Wednesday, March 25, 2009

More Quarteting?

My sax quartet isn't coming along quite as well as I had hoped. I had it played in class Monday and due to a lack of time prior to the class I didn't get a chance to do much with it except for throwing in section in 12 bar blues. This didn't exactly work, it wasn't interesting enough for the music and Dr. Ross said it lacked the 'integrity' that was in the rest of my piece. I never had much invested in the blues section and I'm going to take it out completely, so much for that.

The interesting thing was how much conversation came from the part of my piece that people had already heard. There seems to be a genera consensus that the first two bars of my 9/8 section seem a little redundant and the piece could work well without them. Dylan made the comment on how my writing is almost always fast and fun and to try expanding on the slow section in the intro to the piece. This was followed by some more recommendations to try using isorhythms to bring some of the 9/8 stuff into the intro, this would create a longer slow section and set up the 9/8 so that I could take the previously mentioned two measures out.

I got pretty excited after all the good ideas that came out of the discussion from class and already have made significant changes to my work. The blues section is gone, it may come back later but it will be a much more thought out and integrated way and won't be obvious. I've also done a lot of work on the slow section in the beginning and it's way better now (I hope) and the two measures of the 9/8 are gone and the piece seems to flow a lot better.

Good things to come!
NB

1 comment:

Clark Ross said...

Great journal entry, Neil! I'm looking forward to seeing where you take your composition from here.