27.09.11 - Composition for Emotion
Last tuesday, me and 3 other peers from both second and first year foundation degree courses where arranged into groups at random by our ‘Music In Context 2’ tutors Colin Blakey & Geoff Orr. One Member of each group was nominated or volunteered to select a blank envolope in which an emotion was printed onto paper. The emotion we recieved was “anxiety”. Our objective was to compose a piece of music which represented this emotion, and so my group and I discussed how we where going to successfully achieve this. We soon realised it would be more challenging than first percieved.
Firstly we discussed including allegro ostinatos or entire sections into our composition which could possily show franticity and perhaps an unstable state of mind in which a subject wishes to escape. Following this train of thought we thought it a good idea to include discordant groups of notes or maybe arpeggios in which one note would seem out of context to the chord, in which the audience would feel anxious to have the particular note corrected. This thought then led us to deciding to end our composition in an imperfect cadence to fulfill the aformentioned reason. After more discussion over which genre and style the piece should be wrote in, we finally developed a cinematic storyline which would be our own adaptation of a typical modern western soundtrack in which the genre would imginably be of country and blues origin.
As our ideated plot thickened, we started to envisage exactly how our composition would sound, as though it where a film score, and how it will be directly relevant to the objective. We structured a short piece and each contributed different ideas into the piece, keeping a balance of our interpretation of “anxiety”, and the generic earmarks which are typically found within a composition of the chosen genre, including the token “Dropped D” ( D A D G B E ) tuning on guitar with some slide effects.
The storyline was of a “red-kneck” man from southern USA as fugitave for various felonies. In this particular scene he was in a high speed chase down a dusty highway in a stolen GM truck, with both the flash of the sherriffs police car lights in his mirror and the gas meter gauge sitting just above empty, catching his eye. The fugitive can’t decide either to veer off the desert road and over the edge of the rocky cliff face or turn himself in, knowing he will have to face a life sentence in jail. We searched on YouTube for some inspiration in composing this song, when we discovered that we would like to try something like:
“A Country Boy Can Survive” by Hank Williams Jr.
Once we had shallowly researched music within the genre, we began to piece together and rehearse the composition its self. I believe we will need to continue rehearsing the composition until the sections and structure are familiar to each of us, at which point we will be ready to perform.
