Composer Portraits: Marisa Ewing
Day 3- “Untitled Horror Song Experiment”
This piece is a bit older and was ultimately never finished, but it has become extremely influential in my style of composition. The most important and notable feature in this song is the higher, melody like bell tones. While it’s fair to assume that I chose the notes of the bells, they were actually determined by a synth. I chose the key and the speed, but the software itself chose the notes. I had struggled for a long time with being a perfectionist when it came to composing, so much so that I never seemed to actually finish pieces because I could always find something I thought needed improving. I decided to try an experiment where I gave up some control in this piece to my software so there was an element of this song I couldn’t change or obsess over until it was perfect. It turned into a really fun exercise, and I loved the idea of adding randomness to my pieces. This piece was the start of me adding random elements to my pieces. Since then I’ve created some pieces that allow players to choose how to play certain parts of my pieces, some that included more synth based random elements, and some where notes are chosen by a random number generator or by rolling dice as I’m composing.
Marisa Ewing - @the-sassy-composer