New post, new piece.

A couple of weeks ago I began to write my second piece of the term. It is for trombone quartet and is meant to be an overture to a story that I've come up with about pain and healing. The story is about a man who has a deep love and respect for the ocean who decides to set off one day on a boat and live on the water. After a while, a storm picks up and destroys his boat leaving him clinging to a piece of debris. At this point he has lost his love for the sea and feels deceived and betrayed. Over time though, he comes to peace realizing that it's not the fault of the sea, because it has a life of its own, so to speak. He realizes that nothing is permanent and that when a storm comes along the only way to weather it is to have the right mindset and to accept that there is no changing the past and move on. Upon realizing this, his love and respect for the sea returns and he decides to give himself to it by letting go of the debris and drowning himself in it.

It's a bit of a dark story but I think that there is a lot of beauty and a lot of truth in its darkness. I guess the trick for me is to capture that in music.

ECM+comp 4100 piece = MC2(squared)

On the 17th of November six of the ECM members who were in the city on the Generation 2010 tour were kind enough to read through our pieces for us. It was nothing short of incredible to hear my piece played live by such high calibre musicians. And they were sight-reading! That blew me away.

Overall, I was fairly pleased with how it went. Everything came across the way that I'd hoped it would. The only thing that I would change is the piano part at the very end where the pianist is to sweep the strings inside the piano with their hand. This lacked the punch that I was going for and made the ending fairly anti-climactic. That said I could also make a note in the score asking the pianist to dig into the strings to get a really raucous sound but I'm not sure what exactly I'll do.

Despite this one little hitch (which was totally a compositional issue, not a performance one) the reading of my piece went excellently. What a treat!

Captain's Log November 14th, 2010

Well, it's been quite the while since my last post and a lot has happened between then and now.

When I last posted I was just launching into the B section of my piece. This consisted of a pedal G# in the piano and some pseudo-pointillistic flute licks. These were combined with sweeping upward arpeggios in the piano hinting at the windy sort of atmosphere to come which was essentially the goal of my B section.

Following this I brought back the A section material in a contrapuntal texture with the flute, viola and horn with the percussion commenting here and there. Though this was a return of the A material, I did my best to vary it even further than before. One of the ways that I did this was I derived a couple of chords from the A section pc set and planed those chords on a newly composed melody. I also played fragments of the A theme creating melodies from the fragments beginning on different pitches.

From there I created my C section which was where I created the chaotic, windy atmosphere. I wanted this section to be in very strict time in order to contrast the lack thereof in the rest of the piece. Thus the chaos brings order. This section is composed of steady, quiet bass drum hits underneath a texture of sweeping upward runs beginning in the piano but quickly joined by all of the other instruments one by one. As the chaos and dissonance grows the rhythm falls apart until the various voices drop out one by one leaving just the bass drum signifying the "slow heart".

Overall, I'm fairly happy with the piece and am very much looking forward to hearing it in real life and not through the MIDI playback on sibelius.