading Alan Belkin’s book Musical Composition: Craft and Art. We are all at different stages in our musical journey and have found the homework problems to be different degrees of difficult!

I’ve been thinking about how I can make this book part of my music education. Yesterday I did a flying overview of the whole book (chapter names and subheadings). There is a chapter a little past the halfway mark called “Rondo Form” (ch. 14) and I realized that I would really like to compose something in Rondo form.

For the last 6 weeks I have made a big change to my daily schedule: as soon as I wake up, I go outside (carrying a tray with pencil, notebook and coffee) and sit on one of our park benches. There I alternate back and forth between enjoying the nature around me, and capturing my stream of consciousness in a notebook. Many of the chains of thought are visual images. Could I express them as an animated video? I was recently inspired by a visual accompaniment to the Genesis album “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”. In this case the video was not a fully-fledged animation, but instead a series of still images, like a slide show. The still images were given motion by transitions: fade to black, zoom in, cross fade, pan from one side of the image to the other.

I would love to do that!

These morning park bench meditations could make good material for a Rondo composition. A rondo takes the form A B A C A D…   The recurring sunlight, park bench, bird calls could be represented by the “A section”, and the various other streams of thought could be the B, C, D etc.

In conclusion, I  plan to rush through chapters 3 through 9 (not doing the exercises), skip chapters 10 through 14, and focus on chapter 14, Rondo form. With each chapter I will make an outline on a separate “page” of this blog. I’ll put my questions and personal observations on the chapter in daily entries here.