Wednesday, September 24, 2008

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

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

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.

Monday, September 8, 2008

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.