Finished (for now)

My final cliché piece is essentially finished. It works well in the structure I have it in for now, though the class collectively felt that one particular idea could have been developed more. I agree completely, as about halfway through the piece there is an abrupt tempo change and a harmonic shift that lifts the piece to a climactic level, only to fall back to the original theme 8 bars later. I like the idea of having a very short and completely contrasting idea, but the piano figure I came up with begs to be developed more. I will leave it for now as the concert is days away, but I have grown fond of this piece and I intend on working with the ideas some more later on.

I started this piece with the intentions of pushing myself in a different direction, and although I acheived this in some ways, it still contains some tendencies that I would like to get away from. The first minute or so is based on a repeating phrase based around a 4-chord progression, and the rest of the piece is very closely related to this material. My musicial ideas are most often loop-based, in that the end of an idea flows right back into the beginning of it as it repeats x number of times before I decide to take it somewhere else.. This is perhaps due to my influences from minimalism, or loop-based electronic music - two genres I listen to regularly. I feel I am strong at this approach to composition, because I am used to keeping loop-based things intersting through rhythmic variation, addition of new melodies/textures, etc... but it almost always happens when I'm writing without me even trying. I hear some compositions that have no trace of repetition, they are constantly growing and changing direction, yet they still maintain that sense of unity that is so easily created when I loop an idea over and over. I don't know if I'm taking the easy way out by writing such repetative music, but either way, next time I want to try to achieve a coherent structure that isn't so dependant on repetition.