Well it's back to the proverbial grindstone I guess. I worked on a couple of things over the winter holidays, but was fairly busy doing Christmas baking and cleaning and all those other quaint, godforsaken trivialities we obsess over to do much of anything. Needless to say it's great to be back at school and composing again.I have to admit I'm quite daunted by the second project....Writing for a full concert band? I'm definately going to have a look at some concert band scores and listen to some band music to get an idea of which instruments generally have which parts, and get myself used to the thought ot writin for so many people all the while remembering everything that I learned last semester about writing music. I'm coming to the realization that the composer's mind worked on about 63 different tracks and here I am, a person with a stubborn one-track mindset trying with a sad amount of concentration to pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time. These things just take practice though, and that's more or less what we're doing now...Except we have to show the results of our practicing in front of a class, and later, an audience. Eep.
I'm not too worried about the first project, though since it involves words like 'aleatoric' and functional harmony' which are almost as scary as words like 'omnibus' which, in my mind, sounds like a terrifying bus that's omnipresent and goes around eating people...Okay so I have an overactive imagination from time to time and that's what I do in theory class- I sit there imagining a bus that can be everywhere at once, eating people. No wonder I failed the first time around.
Anyhow, we've been asked to invent three atonal chords, make a scale out of those chords and then make up some melodies based on them, folowed by harmonies. I naturally started out by doing things all out of order- I made up a scale, based on the first four notes of a gypsy scale, starting on C. The notes went C D Eflat Fsharp, and then the same semitone/whole tone pattern was used for the nest four notes- G A Bflat Csharp. Then I made a chord progression out of those which sounds pretty nifty in places, but since that's not what we're supposed to do, I'll save it but not really use it...Ok, I probably will end up using it at some point because I like it, but we'll see.I ended up making three chords which I think (and hope) are atonal- they certainly sound wonky enough, and made a scale out of them. I started playing around with some melodies, which are pretty rough, but it's something at least.
Asking a class that has had a grand total of 5-6 months experience composing music to write for concert band is definitely quite mad (as in 'nuts,' not 'irate'), but I bet we'll get lots of fine new works for concert band composed as a result, and people will learn a lot in the process.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, the prospect of writing for a very large ensemble (like band or orchestra) is often less daunting to children — every now and then someone tells me about some kid who is in the process of writing such a work — perhaps in part because they don't know they ought to be afraid.
I think there is something to be said for that kind of mindset!