After spending half an hour trying to log in to my old blog, I admitted defeat and decided to make a new one. I did however go back and read some of them to realize how utterly foolish and incoherent the vast majority of them were, being generally written in the middle of the night while I struggle to finish composing a piece and putting it in to sibelius.
While I cannot promise that these blogs will be any more coherent and oozing (TMNT 2: the secret of the ooze) with intelligence than the ones prior to this semester, I will attempt to cut down on the large amount of procrastination I dealt with during the semester.
The enemy: Survival tv shows.
currently I'm watching man vs wild. Bear Grylls is pretty bad ass. A minute ago he just killed a snake and used the skin to drink his own pee! Pee!! That's foolish! I can definitely see this show getting in the way of some late night writing. Or maybe it will help me write some wicked epic music that I can incorporate with this course somehow...
One can only hope.
But now on to the music itself. This first project consists of us writing 3 short compositions for solo piano. Yikes! I have yet to write anything for a solo instrument before. And the killer for me is my undying love for minimalist music, which would be quite difficult to state in such a short piece.
***Recommendations:
(A few sets of compositions I'm going to refer to for this assignment that might be useful to all you kind folks as well, especially if you're not a piano player and don't know where to begin looking)
- Chopin's 26 preludes - majority of them are 1-2 pages and basically just concentrate on a rhythmic or melodic idea. Nothing too crazy, very easy to digest and pretty easy to dissect.
- Scriabin's complete collection of preludes - Scriabin is my home boy. His music is a bit more sophisticated and modern (obviously), so this might spark a bit more of an interest for people who want to explore more atonality yet still want to keep things relatively melodic.
- Boulez's 12 notations - Great great great atonal snazziness. If you are fiending something that's a little more out there, take a listen to these bad boys. A wicked representation of different characteristics per piece. It might be a littler harder to track down than the other two, but I found a copy of them on naxos on the cd 'Piano Music: 2008 Sydney International Piano Competition - Vol. 1. Solo Highlights'.
- man vs wild - http://www.justin.tv/drew312312#r=j9xmIyQ it just streams the episodes! Doesn't work all the time, but when it does whooooooa baby watch out!
That's all I have for you right now.
Man, now Bear's on a raft! I love when he's in the ocean!
Watch out for sharks!
They'll get ya!
-Dad
Haha teenage mutant ninja turtles.
ReplyDeleteOuuu, can't wait to get cable so I can see this show!! Some people're crazy. And I always thought "survivor" was lame and rigged. They totally took those 'stranded' people to Burger King whenever they stopped filming.
...And can't wait to hear your piece! Sounds like you've got a bunch of inspirations or at least influences you can choose from. Looking forward to hearing it!