Exhaustive

After finishing the scores to send to the ECM, and many sighs of relief, I began to reflect on the process that was composing this piece. The realization came to me a little late that notes weren't enough. Pitch and rhythm don't make music. In fact there's music out there that disregards both (maybe not so much rhythm, but pitch). So what does this leave us with?

Expression
mood
gesture

The discovery of this came after the fact that most of my piece was completed. But I now know and see how much a gesture can effect the music that precedes and proceeds it. It has so much to do with the mood and the tone established, that the notes are not as important, and with these things we get closer to what we want to convey....musicality.

I now feel silly looking back on my other compositions with how little direction I have given the performers. I am thankful that my works were not performed by robots and that the performers were able to interpret what they thought I had wanted instead of play the expressionless notes that I had written. My intent has to be in the score, and every note needs direction, a way to help determine the phrase.

If nothing else, I am happy to have had this experience if for nothing else than to realize the amount of detail I was neglecting in my composition.

Stuck Like A buck in a truck

Many times when composing things will be going great until the section I'm working on ends, or an idea just runs out of steam. That' s where I am now. My ideas in the way they are presented have got me in a bind. I feel like I am in a creative bind and I don't have the problem solving skills to get me out of this bind.

Normally when I'm in this position, I listen to as much new music as I possibly can and see the way in which those composers treat their material. The main things I listen for is not so much the way that they develop their ideas, rather the way they introduce new material, or use old material in a new way, and make the cohesion of this material with the material already present in the piece.

Presenting my work in class, it seems to be an attractive piece with good ideas, however I feel like my development of the ideas thus far, has been weak. If my piece were a buffet, I merely walked down the serving table and looked at everything, rather than took anything on my plate and ate it yet. I think this may be an interesting formal design, where I could spend the rest of the piece developing these ideas and concluding it. Or this could be a terrible idea, considering I am stuck and cant find direction, and I should probably go back and develop my ideas before leaving them so quickly.

What to do....what to do.....

Back to The Drawing Board

Starting off this project was a difficult task for me. With such an odd group of instruments, I was wondering what stylistically and sonically would work. Like every composition, starting an idea with promise is the hardest part (or at least for me).
For my main idea, I decided to base all of my material on what Schnittke does in his first string quartet and in other places of his music. Present a melody in a cannonic style and allow the melodic notes to form into the harmony. This idea in a way is a further development in counterpoint I guess, or at least it's a way of looking at it.

So I had this idea! Great! however, it took me a while to get running with it.
I Planned a form. I generated 2 themes and extracted multiple motives from this theme. I superimposed the motives over one another to make sure they make good counterpoint. But when it came down to it, I had no idea how to actually start this piece. I went through a good 10 trials before I just let go of the idea a little bit.

After letting go of that concept, Music finally started to happen. I just wrote out a rhythm I thought was pretty cool and expanded on it. My idea was in a way still present and able to be used later in the piece, however I'm going to follow through with this new motivic thing as long as possible.