Edgar Rescues the Damsel of Garstaang Tower

Many blog posts ago, going back perhaps 15 to 20 years, I wrote about a condition I had both invented and decided I suffer from: Salieri Syndrome. I have alternatively described myself as “praying to St. Salieri.” In days past, most people would have immediately gotten the reference, but as I sat down to write this post, I now realize that it’s a reference to a 41 year old movie.¹

That movie is Amadeus, a biographical drama (very) loosely based on the life of Mozart, and largely told by a fellow composer, Antonio Salieri. If you’ve never seen it, I strongly encourage you to watch it.² It is easily one of the best films made during my lifetime.³ The fact that a three-hour movie about classical music became such a pop culture sensation in the mid 80s (the height of MTV, Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson…) is testament to how good it is.

Edgar Rescues the Damsel of Garstaang Tower Ray Toler 1:35

The important bit of all of this is that in the story, Amadeus and Salieri are cast as rival composers in Vienna, which they sort of were. But Vienna, while impressed with Mozart, is largely tone deaf and more concerned with politics and gossip; the masses do not hear the genius, the “voice of God” in Mozart’s music.

But Salieri does, and he’s not happy about it.

The crux is that Salieri is just talented enough to hear how good Mozart is, but not talented enough to even approach that level. Salieri was actually more popular than Mozart at the time, but largely faded into obscurity⁴ And now you understand what’s behind my affinity for praying to St. Salieri: a lifelong battle with imposter syndrome.

The Struggle Bus

Today was an incredible struggle. The previous two days already had me wondering if I’d run out of steam for the month, and today only cemented that worry. Everything I started simply sucked. I think it may have been around 10pm when I finally started down the road that led to today’s piece.⁵ I used Spitfire’s British Drama Toolkit as a shortcut, which is actually the entire point of that particular library – it was developed by Christian Henson to help him write a vast amount of music for a BBC show he was scoring, but for which he had a nearly impossible deadline.

The library features a lot of gestures and phrases, cunningly woven together in various sections. You play a chord, and it sounds a lot more like real musicians were playing it with instructions to make small improvisations. I won’t call it a secret weapon tool, but it’s been quite inspirational over the years and is one of my favorite purchases from Spitfire.

And it sounded fine, but maybe a tiny bit thin. I looked for other things to throw into the mix. I ended up adding the second British Drama Toolkit library which focuses more on brass and woodwinds. Then I added some string swells. Then I added just straight strings to provide an anchor for all of this movement. All of these parts were playing the exact same thing, but they’re all different recordings, which provides variety. Finally, I threw a hastily-composed solo cello over it all and called it a day.

The Magician’s Code

Now, I recognize that if I weren’t writing these posts largely to help me get over future battles with Salieri Syndrome, telling you how I made this piece would be self-defeating. The final product is… fine. With just a little polish it would serve perfectly well as a film or TV cue. It could also be expanded into a much larger and longer piece if I chose to pursue that.

But this peek behind the curtains is for those of you⁶ who struggle with composition and are dissatisfied with your result, not because it’s bad in and of itself, but because you hear it as bad because you’ve got the good taste to know that you’ve heard better. Ira Glass calls this period “working through the suck,”⁷ and I’ve gotten to a level of competency where I can knock something like this out in less than an hour. The most time-consuming part of it (ignoring the rest of the day I spent flailing about) was selecting the particular sample libraries to use.

So why am I so dissatisfied with it? Maybe I’m not. It sounds fine to me with the benefit of a little time (and a good night’s sleep). Maybe my dislike was more for the process than the result. And while creating things can be a joyous experience, it’s often painful. Something’s not working. I can’t find the chord change. I can’t find the sound. I don’t know what to say.

But that’s why Song-A-Day is such an important exercise. The ticking clock pushes you. The onslaught of 28 consecutive days of writing quickly burns out all of that backlog you may have and forces you into the crevices of your brain, beyond any creative reserves you may have stored up. It helps you develop new tricks: steal a story from a book, write about your lunch without anyone knowing that’s what you did, turn the mundane into something beautiful just by filtering it through your mind.

I’ve now written over 1,000 words about a 95 second piece of music. And while the message is important,⁸ I actually think that maybe I’m writing this much as a way to not start my track for the 16^th. So I guess I’d better get to it.⁹

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

British Drama Toolkit (I and II), Olafur Arnalds Chamber Evolutions, Spitfire Chamber Strings, Spitfire Solo Strings

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Gullfoss

Notes

1
Or a 46 year old play, if you want to be pedantic. Or even more than that, as Amadeus was, itself, based on the 1830 play Mozart and Salieri by Alexander Pushkin.
2
Go for the theatrical release if you can find it.
3
Side note: younger folks who are currently raiding the 80s for hooks to steal from its superior pop music may be familiar with a song by Falco, also called Rock Me Amadeus. That song was part of the Amadeus-fever that gripped the world in the mid 1980s.
4
Ironically until Amadeus came out. He has enjoyed a bit of a revival since.
5
I think of it more as a sketch.
6
And future me.
7
If you’re a creative of any type, I cannot recommend this Ira Glass video enough. The entire series on Storytelling is great, but part 3 in particular has helped me the most.
8
I’ll stoop to repeating the grossly overused “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but…” trope
9
Yes, I realize I didn’t say a damn thing about the title. And I’m not going to other than if you have any idea where I got it, let me know. We likely have some interesting common ground.