Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Character Piece #2

After hearing the comments on my second character piece in class on Monday, I am left with lots of good comments and lots of ways to improve my piece. One important comment that came up from Dr. Ross is too expand on the b section that I have written; where I start to have 16th notes. I agree with this comment and my plan is too expand and add some variations to this section. Another comment brought was, what would it sound like if I references the beginning material at the end. I have thought about this and I think I am going to try doing this, hopefully give this piece a coherent ending. There was also conversation about the speed of the fan on the vibraphone. I definitly want to use the fan in my piece but I need to decide on a fan and how I should approach the performance aspect of the instrument and the fan. I have lots of things to think about and change and I am excited to make all my changes and try to make my composition better.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Blog for week 1 and 2!

This is going to be my blog entry for weeks 1 and 2, and then from now until the end of the semester there will be a blog posted weekly.

The idea of writting in an atonal frame is a new idea and a new concept to me, before, I had only put my time into tonal music. Because of this I found writting my chord progression difficult to write. After spending a large amount of time working out chords I had finally made my 15 chord progression which I thought was great. There were lots of great comments made in class about my progression, comments that were going to help the progression to become even better. I had to change one chord because it was enharmonically spelt as a very normal, tonal chord. I also changed a few other chords because a comment was made in class that a few chords sounded the same and had very similiar tension levels. I wanted the rise of tension to be steady and coherent but I didn't want the chords to sound similar. These comments were great and helped my progression grow into something better.

I finally presented my first piece in class today. I was pleased with the work I had done and I was happy with what I was going to present. After playing down through it, I had some very useful comments that will influence my piece. One of the comments that was made was that there was one part where the vibraphone and the piano finally played in unison and created a very cool spot in the disjunct piece. The comment was that it would be nice to have more of that, but at the same time another classmate wondered if I were to do that again would it ruin that one special moment. Another comment Dr. Ross gave was to play around with registers and to see what kind of cool things could come from changing registers. I was very happy with my piece and I know that the comments that were made will help my piece. My plan now is to put these comments into my action and try them out.

A. Rideout