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.