i will wade out

So this piece took a long time to figure out in my head...like I posted earlier the Eric Whitacre version is so good and captures the feeling so well it was hard to find something new and different to say. But the poem is so beautiful and deep that I really tried my best to bring out the natural beauty of the text. I did some very different things than what i usually do. There's a lot more tonal shifting than I usually do, with a few really dramatic harmonic shifts. I'm really trying to expnad my musical language and this was just another step. I'm pretty happy with my work, and it can be found posted first on my myspace music page.

Frustrations

I'm trying to write a new choral piece, based on e.e. cummings poem "i will wade out" and it's frustrating as hell because all I can think of is Eric Whitacre's setting. I've already documented how much admiration I have for the man, but not only that, he does things with his music that are just so intrinsic to what I feel the lyric he's chosen needs. Like he just pulled out the most beautiful sounds of the text already, and I'm left with the leftover sounds. I love this poem though, so I'm mining the depths to see what I can draw from it.

Pieces and Twitter

I've been writing bits and pieces a bunch lately. I have a million ideas but not much that I can follow through with. If you've been following my twitter, it's been a cool resource for on-the-fly thoughts I'm, having. I do need to post here more, but I can't really report anything especially new musically. I'm having trouble writing instrumental parts (piano, etc) and I'm not really in a place where choral music is flowing freely.

Second December Choral work: i thank you God

So I've taken one of my favorite poems (plus one I've already set for voice and piano) and produced a version for SATB (8-part splits at the end) with some interesting metrical things. I'm trying to expand my horizons a bit when it comes to rhythm and meter, since for the longest time i wrote everything in 4/4 with no changes in tempo or anything. I really wanted to concentrate on the melodic and harmonic aspects of my style. Now I really feel that I have a "sound" that I like to write, and I can expand upon it further by doing interesting things with rhythm and texture and the other things that make music so wonderfully diverse. A lot of the themes are common between both versions I've written, but this version is much broader, trying to play with subtle shifts in texture to highlight the textual things I find important or interesting. The tenor and alto lines are really important to me in this piece...they weave back and forth and I really explore the different colors both of the voices can make. There are definitely some things that will probably be changed as I come back to the piece later, but for now I really like the sound it gives, I know I got chills at points when i was writing it...this is definitely one I sketched out long before I brought it to the computer. I knew where I wanted to be tonally with it...it was a matter of bringing the different elements together cohesively. Adding it to Myspace soon.

A quick composition

So I'm now half-done with my goal of completing two choir works this month. I finished in about 2 hours a very small, but I think very pretty arrangement of the simple hymn "Locus Iste". The largest problem for me is, as usual, overcoming the version written in my head by some master. In this case, I took Bruckner's idea and simply put it into my own musical language. I tried to really do more of a re-imagining than starting from scratch. The end result is something that sounds very familiar, but at the same time different. I like the way it sounds. The lovely thing is how the words flow and lend themselves to music so well, but at the same time have a definite rhythmic interest. It's pretty short, and I'll probably upload it to myspace later.

New Toy: Twitter

Fun with monotony! Woo!

And happy December Everyone! I'm going to try to compose at least 2 new pieces this month for choir. Wish me luck!

More Musings

OK, while still on the subject...


The top 10 (or 11...or 12) most influential composers of my compositional life up to this point:
(note: in no particular order)

1. J.S. Bach
2. W. A. Mozart
3. Morten Lauridsen
4. Arvo Part
5. Eric Whitacre
6. Gustav Mahler
7. Sergei Rachmaninoff
8. Franz Schubert
9. Moses Hogan
10. Anton Bruckner
10a. Leonard Bernstein
10b. Aaron Copland

While I know I left off some of my favorites, as well as some giants of the musical world...it was these ten that really inspired me, for one reason or another, to want to compose. All of these composers are special to me in a way, for opening my ears and my mind to trying new things, as a listener and as a composer, daring me to work harder at my craft. They still do. Every time I listen to them I get a tingle of nostalgia, as well as find some new kernal that I can use to make myself better.