#young composer

[hercuthree]

Here it is! The video version of my piece, "Do The Angels Consider Us Human" is live! If you would like, click here to presave wherever you listen to music <3 Sheet music can be purchased here

[laurenwritesmusic]

Heyo Tumblr friends!

I’ve been gone from here for a while (not truly gone, but lurking), but I’m back with a glorious return after working on a bunch of projects. So, here’s what I’ve been up to!

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve finally set up an official website for all my work. There you can read about me, my compositions, as well as some other fun things like my written academic work, which includes a comparative analysis of Ravel’s orchestration of Ma mère l’Oye, another orchestration analysis discussing the use of the orchestra as an accompanying body, and a few more niche discussions about Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.

I’ve also set up a YouTube channel, which I will post performances and videos of my works to (and maybe some scrolling scores and personal projects, but we’ll see). I’ll be posting links to the individual videos here as they’re uploaded, along with anything else I publish.

Finally, I’m incredibly excited to be seeing my new work Pilgrimage to Patroclus performed by the incredible Omega Ensemble at the Sydney Opera House at the beginning of December. If you happen to live in the area and want to come along (or just feel like checking out the program) then all the details are HERE on the Omega Ensemble’s website. This piece was commissioned as part of the CoLAB: Composer Accelerator Program run by Omega, and they’re currently accepting applications for 2022. So, if you’re an emerging composer from Australia (between the ages of 21 and 35) then I would highly encourage you to apply!

Between this, I’ve also been working on my Masters degree in composition, so you can expect to see bits of that pop up every now and then too!

Godspeed, everyone!

[jkl-fff]

MUSIC! (part 5)

Today’s piece is called The Chopped-Up Garden:

Performed and recorded at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee's High School Composers Intensive.

Composed in 2018 (in a single day!)

"The Chopped-Up Garden was written as part of a challenge in the Boston Conservatory at [BHSCI]. We listened to and analyzed Chopin’s Prelude op. 28 no. 6 in b minor, and were given 24 hours to compose a two-page response. 

It took Chopin’s somber feeling in his prelude and expanded on it, through similar 8th note ostinatos and scalar motions. However, I took a more modern spin with my melody, allowing it to drive itself through and away from the quiet gloominess of Chopin’s piece. In some ways, I tried to make it the opposite of Chopin’s piece, using larger intervals and jumps through the melody (as opposed to his more conjunctive motion melodies) ...”

   As an aside, the tune reminds me of the backdrop and setting    of the Over the Garden Wall miniseries.

[kaythejay]

Writing for an entire concert band is hard.

And I haven't even gotten to transposing yet

[violeeeva]

animal crossing inspired lo fi beat

[Samples used from ACNL and ACWW]

[musicb3cca]

Laura Bowler workshop

This is a short review for my bronze Arts Award - I’m reviewing a Laura Bowler workshop that I attended at the 2018 Sound and Music summer school for young composers.

Overall I enjoyed the event - Laura Bowler gave us a very engaging talk about physical performance, and gave us the opportunity to introduce ourselves to each other in interesting ways by singing or shouting our names to the rest of the group. She talked to the group about physical performance, including body movement and facial expressions when playing or singing. Laura composes modern music, focusing lots of her work on atonality. I enjoyed learning about her career as a composer, although I think the workshop would have been better if we had the chance to ask her some questions about her music. Overall, though, I liked learning about physical performance, and the exercises we did as a group helped us get to know each other better.

[musicainextenso]

Dear Followers!

I’m Richard, or @you-had-me-at-e-flat-major , and I’ve been invited to @musicainextenso to talk about my own compositions as well as my composing process. Over this week I’ll be presenting 4 compositions. In general I like to explore different styles in my works, sometimes emulating existing composers, sometimes experimenting on my own. I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse the poor recording quality, all of the compositions I will present over this week use synthesised instruments in their recordings. That being said, I’d like to start with a piano piece, whose synthesised recording doesn’t actually sound half bad, called Cerfs-volants (French for kites).

My intention for this piece was to create an impressionistic piano piece based on the style of Debussy, and I chose to write a piece evoking the image of kites. The most difficult part of writing this piece was finding a beginning theme. In order to do this, I attempted to emulate some of Debussy’s trademarks. Debussy frequently used alternative harmony such as whole-tone scales and extended chords including major 7th and major 9th chords, which led me to base the introduction and first few themes on tetratonic scales (ex. D♭-E♭-G♭-A♭-D♭, bars 1-6) and major 7th and minor 7th chords.

The piece was written in a non-standard form: Introduction-A-B-C-D-Introduction-A1-Coda. The introduction and A theme were based on the tetratonic scale and 7th chords. The B and C sections serve as contrast. The B theme consists of various major 7th and later minor 7th chords, shrinking to 6th chords, major triads, suspended chords and augmented chords, all played over an ostinato, followed by arpeggios. The C theme is starkly different: it consists of very strong, ff arpeggios in C major. During this, the note A♭ is gradually added to facilitate modulation to Fm for the next section.

One difficulty faced was returning after much harmonic development in the B and C sections to the original tonic key of D♭. I achieved this by adding a slower D section of arpeggios based on F minor, gradually adding G♭s to facilitate modulation via an A♭7 chord back to D♭ for the recapitulation.

In order to prevent repetitiveness, I did not recapitulate much: only the introduction and a modified A theme. A coda followed: a series of arpeggios in D♭ and A♭7, ending with an elongated section of D♭ arpeggios with the pedal held.

Enjoy! - Richard B. ( @you-had-me-at-e-flat-major )

[hercuthree]

can you drop the lyrics for Do the Angels Consider Us Human?

Sure! The lyrics are from The Muppet Joker, here is the original post. I altered the final line "That they may yet return to me my Muppet Love" to "That they may return to me my love" in order for it to have the same number of syllables as the previous lines, and therefore fit into the pseudo-quaternary form I composed it in. If you'd like the sheet music, it is now up for sale on my Gumroad! Purchase it here