Finally done

The first concert is done and I feel relieved that there is no more learning parts or stress of getting my score ready for my piano player to give him enough time to learn the part. I have defnitly enjoyed this expierence up until now, but as much as I would like to think that this is it for these pieces, I think there will always be something that I want to do more with them. I guess thats what being a musician and/or composer is about, always trying to make things better and clearly yours. I found for this project that coming up with ideas was not the hard part, I found the hard part to be the revisions. For examle the ending of my second piece refers back to the beginning and in class it was mentioned that it never fit, but finally I was able to tweak it and revise things so that it the ending made sense and was coherent. Again creating ideas was the easy part, but its taking these ideas, developing them and manipulating them is the hard part. Overall I was pleased with my three pieces I believe that I had three contrasting works, which is what I was going for and I believe that it showed off different characters of the vibraphone. I am interested in seeing what our next topic is so I can get started and create some more music.

A. Rideout

Character Piece #3

It took me a lot longer to write my third character piece, lots of ideas that were used and thrown away but at the end of the day, I was for the most part pleased with what I had. The time we spent discussing my piece was short due to the amount of time left in the class but there were enough comments to help me improve what I had already done. The big thing that had come up was a transition section that I had written. The peice from the beginning was building and growing until this section where it seemed to die to almost nothing but one note. The suggestions that were made to fix this were, after the build up, release the tension before the transition material. Also it was suggested that when I go back and fix the transition section that I don't leave it so light. Dr. Ross said he had some ideas for this section so I will go talk to him soon about changing this transition section.

My next step now is to start revising the material I have already written. It will be good to get back to looking at original material after taking a bit of a break from it, come at with hopefully fresh new ideas to improve what I already have.