Entry 2.

I suppose it's about time that I do another blog entry, and since I should technically be in class right now, this is the best way to make up for my absence. I know, I should be in class, but for some reason after donating blood yesterday I woke up this morning feeling as though I was hit by a truck which isn't a nice feeling. Anywho, enough about that, it's time to get back on track and focus.

I presented the first draft of my piece in class on Wednesday, January 21 and took notes as comments were given.
- It sounds sort of like inspector gadget- I never thought of this while writing it, but I can definately see it now, and find that to be quite amusing.
- It's coherent and keeps the brain listening- this definately makes me feel good about what I have so far. We've discussed how hard it can be to follow atonal music sometime, but I'm glad that I can write atonal music while still retaining the listener's interest.
- The bells- nifty but should be used sparingly, and possibly use a vibraphone- This is an idea that I like more and more, and will be adding in to my piece. I think the bells will only be used when the text of the piece (Death, Be Not Proud by John Donne) calls for them.
- Consistant harmonic language- I decided to make the opening of the piece kind of like a fugue, in order to give it a type of form before I deviate away from that into the middle section, which is where the voice comes in. I know that the instruments have to more or less accompany the voice for the majority of it, which is why I gave them the beginning of the piece, to show them off rather than having them be in the background the entire time.
- Moniter the texture around the voice, use sparse activity in the background in order to keep from losing the text, but not necessarily by just making the instruments play softer. This will mean that I have to expirament with texture and layering and such, and make sure I don't let the instruments swallow up the sound of the voice completely.
- The voice has two functions- melodyc quality and the ability to express text. I'm hoping to do a bit of word painting with this piece, which should be fun seeing as I'm basing it off a poem with very vivid language and colourful descriptive words. The voice and the instruments should allow me to do this.

One thing that I've been toying with is using the vibraphone and piano in the background behind the voice (possibly the bass as well) while using the clarinet intermittantly, possibly fill in the silence between the lines of text. You know, because the vocalist has to breathe...Honestly though, all the demands that the voice has...(That's sarcasm, which doesn't translate through text well.) I was playing around with the idea of doing a sort of vamp in the piano while the vibraphone elaborates on top. I wrote a bit of it down in theory one day (I do try to pay attention in class, but when something like that hits me I have to take a minute or two to write it down, otherwise it'll be gone with all the other good ideas I've had that I didn't write down.) and have been toying around with it since then. It seems to provide a good backdrop upon which I can construct a vocal line which will be in the forefront without there being too much empty space in the background. I figured out that you can use a few instruments behind the voice, but the melodic interest has to be in the vocal part. A nifty way of doing this, I've noticed, is to repeat the same thing over and over in the background, making only minimal changes so that attention will be focused on the voice rather than the music in the background.

I'll just keep plugging away at it. Tomorrow's the 12 hour overnight Relay for Life, so I'll have 12 hours (minus the times where I'll be walking) to play around with this, and hopefully I'll have a lot to present next Wednesday.

Entry 1.

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.