moving along

Hello it's me!

Currently I am just finishing up the remainder of the first set of compositions as we speak. I found my first piece to be quite a nuisance to notate using sibelius due to its use of free time, but with the aid of the great Clark Ross I shouldn't be losing too much more sleep over it.

I'm not entirely decided on if I am going to play the piano for my piece or not. I find I get enough performance anxiety playing my rep as it is, let alone something that is written by me. That's more judging! ah yikes! Maybe I guess I'll just have to man up, but we'll see.

If anyone is interested in any new music I have a few links for you!

>As of lately, one of my bands, Ben Trovato, just released a 6 song ep. (Also consisting of currently guitar major steve cowan and former cello major and current rock star romesh thavanathan) 5 dollars for a cd if you want one and we're planning on having a show mid december to release it.

>Another one of my bands, Floods, is also releasing an ep sometime next month. All music is instrumental post-rock. 

>Fellow classmate Justin Guzzwell also has a dandy myspace page with some great originals on it that I enjoy.  Listening to it, in my opinion, gives you a greater appreciation of the compositions that he has performed so far in class!

>The new theory/aural skills prof, Scott Godin, has some really cool compositions that I recommend anyone to listen to if they want any inspiration for a tranquil and timeless composition. I find his music quite soothing.

>Last but not least, if you haven't stumbled across it already is Clark's very own myspace page. If you want a place to listen to his works that he played in class last week, then here is somewhere you can do that. I really enjoy the piece 'dream dance' in particular. Great job Clark!

I encourage anyone to post music of any sort up on their blogs for everyone to listen to. Listening to music is definitely inspirational and gets the creative gears going if you've got a case of the writer's block. 

As for the cliché composition, I am excited to get that started. I'm enjoying the fact that it can be atonal or tonal, which gives us a lot more options. It was great to start off with atonality because I would never have considered writing in it. everything I have written previous to this past assignment has been completely tonal and melodic so it was quite a step for me. With that being said though, I would like to once again point out the difficulties of trying to write a completely atonal piece on the piano when I'm used to playing tonal chords all the time. Once I came up with any idea, I would improvise with it for a bit to see what would come out of it. This lead to occasionally making things turn tonal because my hands would just shift to chords or melodies found within a key. Then I would have to sit back and tweak an idea to make it atonal, which make things a little difficult and more forced. But now that I've completed these first three compositions, I think it helped immensely with my writing. with the next composition's guidelines I can now write tonal chords in an atonal piece wherever I see fit, but also I can use some atonal chords is a tonal piece as well, which is something I have never considered.

I have a few cliché ideas that I would like to work on over the next few days. The first that stuck out would be to put a twist on a typical romantic piece found in a musical. I would absolutely love to write either an entire musical or add some music to one some day so I think that would be fun. but two problems with that is is that for one, I am not much of a lyricist and I think that might call for a vocalist to sing. And also, if we're only allowed three performers, I'm not entirely sure if I would want one to be a voice. I think I would rather work with a trio of instruments for the time being. maybe I can make it into a musical excerpt of the soon to be world famous robbie brett musical of greatness! maybe.

I've also considered using the cliché of the .....hmmmm I'm not quite sure of the technical term. But if you had a 1-3-5 chord, and you played the the 1 on the first beat of the measure and the 3 and 5 together on the other three beats a la beethoven. I think that Would be pretty interesting to work with. We will see how it goes the week!

Okay

yet another long entry!

whoops!

bye bye

- roberto concerto

edit: I was just working on a latin/salsa type idea that I really dig. Has a lot of potential for growth there!  I'm considering having a part in my piece where all three performers play a melody on the piano together, if that's allowed, because I just recorded three ideas that fit together really well when layered. Just making a note.