Vastness was first composed as an instrumental piece, where I imagined walking/driving through an empty vast landscape somewhere noone had ever been before.
But then, when I was writing the ending of the piece, I started imagining a short lyric in my head and decided to include it as a sort of outro, talking about what I would have seen in the vastness of this landscape and how it makes me feel. I tried to give all the voices a similar weight in the role they played in that part.
In the intro for this piece (Example 1), I used the voices linked together with one other instrument as a percussive accent that transforms the repetitive eighth-note pattern into an ever-shrinking cycle that builds up in intensity through taking away one beat at a time from the accents.
I purposefully paired the voices with instruments not in a similar range as the vocalist themselves, as well as spreading the accents out in one octave, so the hit would be more recognizable in the recording (Voice 1 & Viola - red / Voice 2 & Guitar - blue / Voice 3 & Violin - green/ Voice 4 & Electric Bass - purple).
The usage of an alveolar stop seemed to make the most sense to me here when thinking about what I wanted the vocalists to sing. The "d", or sometimes an even harsher, almost "t"-sounding stop also helps accentuate those hits more.
There is a free double and electric bass solo (Example 2) in this piece, as well as a drum solo a bit later on (Example 3).
In the bass solo I wanted to use the voices in two different ways. The two lower voices (circled green and red) I paired with the clarinet and the alto saxophone, two instruments that fit the range of the two vocalists very well and would blend with the horns in a way that yone can almost not tell that there were voices included in these sections, except for the slight alternation of the color that adding a voice gives to the music, as well as again the percussive difference of the attack of "du" we used to voice these hits.
The two higher voices I paired together as a single section (the concept of these backings was always two instruments playing in unison, creating a wave of C's and Eb's throughout the whole range of all the instruments I used (from bass trombone linked with tuba to oboe linked with flute). This tiny vocal-section is circled in blue.
Later in the piece during the drum solo, I composed another set of backings, this time with the least amount of structure possible. Still having paired the same instruments together, I wrote the pairings on small pieces of paper and pulled them out randomly for every eighth note during the solo, one after the other. This way, another - kind of more chaotic - wave of random C's and Eb's emerges during the already quite chaotic drum solo, giving the whole section a very unruly and insecure feel. The two top voices are still clearly discernible on top as a section though.
