#3

I have an idea started for my third piece, and Andrew Staniland + class helped me with some great suggestions of how to finish it. It is a very driving piece, mostly straight 16th notes with lots of open sounding intervals/sustain pedal, meant to be very washy at times, but also very rhythmic. I am trying to keep the driving feel throughout, but changing the rhythmic emphasis as harmonic changes occur so as to keep it interesting.

Some suggestions: m.4 has an accompanimental figure of simply 5ths and 8ves, with a pretty melody on top.... taking those melody notes and fitting them into the accompaniment gives the part a lot more color! something to keep in mind if similar figures occur
- a lot of 3+3+3+3+3+3+4 and such rhythms occur (in 4/4), I could come up with some sort of numerical system to decide the rhythms OR the intervals for me
- the idea of a "blur" at some point in the piece, where so many notes are played very fast and loud, with the sustain pedal all the way down (maybe moving up a chromatic scale), and then slowly lifting off the pedal to reveal the original theme in a new key area. I think this will sound great in the context of what I have so far!

As with most of my pieces, I'm going to keep the rhythmic element a very key component in the compositional process... I now have lots of ideas on how to do this!

Newfound Music

I always enjoy Newfound Music day, and the concerts that accompany it. This year was particularly enjoyable!
The two presentations that I chose to write about were "Inner Space/Outer Space", a presentation about the Sound Symposium, and Derek Charke's presentation on "Sound Ecology".

I am vaguely familiar with the Sound Symposium, and it was great to get an inside scoop of 2008's festival. I've attended several and even performed in some "Night Music" events at the Ship, which are sponsored by the Sound Symposium, so I knew that sound spontaneity, improv, and new approaches to music and art are the basic approaches involved. 2008 had a theme related to geographic locations, how they can affect sound, and the way we perceive it. Concepts such as a "sight-specific" piece (where the composition was intended to be executed at a certain place and certain time), and an individual's "sound biography" (referring to all the sounds one has heard in their lifetime, and the emotions and memories we then associate with such sounds) were new concepts to me. Watching several performers set up experiments of music in strange locations, or having pieces entirely dependant on the participation of the audience were interesting as well.

The idea of Sound Ecology was very intriguing to me as well. I've done a fair bit of processing and messing around with recorded guitars/percussion that I do at home, and in electronic music class last year, some other random noises I created... but capturing the wide array of sounds that occur in nature and using them as a basis for a composition was something I had never thought of. Taking the crunch of someone walking through hard snow and looping it to create a driving rhythm sounded amazing, and layering this all to a tape and then playing flute over it was something Derek did in some of the concerts.. GREAT STUFF!

#2

I received more helpful suggestions for my second piano piece. I'm not entirely sold on my harmonic material, I was mostly trying to organize a fragmented rhythmic approach into a cohesive structure. I think I achieved this, and it was said that this piece worked in its short length. That said, there are a few key musical events that could have went on slightly longer to further emphasize what I was trying to do with them:

The first page jumps between 2 ideas, and each idea is often displayed in a slightly altered manner, such as having 1 less beat or 1 more beat in the measure. Other than slight rhythmic variations, the only other changes are in register. Some felt this should be expanded in length a little bit, and in doing so I could add some more interesting notes, since I felt the harmony here got a bit stale after a while.
Later in the piece there is a more open-sounding section, which could easily be expanded some more and would make more sense if it were slightly longer, especially if the first section is expanded.

Piano I

I received very helpful feedback in today's class. My piece was composed in its entirety yesterday (all 20 measures of it..), so it hadn't really settled with me, and I was unsure of what to do with it next.

Several aspects that people liked were pointed out, and in most cases, they felt could be developed a little more. These included:
-play the recurring grace-note melody in LH as opposed to RH.. or just try moving it around in register
-develop the idea of hitting a low register note/chord fortissimo, followed by a long single-note melodic phrase. More specifically, having multiple big bangin' chords/notes before the melodic phrase kicks in... keep the listener wondering when the motive will finally come back!
-develop the 2-voice contrapuntal texture that enters near the end of some of the phrases
-develop the more open-sounding arpeggiated accompanimental figure (holy mouthful) that doesn't appear until the last few measures

I like all these ideas, but above all, what struck me most was when Dr. Ross said that what I had so far felt like a very good "introduction". and I agree.. I like the flow of the material I have so far, I think it sits on certain ideas for just the right amount of time, but it does seem to be setting the listener up for more. The arpeggiated accompaniment figure comes in near the end, and if I wanted it to, could really go on and take the piece to a more concrete and open sounding middle section. So I think I'll do just that... start by developing that figure, see where it takes me, and try to incorporate all the other suggestions within the new material that I will base on the pre-established motives.

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