Friday, October 10, 2008
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)
Monday, October 6, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, October 3, 2008
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]
[Edit: MP3 moved to above post]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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