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.