So What’s The Plan?

At the moment I’m not entirely sure what I want to focus on for this course. One the one hand, I’d love to learn how to arrange music. It’s something that I’ve only briefly touched upon in the past and feel like it’s an incredibly useful skill to have. On the other hand, I identify as a composer and love writing original work.

Currently, I’m leaning more towards the arrangement approach. Mainly because I know that in the video game music community, you can often land some jobs arranging other popular tracks for albums or standalone releases. Materia Collective are renowned for their arrangement albums and often popular scores are arranged for piano too, so learning how to tackle this kind of thing would be useful (I hope).

But at the same time I feel like these arrangements wouldn’t necessarily be coinciding with the brief. I’m not sure if they’d be fully exploring timbres and instrumentation, but then again maybe I could make them do that? I feel like the easier (maybe not the right word) way to fully explore these things would be to write original works that aim to exploit the potentials of instruments. Plus I’m thinking about the workshops we have with the ensembles. I feel like it’d be more appropriate to write new music for them because of their particular instrumentation.

So at the moment, I’m not sure what the plan is. I need to do some more research and possibly have a meeting to discuss these thoughts and figure out what the most appropriate choice would be.