This Is Where We’re At Right Now

So for this post I’ll briefly talk about last weeks’ lecture/thoughts, and then move onto this week.

The lecture last week was focused on ‘traditional’ string writing techniques and I actually found it super useful to just look so in depth at a score and see how each part is interacting with one another. Rather than trying to analyse harmonies, which is extremely useful but something I struggle with a little, it was nice to focus solely on textures and timbres in the piece and see why they’re effective. Studying scores is something that I’ve been neglecting recently so I’m planning to kick-start that back up again and look at one score a week (outside of lecture time), with a focus on interaction/movement/timbre.

This week we looked at less ‘traditional’ techniques for string writing. The score we looked at, In Digestion, was overwhelmingly detailed (in a good way). It was so fascinating to see how Shiori Usui not only notated and created the score for the piece, but to also see where the music was derived from and the depths she went to in order to accurately represent her initial idea. The specificity in the score was just incredible. I took a few things away from this session that I aim to incorporate into my pieces:

• Be incredibly specific!!!
• Pay attention to the little things
• Remember that you’re writing for real people – they need to breathe/switch positions, so give them time to do this!
• Think about physical gestures and how you want them to be played – and then notate this
• Don’t be afraid to draw
• Don’t be afraid to make notations up
• DO use notation if it already exists
• Add ‘reminders’ in the score if you can (e.g. if you specified a certain trill in the preface, you can also add this in brackets in the score – sometimes people forget things, but that’s okay!)

To round off the observations for this week, I’ll finish with what my intentions are for the first assignment. For now, I‘m planning on writing an original piece for string orchestra. I’ve really enjoyed writing for string quartets before, and have always wanted to ramp it up a little and write for a larger string ensemble. To prepare myself, I’ll start to study some string orchestra writing and probably ask for some recommendations too.

In the weekly tutorials we’ve been looking at score reductions, and it’s made me realise that my transposition skills are nowhere near as good as I’d like them to be. In fact, they’re pretty shoddy. I can get it done but it takes a ridiculous amount of time and several drawings of piano keys. BUT practice makes perfect, so I’ll also be trying to work through the tasks and hopefully I’ll start to see an improvement in the next few weeks.