Writing Contemporary Classical for solo instruments

Hey everyone - long time no see!

Anyway, at the moment I'm meant to be writing a couple of solo pieces in a contemporary classical genre... (My fav - Stravinsky no doubt)

Anyway, I'm having some really trouble getting it off the ground, so-to-speak.

I love Stravinsky's Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet (Especially 2 & 3) and also Debussy's Syrinx, but I'm having trouble emulating how the develop their thematic material (Motifs/themes/phrases etc)

I've got heaps of ideas and phrases but I can't for the life of me develop one into a more meaningful composition.

Anyone with advice on how to approach writing for solo instrument (Probably Clarinet or oboe at this point) or any advice otherwise on developing contemporary themes - please help! lol

Cheers,
Chris :-)

Well, you don't have to develop your themes. This may have been a "necessity" from, say, 1700 - 1900, but in the 20th and 21st century lots of music isn't based on theme development anymore. (Very often there aren't even any themes either.) There's nothing wrong per se with just repeating a "theme", just jumping to a next "theme", just having the piece end after the "theme" is over, making it ultra short, etc. Of course, you should be aware of the effects these "techniques" may have. You don't get processual music like that, but (especially in the case of direct repetition) a very static one, and even just jumping from one idea to the next can give a pretty static impression, as there is no "logical" flow. Also, in that latter case it may be hard for the audience to perceive the piece as one whole, if there aren't any parameters that strongly bind the piece together. (Of course, this approach may be valid too.)

But I understand your problem very well. I also struggled quite a long time with making compositions longer than half a minute. So I did just that. I wrote two cycles of piano pieces of which each piece only has five bars or so. Ultra short. I'm still writing more such piano pieces from time to time, and I enjoy doing so, and I find nothing wrong with keeping them at their "natural length" without needlessly making them longer. Even Schumann wrote some extremely short pieces which have basically no development going on, but are more or less just one single idea brought to paper.

Of course I'm also writing longer pieces, but they don't tend to be built out of themes or motives, but rather some general underlying ideas and structures that hold the piece together and allow me to "draw" rather free musical lines above them.

But I realize that nothing I said really answered your question of how to develop motives, just ways to avoid doing so.

Well I had a lesson today with a composer and we spent about an hour looking at the First 12 bars of the First of Stravinsky's Three Piece for Clarinet Solo.

I am able to see more clearly now, how Stavinsky is developing the original Idea into a more substantial piece of music.

Also, in that latter case it may be hard for the audience to perceive the piece as one whole, if there aren't any parameters that strongly bind the piece together.

See this is what I was finding, I tried to connect one idea to another but the problem was that they were too different to result in anything coherent when combined.

The other problem I think is that I'm doing too much variation too quickly.

Anyway,
Thanks for the reply
Chris :-)

One approach I sometimes use is to work at both ends of the developing piece - it should work just as well for solo instrumental pieces - assuming it works at all .

Suppose you have a motive, call it A, which is decent but maybe not great. Instead of putting something after it as in AB, try to put something before it, that is BA, where B is chosen to make A sound better by anticipating/suggesting some part of A.

Then if you add a second motive C after BA, you can possibly make C sound better again by putting some of it in a D section to get DBAC - and so on.

The listener will hear A as a development of B, and C as a development of D. This technique might help to break writer's block.

Euler - that was a great suggestion! Rethinking the way you develop a piece!

My suggestion is something a professor at my school calls the 'Tossed Salad' technique of development. It's where you just write anything and everything and just toss it into the piece. This may only work if you're accustomed to going back and removing sections or measures (which doesn't work for me).

But try many things out! Good luck.