Reflections

Well, it's been an interesting term. Moreso than probably anyone else in the class, it was a very different experience to me, taking this course, as I am not a music student and have never taken a music course in my life. And although I've composed music intermittently over the years, I have virtually no knowledge of theory in any formal capacity, nor can I play a music instrument at anything better than an early intermediate level. Really, I jumped into this one a little over my head in some ways.

For a few years now, I'd been interested in trying to take some sort of composition course at university, but had never gotten around to it. Since this is the last term of my undergrad (I'll be starting my master's of linguistics in the winter), I figured it was now or never. So here I am.

Although I knew that I knew very little theory, I'm not sure I realized quite how little until I was in an environment where every single person was considerably more knowledgeable than I was. It would be hard to count the number of terms I heard people tossing back and forth that flew completely over my head. To my credit, I did tend to go and look some of these up, so that I would at least have a general idea of the concept, but the course has certainly made my utter lack of knowledge in this area pretty clear. It was actually rather intimidating, feeling so out of your depth, but nevertheless, I'd like to think that the music I wrote can hold its own.

This course was definitely a learning experience, and my first time doing quite a number of different things.

It was the first time I'd worked with atonal music. That was actually pretty tricky at first, since with my lack of theory background, I was sometimes unsure if what I was writing was tonal or not. Before this course, I equated atonal (as peripherally as I was aware of the term) with 'bizzare dissonant art music', which clearly isn't necessarily the case. Atonality isn't something I'd really explored before the course (or been inclined to try), but I'm quite pleased with much of what came out of that assignment. It was a good learning experience.

It was the first time that I'd had to compose under a deadline, and although it wasn't necessarily a pleasant experience, it was an informative one. I think if one were to make a habit of it, they'd need to learn how to work faster and with less stress than I did. I think I get too attached to my pieces, and have a hard time seeing them simply as compositional exercises, or assignments to be completed. Although it can be good to care about your work, it can also make it quite a bit more difficult to complete said work in a timely fashion. I tend to be exceedingly fastidious with much of what I do, and even more so with creative work, which isn't something you can always afford to be when you need to work quickly.

It was also the first time that I spent any real time producing actual scores from my pieces, rather than just audio files, and there was a lot to learn in that area as well; not only the operation of Sibelius (some of which is surprisingly unintuitive for a beginner), but notation and presentation of the score itself. I'd never thought about such issues as clear note spellings before (in fact, I had never ever heard the term 'note spellings' before), or the number of different ways there are to express the same concept. A number of Dr. Ross's blog posts and suggestions in class in this area were quite interesting.

For that matter, it was the first time I'd ever been in such a musically rich environment. It's hard to articulate exactly what I mean here, but there's a certain energy in the music building. Just being able to hear music being played all around you while you're walking down the corridor brings a smile to my face. I know it must seem mundane to people who've been in such an environment for years, but I've never really known anyone musical other than myself, and I've certainly never been around other musicians as a group before. It makes me wish that I could play better than I do. I was evidently considered pretty good for my age, many years ago, but my technical skills has stagnated ever since.

I wish that I'd been able to perform my own compositions on stage during the recitals. And I did try, but was rather surprised (and a little embarrassed) at how rusty I am. If it was even possible for me to learn them fluently, it would have taken more time and effort than I could possibly have given to it while still having time enough to write the piece in the first place. Some of them were more technically difficult than anything I had ever played, even when I was at my peak.

I also wish that I had contributed more in class, but I tended to hold myself back out of insecurity over my lack of knowledge. If there was one thing that I could change about what I did this term, it would probably be that.

I very much enjoyed listening to other's pieces, and it was interesting to see the creative process unfold. I think that some really beautiful stuff came out of this course, and I'm looking forward to getting a copy of the recording from the recitals.

On the whole, it's been a good run, and despite the stress, I'm glad for the experience. I've learned things about music, about myself, and about the intersection of the two. And I've written 4 new songs, which is nothing to sneeze at, and something I'll be able to have with me long after this term is over.

I hope everyone got something useful out of this course, and I wish them all the best of luck with their future endeavors.

Whispers in the Sand

Well, here's the final version of this song (at least for this course). I've decided to call it 'Whispers in the Sand'. On the whole I'm pretty pleased with it, and, despite the extra work it caused me, am glad that I went with this new material rather than the older stuff. I hope that some of the later material departs sufficiently from the starting cliche to other people's ears.

Despite what I said in my previous post about the song being near a natural conclusion, I found it hard to find a natural way to actually make it end there. Really, when I think back on the stuff that I've written in past, I've often had a hard time with endings. At least half of them sound too abrupt to me, or like something else is wrong, and quite a few have no real ending at all; I just stopped writing them at some point.

I think, in the end, this song was simply calling to be longer that it was. I just didn't have time to take it in that direction. I really would like to try to do so in the future, but we'll see if I end up getting around to it. At this point, I'd be pleased to have some time away from the song after all the work I've put into it lately.

Finishing touches

Well, we're in the final stretch before the recital, and I've decided that I'm going to finish this piece, one way or another, tonight.

I can see a number of ways to progress from the last spot in the song that I've written. I was originally planning to return to the style of the livelier earlier sections of the song, do some variations on this material, and then take it towards a concluding section, but I don't believe I'll be doing that now.

You see, the song sounds like it's reaching a natural conclusion at the point where it's at already. If I were to depart from that into new (or even old) material, I think I would need to spend a fair bit of time with this material before returning to a final conclusion. I think that a briefer section would risk feeling rushed, since the break would make it feel like the beginning of a new section that was aborted before it really got off the ground. "Ok, we're ending... and we're starting again, and... oh wait, we're actually ending after all."

Since there really isn't enough time to write a fuller section, and I don't consider a shorter reprise of the early material an option, I'm going to try to end it in the next few bars. In the end, it may not be quite as I would like it, but it's a practical solution that I think I can still write in a way that feels like a satisfying conclusion. And this way, I don't have to give the performers new material on the day of the recital.... There's always the possibility of extending it after the course is over, and perhaps actually being able to incorporate some of the material from my first attempt at this assignment.

Unexpected new directions

Well, I spent a fair bit of the last week unsuccessfully grappling with various issues with my composition.

I'd been hoping that the instrument balance issues would be less of a problem with live instruments, but if anything, when it was played in class last week, I found that they're a bigger problem. It seemed to me that the cello was almost constantly buried under the trumpet. With the digital version, I have the luxury of adjusting the volume level of each instrument, so I can fix these sorts of problems somewhat. However, when dealing with physical instruments, some are simply much louder than others naturally, and I'm going to have to account for that.

I tried thinning out some of the more dense sections, but I found that when I took out many of the 16th notes from the piano, a great deal of the sense of motion in the song at those points was also lost. I experimented with register, and swapping parts between the 3 instruments, but on the whole, I just wasn't feeling satisfied with almost any of the alterations I was making.

Eventually, after a number of days of frustratingly little progress, I decided that I simply would have to leave it as-is for the moment, and write some more material, or I'd never hit the length requirement by the time the score was do. Thus, I started to write an intro to place before the existing material, something I'd been intending for some time, but hadn't gotten to, yet.

I'd originally been thinking of a soft, slow section with trumpet and piano, but I decided to go with the cello instead, to give it some passages where it wouldn't need to compete with the trumpet. I'd expected the intro to be maybe 20 seconds or so, and then meet up with the beginning of the song as previous written. However, I found that the end of the solo wasn't really meshing well with my existing material, so I continued to extend it in hopes of finding a good point to join them up again. A minute and a half later, and I'm still not there.

I'm beginning to think that the old material, or at least most of it, may not have a place in this new version of the song. This kinda makes me sad, since I put a lot of work into it, and, despite its flaws, I still like quite a few bits from it. Really, it cuts the material that I've written in half, and it is drawing towards the end of this assignment, so I don't have a whole lot of time to play around with it. There are certainly a couple places where I could insert it, if I had to, but it really doesn't seem to work as well with it there as with it not.

Actually, I'm inclined to think that the overall level of quality with this new version is better than the last one, which is good, although I admit that I don't relish having to write as much material in the one week before the recital as I came up with in 3 weeks previous. I may yet find a way to reuse some of it, and I hope that I do, but for the moment I guess I'll keep writing without it.

Project 2: First feedback

Although it took a quite while to get a foothold in this piece, once I did I was actually surprised at how quickly I progressed. I think that might be because, in many ways, this song is in a style closer to what I'm accustomed to writing. When I played it for a couple of friends, they said they could definitely hear more 'me' in it, however one takes that.

I was a bit uncertain about the piece as I began, but I've actually grown to rather like it. Sadly, I think it played to more mixed reviews in class than my previous pieces.

The main issues Dr. Ross raised were: too fast, too busy, and instrument balance.

I'm actually rather content with the tempo, for the most part. To be honest, it was actually slightly faster than this for the first couple drafts before I showed it in class. I think it sounds kinda peppy. Even at this pace, I don't think I'll have difficulty meeting the length requirements for this assignment (famous last words?). In any event, I was planning for at least some of the later (and perhaps earlier) sections to be softer and slower, in contrast the more energetic sections.

I think there is a valid point about the song being busy, though. Although I like many of the little flourishes, upon relistening, a few of them do sound a little crowded or rushed, or just 'off' somehow. I'm going to go see if I can move a few notes around, or simply thin some of them a little bit. Interestingly enough, after having listened to the song on a number of different sets of speakers and headphones, I find that it sounds much more busy on some than others.

Although I can definitely hear some instrument balance issues, I think that this is mostly a result of mixing with the samples that I used. I spent a little time playing with the EQ of the tracks to try and clear things up a bit, with only limited success. However, it was easy enough to hear all of the instruments in the general midi version of the song, even if the overall sound quality of GM is terrible, so I don't think the balance issue is an inherent property of the notation of the song. In fact, I'm hoping that it simply wouldn't be an issue with live instruments at all, but I suppose that remains to be seen.

I guess to some degree I think that some of these complaints might be more an issue with the recording than with the song itself, but I might just be a little too close to the song to tell at the moment. One thing I've noticed is that, when I'm writing a song, I listen to it over and over so many times that things which might sound like issues at first eventually begin to sound normal. I guess you just get used to hearing them. After so long, it becomes kinda hard to tell which bits sound awkward or could use changing.

Finding a cliche

When the second project began, I expected it to be much easier to work with than the first one. Unlike some of my classmates, I found the prospect of being allowed to write tonal music freeing. At many points during the first project, I'd had to second-guess what I was writing, or force it to go in different directions than what felt natural to me, in order to keep it atonal. Now I wouldn't need to worry about that.

However, I underestimated the difficulty I would have in selecting a cliche. Part of the problem was that when I was brainstorming musical cliches, most of the ones that appealed to me, appealed to me enough that if I were to draw upon them in a composition, it would be to compose within that cliche, rather than to take it in very different directions. And on the flip side, many of the cliches that I wasn't particularly fond of, I was adverse enough to that I would find working with even very altered versions thereof off-putting. Thus, the problem became finding something that I both liked, and was recognizable, and that I felt that I could work with.

I ran through a number of false starts before I settled on the base of the song that I will be writing for this project. A couple of them were based on particular recurring motifs in classical music. They might very well have names, but given my utter lack of theory background I cannot provide them. One of the first ideas I entertained briefly was 'Ominous Latin Chanting', however most of the ideas on how to play with the cliche involved writing ironically underdramatic lyrics, totally inappropriate for the apparent mood of the piece. Writing something whose humor can only be fully appreciated by someone who can understand Latin means writing for an vanishingly small audience (and risking being rather pretentious). And in any event, if most of the cliche bending is in the lyrics, rather than the music, it doesn't really work for this course in the first place.

The musical cliche that I will be basing this composition around is loosely 'middle eastern music', more specifically such stereotypical elements as the progression D-D#-F#-G-F#-D#-D. I have no idea how closely actual middle eastern music adheres to these stereotypes, but sometimes cliches have a life of their own.

Settling the Scores

Well, all of my scores for this first major project have been submitted, and it is with a sigh of relief/exhaustion that I can put them to rest. Of course, as soon as they're submitted, I hear things that I would like to fix or change, but that's probably par for the course.

Since my 3rd song has not actually finished when I presented it class last week, I decided that I would spend some of the final week working on that song itself, before polishing all 3 into a final score. Of course, I ended up taking the whole week and then some, leaving the tiniest sliver to time to get the score for it done up.

The 3rd song is easily my favorite at this point, and is the longest and most developed. Perhaps that's because I effectively had twice as long to work on it as any other song. To be honest, the endings of the others (and even still this one to some extent) feel very rushed to me. Basically, I can feel the song naturally continuing for quite a bit longer, but I was running out of time, so I had to put some sort of an ending there. I'd hoped to go back and expand them this week, but it turned out that I didn't have time then, either.

This is the first time I've ever composed anything under any sort of a deadline and it's been a bit of a learning experience. I find it very hard to feel that I'm 'finished' with anything on any sort of a timeline. Some pieces come quickly, and some take a long time of shuffling notes around before I'm satisfied that it is complete. Most real world deadlines are obviously not as flexible as one's muse, and sometimes (frequently?) will necessitate one being finished with a piece before you really feel it's finished. I guess composers who do this sort of thing for a living (like writing soundtracks or something) need to learn to make peace with this, since they're always operating under this kind of constraint.

Fortunately, a couple days ago I discovered a way to coerce Sibelius into importing midis in a more or less unbroken fashion. Certainly less broken than my attempts on previous weeks, where it seemed quite content to place notes where there were not notes, and pepper rests and other markings all of the place.

On the whole, this has been an interesting experience, though. I've written a few songs, all in a style different than I would have attempted outside this course, and I'm fairly pleased with much of it, especially my 3rd piece.

Atonal #3 (Temporary)

The clip above is what I would have played in class today, if only the cd player was working. I thought I'd put it up for those who were interested in what I'd intended for it to sound like. More to follow (with hopefully a shorter delay than the last time I said that)

Atonal #2 (Sorry for the delay)

[This was supposed to have been published earlier. It was written a few days ago, but my connection with blogger was on the fritz at the time, and refused to publish it, and it simply slipped my mind in the intervening days]



I've ended up being relatively pleased with my second song, which is nice, because a few days before it was presented in class, this was definitely not the case. I wrote the first section (up to about 0:20) one day, and liked it. And then, on the following days, found myself seemingly incapable of writing a subsequent section that I both liked, and which sounded as though it fit with the song.

I think I have nearly a half-dozen sections, or at least beginnings of sections, which were written and discarded. Some of them are even pretty nice, but just didn't sound like they belonged with this song. You know, sometimes when you've pushed notes in a phrase around enough times, your mind (or at least mine) tends to get a bit numb. This is normally when I'd let the piece lie fallow for a little while and come back to it later, however that's not really possible when you're working with a deadline.

One nice thing may have come out of all the rewriting, though. At least one of the rejected sections I like well enough to try writing my third variation around it. It's a bit waltz-like, I think, although the atonality makes it sound a little different.

Hearing it performed live in class was an interesting experience. Never in my life has anyone other than myself performed anything I've written (and even I haven't done that in a long time, as my compositions become more complex and my technical skills rusted). I felt a little bad thrusting the score into their hands mere moments before they were expected to play it, but it literally was not finished until that morning. Well, the song itself had been finished by the beginning of the previous day, but the notation wasn't ready until then.

I realized that I never specified a tempo on the score, and although this was somewhat intentionally, in retrospect I should have nonetheless. I didn't know at what tempo they'd be comfortable to sight read the piece, so I thought I'd leave it to their own discretion. However, it somehow slipped my mind that they'd have no frame of reference from which to just how it 'should' be played.

Actually, I think I kind of expected one of them to ask, but by the time it was evident that they weren't going to, they'd already started performing. However, although it was immediately clear that they were playing it at a very different tempo than I expected, I thought it would be interesting to hear it at that speed just the same. It creates a very different effect than the original, moreso than I might have expected. If I were to give my overall impression of it at that speed, I'd probably say that the faster sections were more emotive than in the original, while the sections which were already fairly slow at the fast tempo sounded more static.

Some of the feedback I received in class related to the static-ness of the slower sections, and I think it was fortunate that I'd played a draft copy of the digital version to Dr. Ross previously, since he weighed in that he thought most of the issues pointed out disappeared at the faster tempo.

Someone mentioned whether I'd considered writing in slurs for some passages for the violin, and I'd said at the time that I hadn't, possibly because I'd never written for a real physical violin before, but in retrospect, I think it has as much to do with my inexperience writing actual sheet music in general.

For many years now, whenever I've done any composing, I've done it in a midi sequencer. Midi notation is much more specific. You can specify note onsets down to the millisecond, and the exact force with which every note is played (although, admittedly, I tend not to spend as much time fiddling with the dynamics as I could if I were to get the best performance out of them). As with most things involving computers, there is no subjectivity or ambiguity. You tell the computer exactly what to do and it will do exactly that, no more and no less, every time. You think that one note sounds a little too loud? Well, just make it, and only it, a little quieter. Of course, it raises a number of its own technical problems that live instruments in the hands of competent musicians tend not to have. I won't get into them here, since some are a bit technical, but let's just say that sometimes you have to fight to get a simple passage to come out sounding right, when a real person with a real instrument could easily nail it first try.

Well, what I meant to say by all that is that it's probably easy, as a general rule, to not notice what you're taking for granted about how a piece is intended to be played. Especially when one is not used to thinking in terms of notation.

Speaking of notation, this was the first time that I attempted to use actual notation software to work on the score. Sibelius has... a bit more of a learning curve than I anticipated. Although it's clearly quite powerful, many features, even ones that seem relatively basic, are often buried deep in some hidden corner of the menus. For example, I could not find any way to convert a single staff with all of the piano section on it into the standard piano double staff. When you were adding the staff, yes, but not after it was already there. Since the song itself had already been notated mostly correctly in Sonar, I didn't relish having to type in everything from scratch just to get it to come out right. (I did eventually find a way around this)

Most frustratingly, there are a few 16th notes that simply refuse to beam together with the adjacent 16th notes, and after a few hours working with that, I still have no idea why. I'm following the instructions in the manual exactly, but the appropriate buttons simply do nothing, or just add beams to the notes that don't connect to the follow notes, and simply end abruptly in space. Sonar doesn't beam the notes because they're on different staves. If I move them onto the same staff, it works fine, but even this doesn't work in Sibelius. I think I've tried at least 5 different approaches, which all failed. I'm not quite sure what to do about that at this point, actually.

Back to feedback on the song, one of the most strong points that Dr. Ross brought up was that he didn't really like the ending. This was actually a bit surprising to me at the time, since the 3rd section of the song was actually the one that I felt the most satisfied with. I'm not sure if he was referring just to the couple bars immediately before the end, or the whole build up to that point. Having listened to it a bunch over the last couple days, I can maybe see the point about the second-last bar, although I remain quite pleased with the several immediately before that.

He suggested that instead of ending on B-flat, I try F-sharp instead. I tried that, and my immediate reaction to listening to it was that the preceding section (at least the previous bar, anyway) needs to be heavily rewritten for that to work. I tried moving some of the existing notes around, but nothing seemed to gel for me at the time. I'll probably go back and see what I can do with that, later, but at the moment I think I should be directing my compositional efforts towards the third song, or I risk not having it ready for Friday at all. Writing music quickly was never my strong suit.

Atonal 2 uploaded (update to follow)

Well, here's the recorded copy of the song that was played in class today, more or less as it was originally intended. It's interesting how different it sounded compared to today's performance, although that was interesting in and of itself (and thanks to Kate and Mike for playing it) I'm putting this up here immediately on the off-chance that anyone from class will actually listen to it. If you do, it would be great if you could leave some sort of a comment, even something as simple as 'Yeah, that does feel different'. I'll have something more insightful to post when I get home and have time to write it.

[Edit: MP3 moved to above post]

Atonal #1

Well, my first song based on my atonal chord progression is somewhat complete and has been performed. Well, actually this happened a few days ago, but I hadn't gotten around to writing anything about it until now.

It's too bad that the sound system in the room didn't seem to be working, and still isn't as of today. I hope that it can be made functional before I'm slated to present my second piece (or at least that I can line up two people to play it live in advance of that date)

On the whole I'm relatively pleased with the piece, although there are certainly bits that I don't like so much. The ending, in particular, feels a bit sudden or arbitrary, and to be honest that's kind of what it was. I feel like the piece could have been longer, but I was running out of time for Monday, and I also felt saturated from working on it and wanted to put it aside. Actually, I generally prefer the section before 0:35, and had much less trouble writing it than the later sections (a not uncommon co-occurrence)

In general, I've been finding this assignment quite taxing. I keep instinctively moving towards tonality, and have to keep pulling myself back, or even intentionally putting notes in places where they don't feel 'right' to me. Moreover, although I liked my chord progression in isolation, when I'm trying to work the song around it, there are many times where I want to go places that have nothing to do with the chords as they are. I've tried to be a little creative with my interpretation of the chords, though. At several points, half of a chord is played on the piano, and the other notes in the chord become part of the overlying melody played by the violin. Several times, though, I would find after writing a section that I'd basically ended up turning an atonal chord into a melody with a tonal harmony. Quite a number of phrases have ended up in the proverbial wastebasket.

My second piece is in-progress, although experiencing similar difficulties. I'm going to try not to labor it as much as the last one, although it seems to be a bad habit of mine. I think I may have found a thread today that I can work from, although bits of it already sound suspiciously tonal. I'll see what I can do with it

We have lift-off

After some scrounging around the web and perusing of reference materials, I now have working mp3 streams.



This clip is just the series of chords that I performed earlier in class. Well, more or less. I made a few last minute changes to the version that I played in class, some of which I don't entirely remember now. Mostly it was removing a few octave doubling that I didn't notice until the last minute, by shifting one note up or down a semitone. This version still has a few of them in it, but that's ok; I liked it more this way, anyway.

Work on the first actual composition based on these chords proceeds slowly. I have a few snippets that I like, but I don't feel that I've yet found a coherent thread to proceed from. Hopefully I'll find one over the next day or two.

Adventures in Atonality

Well, the chord progression for assignment 1 is complete, and been performed in class. At first, I wasn't quite sure how to go about writing this, but the usual method of experimentation and incremental refinement worked well enough.

I sat down in front of Sonar and recorded a whole pile of random chords. Sometimes, if I liked one, or almost liked one, I'd try moving a couple of the notes a few semitones one way or the the other, but mostly I just left them as-is, with little thought for flow or progression. After I had a bunch of them, I went and listened to the recording a couple times, and copied those chords which appealed to me for one reason or another. I think I was left with about 25 or so at this point.

Next, I tried to order the chords both according to rising and falling tension levels, as well as what felt like a fairly natural harmonic progression. Many chords were used as-is, but at a few points, I could feel the harmony wanting to move in a certain way, and created a new, related chord to follow an existing one.

I was fairly pleased with it by this point, although I was a bit concerned that the tension level didn't drop off enough by the end. Many of the songs in class ended in a high register, and that was my original plan, as well. It's generally easier for high register chords to sound less tense (although, inversely, when notes in the upper register clash against each other, it can be much more shrill and piercing). However, my final chords were among my lowest. Since I generally liked how it went, I tried thinning out the final chords instead of writing new ones, deleting a few of the more dissonant notes.

Evidently I may not have done enough, since several people thought that the end was nearly as tense as the climax, and at least one thought it was the most tense of all. Part of the problem, in this case, I believe, is that the instrument I wrote this on is much less rumbly in the lower register than the grand piano in class. The final chord is actually fairly clean, since the notes are spread out over 3 octaves, but it also starts at C2.

Actually, I found it interesting how the relative tension levels of the chords (both for my composition, and others) seem to be fairly subjective. A friend that I had played it for before class actually thought that chord 4 was the most tense, nearly the opposite of the feedback I got in class. I find that the type of tension one gets from low and high register chords has quite a different tone, and I wonder if one type or the other sounds more tense to different people. Chord 4 is still in the upper register

I've also noticed when I've been rating the tension of other people's chords that my subjective impression of the absolute tension of a chord has a lot to do with the tension of the preceding chord. Even if two chords are probably equally tense, the second often sounds softer to me, since the previous one has already sort of 'prepared' me, in a sense. I've noticed a number of songs where the first chord sounds more tense than the next few following ones, and think this is just because the contrast between silence and dissonance is so much greater than dissonance and slightly more dissonance.

On a separate note, I'm looking into embedding some audio files into this blog, that I could use to demonstrate snippets of the songs that I'm working on for the course. I'll post more when I've gotten that working.

And so it begins

Well, this is my first excursion into the world of blogging. For the next several months, I'll be posting related to course work, and detailing some of my thoughts on the process of composition.

This is all quite new to me, both blogging and composing in a formal setting, or indeed taking a formal music course of any sort. I've written music on a sporadic basis over the years as a hobby, and had always been meaning to check out a music course, but had never gotten around to it. However, since I'm due to graduate with a BA in linguistics at the end of this term, I figured now would be a good time to try, if I were ever going to.

Our first assignment wasn't exactly what I was expecting, although I don't suppose I really knew what I was expecting. I've never spent much time with atonal music, and can't say that I'm particularly fond of it, either. Perhaps this is because the term evokes 'art pieces', more experiments in random constellations of notes than anything else, which might sometimes be called 'interesting', but are rarely very pleasing to listen to. However, Dr. Ross rightly points out that atonal doesn't need to be unpleasant. I don't need to write 'Minuet in the key of a man collapsing on a piano'. Which probably means I'll be trying to skirt on the less dissonant end of the spectrum. But this is ok, I think.

I read Dr. Ross's post 'Why Atonal?' where he explains why he chose to make this assignment (and perhaps others in the future) about atonal music. The points are interesting and I tend to agree, although I might not have expected to beforehand. It can only be a good thing for a composer to have experience in a wider variety of idioms. I doubt this course will shift my personal music preferences, but it needn't. I did take this course, after all, because I wanted to try something different, and hopefully learn something. And even if what I write tends towards the tonal side of atonal, this is still further into atonality than I might otherwise have gone, which is hopefully good enough.

As for my composition itself, I've tinkered around with a few chords now, but it's mostly been freeform experimentation, and I don't feel that I've really found a thread to follow yet. I'll have to make sure I get something soon, though, since I don't know exactly when I'll be called on in class to perform it. I'll report more when I have more to report.