2nd Character Piece

The day my second piece was played in class was certainly an eventful one. Earlier that morning, I met with Dr. Ross to discuss it. I told him that I had trouble with the amount of material I was getting, proportional to the time I was putting in at it (a topic which I've struggled with and addressed in other blogs). We talked about taking previous material and reworking it: stretching your ideas to make more music. Repetition of basic ideas is also important because of its function in setting up expectation in the listener. In order to introduce more repetition, I expanded the beginning section to just chord progressions in the piano in longer note durations. My most significant break through of the day was that when I went to Dr. Ross that morning, I probably only had about 20 seconds or so of music, but when I wento to composition that afternoon (to present my piece) I had almost 2 minutes of music - and only spent 40 minutes or so composing.

What I ended up with wasn't perfect, though. I had to add a transition from some of the new material I added. Other than that, it was pretty good.

On a totally different note, I got the idea for this piece in a very different way than the other pieces. The melodic motive I used actually came from the top voice of the original chord progressions I had to write. I was very excited when I discovered the beautiful melody, however, struggled when I went to actually write it. The problem was that with the melody I heard, I also heard a tonal accompaniment/harmonic progression. What I did to come up with the harmonies I used was go through the chords and pick out a few with a tone color that I liked, and served the function I was looking for (i.e. didn't sound final, but kept the harmonic momentum flowing). One thing I found when searching for the right chord was that the same chord served a totally different function when transposed. I found it was very helpful to have a predetermined harmonic palette (the progression which was our first assignment). It gave me somewhere to start and something to work with, which makes the process of composition a bit easier.