Blog: Life Near Death — Kimberly R. Osberg

*From a recent trip out to Mt. St. Helens—another way to contemplate what living near death can look like.*

Last week I turned in the “final” draft for my latest work, near death. Commissioned by Calypsus Brass Quintet, the piece is inspired by whale falls (for more on that, read my last post linked here) and is organized into 3 movements: fall, feast, and flourish. At 12’45”, this was among one of the more challenging projects I’ve had in recent years. I haven’t written much for brass-only ensembles, and this was definitely the most substantial work by far. It has been really gratifying to work with an ensemble that embraces that newness, rather than fears it, however—and I’m looking forward to seeing what the ensemble does with it!

That being said, I still anticipate the piece to develop and grow from here, and look forward to getting the first wave of feedback from players as they start to look at the music. I don’t know if everything from the excerpts I share here will work exactly as I plan, but I am excited to find out!

How Long Did This Take?

After getting this question a lot about my work, I’ve decided to include a brief segment in my future posts about the timeline for my projects! If this doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip ahead!

I have another job I work at for about 20 hours each week, so I have about another 25-30 I dedicate to composing tasks (writing/editing, teaching and running clinics, fulfilling orders, and having meetings). In early 2023, I met with Calypsus to talk about the piece - what kinds of things did they enjoy playing, what are some of their favorite techniques or gestures on their instruments, what do they hope is NOT in the piece, what do they love about playing together, etc.

I had a lot of projects over the spring and summer, but this project remained something in the back of my mind all that time. It was around June or early July I finally decided to pair the quintet with the whale falls idea (the idea itself which I stumbled on around April or May and had been instantly drawn to for a musical interpretation). I spent most of June and July wrapping up other projects so I could spend August only on this piece.

While I spent a long time thinking about this project, sketching out ideas, listening to other brass music, and researching different topics and images, I only spent about two weeks actually getting notes on a page. The writing itself started mid-August (around the 15th or so), and finished on September 1st.

The Music

While right now I’m not sharing MIDI of the work, I thought I’d share a bit of the score and talk about how I put the piece together!

fall

For fall, I really wanted to sit with the pain and loss we normally associate with death. The opening motive is meant as a sort of “whale” motif, and appears in various forms throughout the entire piece. The rich harmony and expansive voicing helps to give the motive a sense of great presence and depth, while the increasingly-truncated nature of its progression helps to both build tension as well as depict the shortening of the whale’s life.

*It was fun figuring out how to give the middle voices space while still maintaining the lush ebb and flow of this texture!*

At measure 7, the middle voices create a wave-inspired texture - leaving space for the tuba to play a mournful serenade below. The melodies in tuba and trumpet give way to a few ensemble chords before a sudden silence in m. 30 breaks the flow, gasping into a brief section of whale-like glisses and moans before settling back into the whale motive from the opening, now a few steps lower.

Some brief solos in the trombone and French horn give way to more gliss-moans before the final iterations of the whale theme return, now slower and longer each time rather than shorter. Each instrument sounds off in its lowest register, creating a sinister, somewhat primeval texture before settling on the final, throaty chord.

I thought of this movement almost as the ending to another piece—a great and mysterious titan falls to the ocean floor, taking so many memories and stories and years of life with it. Out of all the movements, this one deals most directly with a sense of profound loss, mourning, and despair. While these feelings are complex, this movement was built on a few pretty simple elements—providing a few clear and (hopefully) memorable ideas upon which the next movements will develop.

feast

After having a pretty clear idea of what I wanted for the first movement, I found myself a bit stuck moving onto the second. In this movement, we largely focus on the first few stages of scavengers and feeders that make the most of the fallen feast. I knew I wanted something aggressive and violent, varied and chaotic, but also a bit playful and lively. While there are definitely fights over the precious resources the whale body provides, there is also something beautiful about the way the deceased whale brings so many different species together.

*Where Malcom uses these chromatic trades to rip up the register of the trumpets, I use it more like an oscillating prowl.*

I was feeling a bit stuck, however, and decided to take one of my precious writing days as a listening day instead. I found myself drawn back to Malcolm Arnold, whose work I first stumbled on in my masters program. He writes a lot of very over-the-top, flashy music with a great sense of humor - if nothing else, I thought listening may reinvigorate me into a less lethargic headspace!

Upon listening, I found a few textures I really loved the sound of and copied them into my file to start playing around with them to make them better suit my own purposes. In measures 2-8 and similar sections, I loved the ripping trades Malcom achieved in the trumpets, but rather than making the line ascend I reworked the chromatic lines to weave up and down in smaller motions. The playful taunting gestures like in measure 26 and 27 were also a Malcomism I found fun to play with throughout the movement.

It was a really fun way to get my brain going again. It also struck me how doing this—taking some material I had heard in one piece and digging out small pieces of it for my own use—was not unlike how these deep sea feasters were taking their preferred pieces of whale with them. Just as these pieces of whale sustain and foster life, so too does other music build upon and flourish from what came before. An unanticipated but totally appropriate extramusical parallel born from writer’s block—hard to ask for a better outcome!

The movement ends with a piercing alarm of bell tones from the ensemble, ending with a giant chord before a quiet whisper of what’s to come in the final stage.

While this certainly takes the trumpets into the most extremes (and I may add an ossia staff for some lower voicing later on), the ugly, piercing sound is so appropriate - I probably wouldn’t even mind if it were out of tune!

flourish

After all the frenzied feeding in the second movement, I wanted to focus the start of this movement on stillness and space. There is still life after the big fish swim away, after all, but it happens in a much smaller, quieter way. The movement opens with a series of chords, stutters, and pauses before settling into a solo from the French horn.

From here, we still hear elements from the second movement, but returned transformed - harmonized in a different way (as in the case of the oscillating seconds) or put into a new context (such as the now-expressive use of the more chromatic sliding gesture used more aggressively/comically in the previous movement). At m. 32 we get a return of the whale motive, but now in regular repetitions instead of increasingly longer or shorter - a more solid base upon which to build to the new stage of life.

The cascading triplet-sixteenth gesture here is all indulgent bliss—legato and lyrical, still pushing forward. The silences return briefly, but with little of the stuttering that came before—and soon building back into the lush lyricism of before. This final push is meant as a triumph; life not only persists, but thrives. This flourishing happens in the wake of death, and the whale’s presence permeates all that came into contact with it—whether as a quick meal or as a long-standing harbor of shelter and food.

Wrapping Up

I’ve been spending a lot of time the last few months thinking about my work as a composer—what role does my work play in my life, and what role can it play in the lives of other people? Does the work I do bring anything positive to the people it comes into contact with? Can I use my work to help anything else I care about grow, develop, or be saved? Does this work matter?

*From a recent trip to the coast. I still have yet to see a whale in person since moving to the PNW, but I strongly believe it will happen someday!*

I’ve also been spending a lot time thinking about mortality, and it’s been weighing on me so heavily in recent months what it really means to only have “this one life,” as we know it. To think about what to do with that precious time. Our time isn’t like sand—it isn’t an incomprehensibly vast expanse. It’s more like a hole of seashells—we can’t see how many are left inside; all we can do is appreciate each one as it’s taken out and experienced. And maybe, sometimes, we find something meaningful to do with them.

I was just speaking to someone recently about music that gives and music that takes. I think listeners can tell the difference. Music that gives tries to share something—tries to share something that you’re excited about, or that you think others might be able to relate to in some way (maybe that’s a story or a feeling or even as simple as “this one sound effect is really cool and I think other people should hear it.)” Music that takes is always trying to get something from their listeners—it seeks validation over connection.

I think chasing “legacy” as it relates to prestige or accomplishment can be a kind of waste. But, to leave the world a place that has ripples of your love, your care, your passion, your interests—there’s something truly beautiful in that. Maybe what you leave is quiet, but that doesn’t mean it can’t lead to some flourishing anyway.

Thank you

If you’ve read this far, thank you for being here. More than ever I understand how precious and valuable time can be, and it means the world that you have shared some of yours with me.