III

This week I played a revised version of my third character piece. I would describe the piece as frantic.. noodly.. driving.. and quite silly at times. It makes me laugh, so I think that's a good thing.

It was mentioned before that the piece worked as a short work, but could stand to be even twice as long. I added some repeats/variations, and extended some sections, and it definitely works even better now. It is still less than two minutes so it doesn't lose the concise quality I was going for.

There is a repetative ascending 4-note figure that occurs a lot throughout the piece. It is used as an accompanying figure and also as a transitional figure, though in a couple of transitions it sounded kind of awkward and I knew it was also a bit tricky to get to the next part technically. Simon suggested something that I think should have been obvious to me, and that was to extend the 4 notes to keep ascending and take off at some point, rather than repeating. I immediately incorporated this idea, and the transition now sounds better, and runs very smoothly into the next section when it comes to the piano fingering (thanks, Simon!).

There was another section that is a direct repeat but modulated down a perfect fourth.. I thought this may have been enough variation, but a comment was made that it should be even more different.. I agree, and there are definitely some nuances I can spice up within the section to achieve this.

Anthony Braxton

I chose to reflect on the article about Anthony Braxton’s latest approach to composition, because I have always heard a lot about Braxton without ever checking him out. I am a big fan of his son (Tyundai Braxton), whose recent projects are praised for combining rock and electronic elements in unique ways. I had always heard that Anthony was a well-regarded jazz musician, but had no idea how unique and extensive his different approaches to composition were.

This article is about his latest series of compositions entitled “ghost trance musics”. In the start of the interview he speaks of his past experimentation with schematic musics, coordinate music, serialism and other 20^th century techniques, hieroglyphics and colour and dance in music – this is clearly someone always looking forward, so I am itching to hear what this latest project actually sounds like. While I think I would have to read this article 4 or 5 times to fully understand what it is Braxton is trying to achieve with the ghost trance music, I took away enough to be greatly intrigued.

His inspiration comes from ghost dance music of Native Americans, which was used to spiritually unify them with their ancestors, as well as trance musics of Europe, Persia, and Africa. He speaks of using the music as a tool, or a body of information, looking to “unify large and small time spaces”. It seems to me that he is taking a mentality that arose with minimalism – that music didn’t need to be about melody, it could be about texture or repetition or the concept of time in music or any number of things – and taking it to the next level. He drops other boundaries by stating that instrumentation is more or less irrelevant and that the participation of a “friendly experiencer” along with the designated musicians will help achieve his goal.

Again, he is relatively vague when describing technical aspects of the music.. it’s always analogies and explanations of what he is trying to achieve structurally, or what he is trying to provoke in the listener, etc. So I have no idea what to expect as far as what it actually sounds like, but I am now extremely curious. So I guess this was a very effective article.

Blog #4

I was away this past week and missed a lot of time I would have spent working on my pieces, but I managed to get something together anyhow. I was stuck for hours in the editing/re-writing phase of my second piece, so decided to leave it for the time being and try to get a start on my final piece.

I knew that I wanted to have a typical "finale"-esque third piece, so as to be exciting and climactic in the set of 3. I knew I wanted it to be fast, busy, unpredictable in accents and time signatures, and incorporate some themes from the previous 2 pieces (certain chord changes and rhythmic figures).

Many of my chords were very spaced out in their initial voicings, so I put most of them in their prime form and played around with stepwise single note patterns to see if I could get a starting point. Once I had a good progression going, the phrases and sections kind of constructed themselves within a couple of hours.. certain chords I instantly knew to sit on for a bit longer, others I knew I wanted to occur very loud for a brief period of time, etc. My atonal progression seemed a lot easier to work with when I stripped it down to single-note play with all notes very close in register.

Due to time constraints I didn't get a whole lot of feedback today in class, also probably because the performance was under-prepared and sight-reading a fast, unpredictable piece is quite challenging. There was the comment that many of the ideas could potentially be developed more, which I agree with, but I think this piece moreso than my other two would be effective if kept quite short. The different ideas within it all seem to flow in and out of each other quite fluently, so rather than extending or coming up with new material (because there is a lot packed into about 1:30 already) I may just toy around with structuring/repeats of certain parts to see if I can make it a bit longer while retaining its concise quality.