Gazing at the Night Sky - Composition Walkthrough Pt.1 - Concept & Theme

Welcome to this new composition walkthrough series! As the poll I did a few months back was split between Hero and Gazing at the Night Sky, I decided to go for both. Also, I feel it might losen up things a bit more to alternate between two different pieces instead of plowing through Hero in probably no less than 20 parts.

If you have been around for a while, you will most likely have heard this piece already. I had the pleasure to record this live in February with the Staatskapelle Frankfurt/ in Germany before Covid brought everything to a stop.

I also made the entire multitrack session as well as a Midi file and score sheet available for download. In fact one of my (former) patrons has attempted a mockup based on that material:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7ySaFlpDNw 

The background for this piece started a few years ago. I wrote that theme in 2016 when actually writing for another project but for some reason that melody got stuck in my head back then so I wrote a quick piano sketch of it and put it away for potential later use.

I tend to "collect" such ideas in piles of score sheet paper, hardly ever origanized or properly labeled.

In 2017, when I was writing the score for HERO, in the search for inspiration or a main theme for the movie, I went through some of these notes again and stumbled again over this melody that I had written back then. I thought that it might be suitable for the movie and decided to create a proper short demo of it and send it to the filmmakers as basis for further discussion. Now as I wrote already in the Hero walkthrough, that theme didn't make it into the movie but I still thought it was a nice melody that could potentially be used later on. One thing I really liked about that theme is that it seemed to be very versatile in it's interpretation. It would work as a bold fanfare just as well as in a tender and fragile version of it and it seemed to have endless possibilities for useful reharmonisations.

Fast forward to mid 2019, I was in a situation where I felt like I needed some creative "play time" after working through for half a year on many different projects. Back at that time, I also started to rework my template from ground up so having a piece that uses all forces of the orchestra would be useful for that task as well.

So I decided to dig up that theme again and put it into a piece. I knew that once in a while, there might be opportunities to record such pieces either at the end of a scoring session or other reasons, so I decided to keep the line-up at a reasonable size. If I had a free choice of line-up, I would have probably gone for 6 Horns, 4 Trumpets and 4 Trombones with this one and also a few more woodwinds and strings to really get to that "Scifi Score" sound but it worked reasonably well with the "standard" line-up.

So let's talk a bit about the theme itself. Here it is as I sketched it out in its original form.

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/gatns-theme/s-bXFHT84kafh

Structurally, you could probably divide it into two sections of four bars each. Central motivic element is the upward gesture of the dotted eighth+16th+target note. You can see a similar motivic core for instance in Indiana Jones' Theme. Particularly the dotted eighth+16th gives it a sort of bouncyness that it wouldn't have if these two notes were straight eights. Also, this rhythm is more prominently recognizable compared to straight eighths.

The core intervals in the first half are fourths and fifths upwards which give it that adventurous and uplifting quality. Particularly exposed are the leaps c-f (bar 1-2), c-g (bar 2-3) and c-f-bb (bar 3-4). It's more or less a growing intervallic propulsion upwards, starting with a fourth, going to a fifth and culminating in two stacked fourths. This outlines also the dramaturgy of the  first half with the melodic peak at Bb in bar 4 and descending from there again. Generally, I like the principle of creating a melodic quality of the peak tones of a melody. So if we jsut outline the path of the highest notes in the first 4 bars with f-g-bb, they create an inherent melodic logic which our ear usually finds quite attractive. You will find a lot of melodies where these peak tones move in seconds up or down or in an arc in the music literature.

Harmonically speaking, it spreads out over an F pedal point moving from the tonic to a "subdominant field" for 3 bars (Gm being the ii and Bb being the IV which both function more or less as subdominant).

All these traits are more or less protoypic "hero theme/fanfare" tropes. You will find a lot of heroic/adventurous main themes in the film music literature that are based on upward moving fourths and/or fifths, as well as many themes that have amotivic cell of a dotted eighth+16th, as well as many themes that build their harmonic path on pedal points with a preference of moving to the subdominant over it.

So musically speaking, none of this touches any unknown musical territory, yet it still is incredibly tricky to find a catchy tune that has all the properties of a well written and satisfying melody.

The second half of the theme keeps the upward rhythmic motif but switches into a call/response principle in bar 5 and 6. I have to admit that I stumbled across this more or less by accident but I found this little section gave the theme some quality that moved it a bit away from being too clichéd from its structural approach. Repeating this call and response gives it musical legimitation. Notice how the upwards motion of the motif now becomes diatonic and doesn't leap anymore as before. Bar 8 and 9 warp it up again in the prototypic fanfaric style again with a leap of a fifth upwards.

Harmonically, the second half builds a slight contrast to the first half with the harmony becoming slightly more adventurous. I personally love how the sustain c in the call/response section in bar 5 and 6 becomes the 11th over the Gm/Bb chord which in general is one of my favourite tensions over a minor chord. It was a conscious decision to introduce a non-diatonic chord in bar 8 (Dbmaj7) as I wanted to create a bit of a harmonic surprise and expand the harmonic universe of that theme a bit more as I felt that going over purely diatonic chords would give it harmonic safety where I wanted to express some bold adventurism with that theme that dared to "go to places no man has gone before" - well not really but you get the idea. The major seventh melody note (c) gave that unexpected chord some relation to the actual key of the theme andthe leap towards the #11 (g) that resolves to the fifth gives it that lydian quality which always creates some cinemascope feeling. 

If you would want to dive deeper into the function of that Db chord, you could understand it as a subsitution for a G7 chord (which would be the V of V that follows (Csus)). It is not really a tritone substitution as the Db chord lacks that tritone of a dominant7 chord but as I wrote in the tutorial about tritone substitutions it doesn't need to have that in order to create that "dominant feeling" for us.

Here it is with the G7 chord instead (which would need to be a sus4 b9 in order to accomodate for the melodic notes).

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/gatns-theme-db-sub/s-UnkWOETEwgx

You can see while it theoretically works, due to its rather sad feeling it kills the complete mood of this adventurous theme and is no match for that daring and open sounding Dbmaj7 chord. If the theme were written like this it would feel like a hero who almost went on adventure bit then got scared and went back home again.

Speaking of going back home, the final chord in the theme is a Csus4 which of course is the dominant leading back to the tonic and bringing this to a clear structural circle.

From an orchestrational standpoint, this theme creates quite a bit of a challenge. It has a range of a major ninth which is considerably more than what such themes usually have. The problem that this creates is that it is quite hard to find a key where a suited instrument for that theme (e.g. trumpets or horns) could play through the entire theme without moving out of their brilliant register or being pushed too high. I will talk more in detail about this when we get to the specific sections but you might notice that I sometimes switch the leading instruments halfway through the theme due to this.

I felt this theme needed a counterpart, a sort of classical B theme with a contrasting gestus. Rather than marcato and articulated it is a legato melody. Rather than relying on rhythmic motifs it revolves around constant quarter notes. Rather than having a clear melodic direction, it seems to be rather "searching" and rather than having a straight forward and quite simple harmonic approach, under the hood it encompasses quite complex harmonies.

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/gatns-side-theme/s-EdBebDAlN2X

The side theme more or less is only the first two bars which also open the piece. I felt like this was a nice addition to the theme to give it some depth, and also some richness, almost like writing a character for a film where you want to give it a multi layered personality rather than just the one "shiny" side.

Notice how the harmonic device I used in the main theme of Dbmaj7 going to C is kind if the linking element here as the B theme revolves around this chord progression (with the difference of having the thirds in the bass). In fact this harmonic device is quite prominent in this piece which at least for me has a lot of this emotional quality that evokes this 80s/90s childhood awe and wonder memories. But I guess this is a highly generational matter of taste.

The harmony here becomes quite complex and I was somewhat astounded myself how smoothly this worked. You see that first chord has a quite complex chord symbol but we could also understand it as a polychord of C over Db which harmonically is quite "out there" for a piece like this. But for some reason I found this rubbing melodic gesture on top of this chord not by any means unpleasantly dissonant but harmonically rich. 

My explanation why this works would probably be that the "strange melodic tones" in the first bar get harmonically justified in the second bar which feels like a resolution. It's more or less a retrospective consonance. You could also see it as a field of the fifth mode of harmonic minor or as a bitonal field of Db and C at the same time. But those are just approximations of what could be the reason for this working. Sometimes, just following your gut and not having a perfectly clear explanation might just be the better way to go.

After the thematic material was set, I decided for a structure. As mentioned above, this theme gave a lot of opportunity for interesting reharmonisations so I wanted to use this potential. I generally love brass chorals so this was part of the decision to include one and the string ending was just another reharmonisation that I felt was fitting. So in broad structures we have a rather classical "main theme" structure for the first half of the piece:

Intro - A A B A A

followed by the brass chorale and the soft string outro.

In fact as we had so little time to record that piece, I had a plan B to end it before the brass chorale if we wouldn't get to that part which would have structurally worked as well but of course with the "epilogue" it gets way more multi dimensional so thankfully we managed to record that as well.