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.