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.

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

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