I tend to conceptualise big sounds, so I'm usually surprised by the sparseness of the sound with small ensembles.
The second piece I wrote for piano and viola, Power Breeds Madness actually turned out better than I expected in many spots. I'm still learning a lot about the capabilities of the viola, specific notation, and the different sounds it can create. But what I was looking for was realised more or less.
There is a falling ostinato figure that I need to take another look at. The piano carries it for a few measures before dropping it to imitate the viola, while it picks up a tremolo before picking up where the piano left off. I'm going to see if there are other ways of handling it, altering it, and seeing if it can last that long or if it needs to be interrupted.
I'm wondering too about the last section. I want to keep the viola's role of and undulating "pedal," for lack of a better term. But perhaps it's just too long.
Overall there's a lot of tweaking that needs to be done, but for now it's time to move on and get some other ideas out and then coming back and taking a fresh look at this, and 2006 again.
1 comment:
Good entry.
In my experience, composers often do better to edit/revise their music before moving on to another composition, simply because the ideas are fresher in the mind (and, quite frankly, student composers often neglect to come back and fix problems once they have moved on to another composition).
There is no right or wrong way to approach this, of course, as long as the improvements you wish to make eventually get made.
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