Tag Archives: Classical

Despair (2023), by Satis

In the past, I’ve used the category “Music I Love” to discuss music that has been particularly important to me over the course of my life. Anything from Mozart to Metallica, I’ve often mentioned the significance of their emotional response in me, or how it meant something at a particular time of my life.

This time, however, I’m changing it up slightly. While this post is intended to highlight music that is indeed very important to me, this time the music I’m discussing is … my own!

It may not have been made entirely clear to everyone over the course of my blogging tenure, but my background and education is in music, not writing – specifically composition. And in recent years, I’ve taken the time to reinvest in that old, forgotten passion, and write some new music.

Back in 2019-2020, I began thinking that I would like to write an album that blended the best of classical orchestration with the gritty heaviness of metal music (my two musical loves). As I began to experiment with different ideas, I realized that I could write something of a heavy metal symphony; nothing so pretentious as Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra, yet more focused and structured around the orchestra itself than something like Nightwish, whose music – whilst evocative and generally excellent – tends to be “orchestrated” metal. I was looking to write music that could only exist with both contrasting elements; remove one, and the other isn’t sufficient to carry the music alone.

And so was born Despair; a five-track, hour-long album of metal and orchestra, exploring themes of darkness and misery through music. It took a long time – over a year – to complete the first draft, and a year further to fine-tune the sounds, hone the orchestration, and get it to a standard where I felt it was publishable.

And whilst the follow-up, an album soon-to-be-released called Shade Under Trees of Longing, has (in my opinion) a far superior production, I am nonetheless proud to announce that Despair is now live and available to stream through all your favorite platforms: Apple Music, Spotify, iTunes, and more!

The Diminishing Returns of Practicing

They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something – chess, neurosurgery, piano, what-have-you. If you practiced your field three hours a day, that would equal roughly ten years. If, like me, you practice closer to 10 minutes a day, you might never actually master anything in your lifetime.

The thought occurred to me the other day as I was playing some Beethoven, and wondering why it seems so freaking difficult. I’ve been playing piano since I was eight, so by rights I should have crossed the line into mastery by now, but I most certainly have not. I achieved Grade 8 piano (a measure of skill in England, the highest grade for students there) at around age seventeen, and I would argue I’ve not improved much since then. I struggle to play simple pieces accurately, and I struggle to play difficult pieces entirely.

Now in fairness, I haven’t had access to an actual piano for the past 12 years since moving from England (a problem that I’m hoping to remedy this summer as we convert our garage into a music studio), and I’ve only had a fully-weighted, full-size digital keyboard for about six months or so. To that extent, it really means there’s been a huge gap in time in my ability to actually practice playing piano, and one could argue that I’ve probably regressed significantly in my performance ability.

Another component is my inability to recognize that I’m no longer as good as I used to be, and that it will take some time to get back to that place – never mind get better. I’m diving right back in to Mozart and Beethoven’s difficult piano sonatas, when I should probably be trying to learn a few newer, but easier, pieces.

Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling overwhelmed by this idea that there’s only so far practice is going to get me. I’m never going to be Alfred Brendel, or Glenn Gould, no matter how much time and effort I put into practicing. I feel like a hack, with a better understanding of technique than an ability to put it into practice. And ultimately, I feel like the returns of intense practice are diminishing, to the point where there really just isn’t much point; hours and hours of practice are going to result in smaller and smaller improvements in my skill, until the point comes where I simply will not get any better.

I fear I may already be there.

I don’t think this means I’ll stop playing piano altogether, because at the end of the day I enjoy the art itself, even if it’s just for myself. But whereas once I used to believe that I could play anything if I put enough time and effort into it, now I feel like there’s a hard limit to what I’ll ever be able to achieve. It’s not like this is my profession, or my academic career; I literally just play for fun. But maybe there’s a point where I have to recognize that certain pieces will forever be out of my reach.

Oh well.

For those of you who do a thing that requires practice – whether it’s a musical instrument, or a sport, or a job – what’s your perspective on practice? Do you think you can become the best in the world if you only practiced enough, or is there a point where you’ll be the best you can be, and no amount of further practice will significantly improve you beyond that?

New Music Is Available!

So … when I’m not writing, it seems, I’m writing music. Whilst The Redemption of Erâth has been on pause for a few months, I’ve been revisiting some music I created between 2019 and 2021 – an album of symphonic metal called Despair.

Recently, I upgraded the orchestral sample libraries I use, and re-recorded all five tracks of the album using EastWest’s phenomenal samples and sound engine. Whilst the final result may not sound exactly like a live orchestra, it’s (in my mind, at least) pretty damn close.

So without further ado, I present to you: Despair, a suite of orchestral heavy metal in five parts, channeling the deepest, darkest emotions of human nature!

1: Depression

Depression is the first track from Despair, opening with quiet strings and horns, building to crescendo before the crushing heaviness of the metal band comes crashing in. Segueing to a softer, melodic verse section, things eventually take off with pounding guitars and drums, intertwining a full orchestra through rises and falls until a heavier recapitulation brings us to the outro – soft and quiet again, building into a sudden wall of orchestral noise and a thundering drum punctuation that leaves on a cliffhanger, waiting for the next track.

2: Anger

Bursting in with furious strings and brass, Anger ups the pace and energy tenfold, a full orchestra blasting away until dropping out suddenly to allow for the metal band to take over with churning, grinding riffs. Never giving in to a slower beat, the song carries forward in a kind of scherzo-and-trio format, building to a climax before a middle section that leads again with devastating riffs, before recapitulating to the opening. Finally drawing to close with every instrument at full tilt, Anger is a crushing ode to unbridled fury.

3: Fear

Opening with a rumbling, unsettled bass line, Fear is deliberately the most disjointed piece of the suite, wavering between numerous time and key signatures throughout. There are moments of melody interspersed between longer passages of chromatic atonality, but the overall mood is one of anxiety and unsettled, indescribable fearfulness.

4: Grief

Almost entirely orchestral (the band comes in only briefly at the very climax of the piece), Grief takes us through a journey of pathos and heartbreak, with sweeping strings and devastating horn lines drawing influence from the raw emotion of the greatest of classical composers – Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and more. From the soft, distant opening to the thundering timpani that bring the song to a heaving climax of sadness, Grief will tug at your heartstrings and (hopefully) give you chills at all the rights moments.

5: Despair

The epic conclusion and title track, Despair opens with a hammering timpani roll and huge, crashing chords from the band and full orchestra – nearly a full two minutes of opening to a 20-minute track that winds through many layers of instrumentation before coming to a quiet close halfway-through, only to burst back into life with grand horns and strings sustaining the melody over churning guitar riffs. Through a varied development we finally return to a grand reprise of the opening, announced with a huge gong crash, before moving on to the closing of the song, and the album, with a revisiting of the very opening of Depression, bringing the full album to a close.