#composition for emotion

[jamescarlingfdmusicperf-blog]

Composition For Emotion: Jelousy

http://minus.com/m5Wo7dSZI

[jamescarlingfdmusicperf-blog]

04.10.11 - Composition for Emotion (Performance)

1) Initially, my group & I engaged in discussions over various aspects of the composition. We discussed how we would achieve the assigned emotion successfully. A lot of ideas where contributed in the form of musical devices such as dissonance, use of major or minor. Some ideas that where contributed to start with where dropped such as including allegro sections to the composition to make the audience feel the anxiety and a quick flow of unrelated notes irrelevant to the appropriate scale used. However, we did develop certain ideas chosen which seemed to fit round a western film theme. This was our foundation for any further ideas to be contributed. As the piece had a very bluesy feel, I felt it would be beneficial to include use of a “slide”. Which straight away is recognizable to the token sound we where aiming for. With the second group I worked with, we felt like we didn’t have enough time to elaborate on different ideas and discuss how or what we would be able to do to further the validity of the composition in relation to the emotion. As our emotion was “jealousy”, we came up with just one idea of using a very low tuned guitar and having a slow drum beat. The reason we decided to do this is because we concluded from our initial discussions that generally, jealousy could be seen as quite a heavy and dull burden for someone to carry, however it can be controlled and masked by the bearer of the burden. Thus, we created a piece of music that was very dull, heavy, and it seemed to drag out, however the piece was clearly structured and included use of dynamic, which directly relates to how jealousy can rise and fall within the mind. 2) For both groups, we realised that the objective was going to be a lot more difficult to accomplish  than we first thought. In the first group, the contributions came from each of us and then we would each change something until when it came to performance it was half improvised as that much had changed, none of us particularly knew our parts exactly. I think this worked to our advantage though, as we didn’t realise it at the time of performance but we where all in a way anxious to know what section was coming next and in what key, although a structure and different sections could easily be separated from each other. For the second group, the creative process was a lot simpler. We thought of one idea and then elaborated it. I tuned my E string down on my guitar so it was an octave below the next string (A). Then I started playing a slow and heavy ostinato in which the basis of the composition took place. After the group and I had improvised around that ostinato, we structured a piece, rehearsed it once, then it was ready to perform. 3) I felt each performance was at a higher standard than I had anticipated. This was backed up by the positive feedback we received for each performance. If I was to do this task for the second time, I would follow the exact same procedures I did to begin with. The only thing that wouldn’t be the same, is that I’d make sure I had something absolutely solid in which we are conformable in performing, rather than half-improvising.

[jamescarlingfdmusicperf-blog]

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.