Gestures

The gestural composition techniques have been present in the music of many
composers since especially the beginning of the 21st Century. In order to approach
this topic, I’ll do in this essay a brief analysis of one of my pieces.
Metamorphosis is the third of a group of solo piano pieces called “Seasoning”.
The four pieces that has this work are based in different ways on four of the
pieces that are included in Tchaikovsky’s “Seasons”. I decided to use in each of my
pieces a different compositional style and for this one I chose a gestural
approach.

The compositional process of my piece was based on analyzing the gestures that
Tchaikovsky’s September has and transform or metamorphose them into a
modernist language. Now let’s examine every one of them.
 
 

 
Fig.  1

On the first five measures of Tchaikovsky’s piece we find two gestures: a figured
pedal note and the juxtaposition of two complementary rhythms. (Fig. 1). These
same two gestures, as it can be seen of Fig. 2, form also the first two units1 of my
piece.

Fig.  2

                                                                                                               
1  Since  no  barlines  have  been  used  on  the  piece,  I’m  going  to  refer  to  each  “happening”  in  the  

piece  as  a  unit.  

The next three bars from Tchaikovsky present a clear increase of tension by
means of the next features:
• The register of both hands but especially on the right hand moves up.
• A new element appears, as it the chromatic line on the left hand, and it
suffers already an evolution from a syncopated half-note rhythm to quarter
notes.
• The reinforcement of the syncope with the accents on the left hand.
Until this point we had a continuous, fast movement in both hands, while here the
left hand takes deeper breathes with those syncopated, “long” notes.
In order to represent all this characteristics in my music, I started with long
chords in a piano dynamic to represent Tchaikovsky’s “long” notes. In my piece
the change of register occurs in these chords and, contrary to Tchaikovsky, it goes
downwards. Every statement from them is finished with a note/chord in forte
dynamic, which every time is more dissonant and preceded by more grace notes,
which are chromatic. In Fig. 3 are marked the parallelisms between both pieces
using different colors.

Fig.  3

The next gesture to bring out from Tchaikovsky’s piece is the descending
successions of notes that start taking over both hands. The intensity and tension
is increased from here on until the end of the first section of the piece. Here it’s
shown in Fig. 4 the beginning of it.

Fig.  4  
I represent that in my music with two different units. First, with a rapid
succession of descending glissandi (Fig. 5), which also work as a culmination of
the previous unit. Then, with descending scales, which grow up on speed and
volume, formed by minor 2nd clusters. This unit, whose beginning is shown on
Fig. 6, ends with a new and short statement of the first unit. This works as a
parallelism with Tchaikovsky’s piece, where his descending lines bring the music
to a new statement of the initial thematic material.

Fig.  5  

Fig.  6  

The second section of Tchaikovsky’s piece is totally contrasting with the first, in
the way that it keeps a long time in a piano dynamic and the sonorities are much
shorter.
The section begins with a second thematic idea mostly in legato (Fig. 7a), which is
accompanied by a contrasting, staccato texture. Then, this staccato texture takes
over and by means of both ascending and descending progressions brings the
music to the powerful second thematic element of this section (Fig. 7b).

Fig.  7a  

Fig.  7b  
The gesture that we see in Fig. 7a is represented by the first unit of the second
section of my piece, as shown in Fig. 8a. The transition until the second thematic
idea in Tchaikovsky’s piece is represented by means of ascending tremolos in my
music. This brings us to the climatic point of the second section of my
composition, where the elements shown in Fig. 8a are represented.

Fig.  8a  

Fig.  9  

Fig.  8b  

The second section on Tchaikovsky’s piece ends with a climatic, retransitional

passage, which is represented in my piece freely by a huge glissando that goes
through every key of the piano (Fig. 9).
Then we find an exact recapitulation in Tchaikovsky’s music. Instead of the doing
the same with my music and taking into account that my piece is gesture-based, I
decided to resume this whole exact recapitulation with simple, last statement of
the first unit of my piece (Fig. 10).

Fig.  10  

Jose Luis Gómez Aleixandre

BMus in Composition - Sibelius Academy