(27/03/2020 – forgot to publish and left it in my drafts….) Again, it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update but with the strike action/current end-of-the-world issue I think it’s acceptable (hopefully). So currently, I finished the piece for the (now-cancelled) SCO workshop and looked over the piece with Suzie. I’ll use this post to mainly reflect on my compositional approach to the piece, and also touch on potential ideas for the assignment now.
Composing Is Hard
I’ve said this before, and will probably say it forever, but composing is hard. I know in my bones that I’m not a virtuosic composer and that a lot of my more ‘successful’ compositions come from happy accidents or me working insanely hard, rather than just having this natural ‘talent’ for churning out scores. Despite really enjoying the pieces I listened to/studied in my previous post, and referring back to them often and looking at what originally drew me to them, I found myself feeling uninspired/unimaginative. I think it was because I still hadn’t decided what it was that I actually wanted to achieve with this workshop/piece. So instead of being smart and solving that issue, I avoided working on the piece for a while and then felt rushed because I had left it a little late to start, and still hadn’t decided exactly what it was I wanted to achieve. I ended up writing a short, simple, and pretty boring piece just so that I had something to hand in. I worked primarily on Cubase, even though this was something I said I’d try to avoid. The whole situation wasn’t ideal, but at least I finished something? I plan on just scrapping this piece and not using it for the next submission, but I don’t think the piece was a complete waste of time because my tutorial with Suzie was insightful. Her main comments were regarding specificity, and that because the piece was so simple, I should take advantage of the fact that the players will easily be able to pay more attention to the finer details, rather than trying to get it under their fingers. Being more specific was one of the points I made in a previous post when looking at the In Digesetion piece, and I did want to try and implement more specific notation into my own works. Although this is not on the same scale, it’s a step in the right direction. This mess of a process has hopefully been a learning experience, and I’ll try to avoid being in this situation by making a PLAN or LIST OF THINGS I WANT TO ACHIEVE before I even attempt to start composing. And if I don’t have a plan, I’ll force myself to explore something new or something that I like.
Here we go again
For the next submission I’m not sure what I really want to do. Part of me wants to wait and see what my feedback is like and gauge how to go about it from that. The other part of me knows that it’s better to start sooner rather than later. I’m not particularly fussed about marks, or I’m trying to convince myself that that is the case, but I’m sure it’ll impact my ideas for the next submission in one way or another.
After todays session, I am quite interested in writing an aleatoric piece. Letting go of control and seeing how things pan out in the moment is something that I’m trying to do more in all of my music, and the pieces from the session today reminded me of this. I’ve done quite a lot of writing for strings recently so I think it’d be a good idea to change it up and try and write something for winds and brass. Brass is another category of instruments that I’ve often avoided because using them effectively is something I find quite difficult. The only way to get better is to do it though, so maybe a chamber wind ensemble or concert band piece? The worry with concert band is that whenever I think of them, I think of big cheesy wind band pieces or arrangements of movie scores. There’s nothing wrong with that – I used to LOVE playing and conducting wind band during my undergrad, but I don’t know if I could, or if I even want to, write something like that. I’m back to the point where I’m struggling to know if I should arrange or compose an original piece. I think for the things I want to explore, composing an original piece is probably a better option, but I feel like I’ve missed an opportunity to give arranging a go.
Instrumentation and Timbre 