Sketch #2 (Weeks 2 & 3)

In this blog I will discuss both Weeks 2 & 3, as they both cover the same sketch.

Week 2
In the interest of time, I moved on to my second sketch for this week. This piece was my attempt at moving out of my comfort zone of diatonic music into the realm of extended tonal resources. I used an octatonic scale and stuck to it exclusively throughout the entirety of the sketch.

This sketch was rather short, so there were just a few comments on this first version:

• Vary the left hand's steady pulse with varying octaves in the opening theme.
• Try and foreshadow the meno mosso section a bit more. (Use ties to break the constant triplet pattern?)
• Vary the left hand octaves in the meno mosso section.
• Perhaps rethink the meno mosso section as a whole to see if it really does fit. I hadn't noticed exactly how much the section seemed out of place until I heard it played in this class. The tempo shift didn't really work, and it was not very motivically related to my opening theme. The main suggestion here was to try and think of ways to expand the first section farther rather than try and shift to a new idea.

Week 3
This was the second week for my sketch #2. I had managed to get rid of the meno mosso section that needed to go and replaced it with a much more unifying second section. Although, I did not succeed in developing the “A” section much further.
  
Suggestions:

• Change the value of the opening accompaniment from staccato dotted quarters to just staccato quarters. 
• Perhaps vary the opening rhythm (specifically the steady left hand pulse).

• Develop the “A” section further.
• Show the intervallic content within the fast melodies by spelling notes how they are heard (i.e. instead of using an “f” and “f sharp”, I would use an “f” and “g flat”).
• Fix the transition into the ending, where it returns to opening material.

Again, the actual notation comments from these two weeks helped me quite a bit in producing a score that looks both professional and easy on the eye.


The playback of the ending in class was much slower than I had intended (due to a glitch in the MIDI) but there were a few comments that this slower tempo was actually quite effective. I went and listened to it a few times only to notice the same thing, so I got a good ending out of this week. Thanks composition class/messed up MIDI importing!

Sketch #1 (Week 1)

For my first of the three piano pieces I was trying to write something that someone like myself (who has very little skill on the piano) could feel good about playing. The way I went about it was creating a motive using clusters and small intervals (like 2nds). The piece also has a very strong rhythmic intensity. I chose to use rhythm as the main focus of composition because it is something that transcends your instrument, as where keyboard dexterity does not.

There were some good suggestions made on how I can improve this sketch:

• Use cross staff notation for the oscillating hand figure that repeats for most of the piece.
• Indicate when the left hand is shifting to the top staff with a line.
• After the chromatic cluster build up, a grand pause could be very effective. (The MIDI playback stopped right here because that was all that I had written. It turned out to be quite an effective pause!)
• During that chromatic cluster build up, I could thicken the texture by using actual cluster notation rather than precise pitches.
• After the pause that was suggested, I could do a number of false starts with the opening material before continuing on.

I found every one of these suggestions quite helpful, and I used all of them to some degree in my revamp of this sketch. The cross staff notation was extremely useful to me in this piece, as it can now be read easily!