Monday 9 March 2015

The Refinery

Today was my first chance to present to the composition seminar class in a month! Its hard to believe, but between midterm break and Kiwanis, a whole month has flown by in which my piece in progress has only been heard by myself and Dr. Ross. Needless to say, I was quite excited to finally have some feedback from the class on my concert band piece after all this time.

I now have the piece roughly finished and it is 5 minutes and 4 seconds in duration, just barely fitting the regulations. I've approached working on this piece in a sort of headlong charge to the finish to prevent myself from second guessing too much, seeing as I'm working so far out of my comfort zone... but now it is time to begin refining and expanding on the material that has already been written. Most of the comments I received today were suggestions on some ways I could go about doing that, as well as some things to take in consideration as I proceed.
As far as percussion is concerned, I have at this point only written parts where I saw them absolutely necessary to the development of the piece, and these parts were all battery percussion and timpani. I was given lots of great ideas for other percussion parts that I could use to fill out the texture, such as doubling flute lines in the glockenspiel in sections where they are somewhat buried, and using vibraphone in the quieter development section to help establish the mood.

The other big suggestion to help with my expansion came from Dr. Ross. He felt that throughout the piece there were a lot of great gestures, but that they were always cut short and rarely developed to their full potential. I can certainly see what he means by this, and I think developing some of these lines further will do a great deal to maintain interest and enrich the texture of the work.

Over all the class seemed to be enjoy what I had to offer today, which served both as a relief and as inspiration to keep at it. Hopefully by next week I will have the score filled out so that I can begin working on parts... but I did say that last week too, so I guess we'll see!

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