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.