1st Character Piece

For my first piece, I wanted to write something that was more upbeat than most of the other compositions I heard from my classmates. I took my ideas from a piece for trombone that I played last semester by Jacques Casterede. It is an atonal piece, and I really like the way it sounds, particularly its temporal and rhythmic aspect. It has a sort of cannonic feature; the piano more or less "chases" the trombone with the various themes in the piece, entering in stretto. I don't really think that my description does the piece justice, but I hope that you can get some idea of what I'm talking about. This thematic stretto effect is one of the things I was going for in my first composition. As for character, I originally was going for a "heroic" or "adventurous" character, however, that was somewhat modified in the end result. After playing the first few measures in class, I received some comments, one of which was that I should "thin out" the piano part a bit. There was a section the piano went through which had a lot of thick block chords, which made it sound really muddy. Really all I did was cut out a few notes in certain chords, and then cut out some chords all together. Not only did this make the harmonies sound clearer, it also added rhythmic interest with a hemiolic or syncopated effect - something which I used later in the piece. Another of the comments was that I had plenty of material in the few bars that I presented - enough to use for the rest of the composition. When I finished the composition, I didn't add any more material. Instead, I developed what I already had. To develop it, I took a small section of the piano "accompaniment" (the main melody was in the trumpet part), copied and pasted it, then transposed it, creating a sequence. I then composed a melody (also based on previous melodic material) to go over top of it. I then created a "climax section" based on an original idea I had in my original composition. It turned out to be a fanfare-like section. My classmates said it sounded kind of like StarWars (I took that as a compliment). I decided to develop this section a little as well. Once again using the copy and paste tool on my computer, I copied it and added some fast triplets to be triple-tongued in the melody (the trumpet player I was writing for, Heidi, requested that there be some triple tonguing). To finish the piece, I returned to the opening motive, with a small rit. I also got this idea from the Casterede piece, as his movements end in a way similar to this. This piece is not very long, however, I feel it is effective in its length. It is also significance to the title... but I'll talk about that in another blog!