Wednesday, November 25, 2009

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.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Clavé

So, a lot has happened since my last blog. I spent countless hours toying around with new areas for my wonky waltz to go, only to get extremely frustrated and scrap the whole thing. I definitely liked some of what I had going with it, but the obnoxious/silly vibe was exhausting my patience. I felt like I was falling into a lot of things I always do compositionally, and I decided I wanted to push myself in a different direction.

I am very rhythmic-minded, in that I am stimulated by rhymically-driven music, and my writing is usually driven by rhythm. With this I decided to take the typical Clave rhythm and use is as the basis for my cliché piece. Since it is often heard amongst several percussive instruments playing energetic latin-based music, I thought it would be interesting to incorporate it into a softer and more subdued piece of music. What has evolved so far is a simple, pleasant piece of music that I find very easy to digest. It is a bit more repetative than I would like at this point (one of the things I always fall into), but I'm happy with the overall scope of what it seems to be settling into. The melodic lines and rhythmic interplay between piano, violin, cello, and a variety of percussion instruments sounds great to me through the MIDI playback.. let's hope it carries over to THE REAL WORLDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

wonky waltz

For my composition that incorporates a musical cliché, I decided to use a i-V progression in a waltz feel as my cliché. My goal was to make it obnoxious and silly within the familiar i-V territory, while still being clever and creative both harmonically and rhythmically so that it doesn't become too cliché. As of now I have an introduction that flows and builds quite nicely into the A section of the piece, and a couple of short ideas of where to go next. Although I incorporate some unexpected harmonies in my first few ideas (I+, V+, use of a whole-tone scale), I was looking for ways to go further away from the cliché as the piece went on. Some suggestions last class helped a great deal in this regard.
Rhythmically, some ideas presented to me were: use of hemiola, dropping/adding beats (11/16 as opposed to 3/4, for example). I think these will be essential in taking the music to new, interesting territory. The constricted rhythmic feel of a waltz can get old pretty fast, so I imagined opening up in the next section... perhaps playing around with longer chord progressions as opposed to just alternating between 2 chords, or using a more sustain-heavy texture to get away from the staccato I presented in the early material... basically just getting into less familiar and cliché material, and different rhythmic approaches will undoubtedly help me achieve this more effectively.

Instrumentation is also something I need to reconsider.. piano+oboe+violin could create some balance problems, so I'm thinking about going either with a piano trio, or maybe piano+2 woodwinds, or piano+2 brass, or piano+woodwind+brass... I CAN'T DECIDE