This reflection corresponds to Composing Music – Assignment 2

The assignment reserves a portion of the task to reflections about the compositional process and presentation. We have been asked to assess critically how the completed assignment responds to the assessment criteria below. I will give a few thoughts on this as I await for feedback from my tutor.

To begin, I will say that this was not an easy assignment to complete, or rather, it wasn’t an easy assignment to start. I went back and forth between two separate ideas for nearly a week, until finally combining the two together in the best way I that occurred to me: stopping one section and introduce the next, before resurfacing the first section until the end, all without warning. I feel like this is going to be an ongoing issue during the course, but the playback from the software, although incredibly useful, can be a bit misleading at points, but I think in this exercise I over-relied on it a bit during the writing process.

The form of the piece ended up being a simple ABA form. I had a look at some other compositions done for this assignment from students in the past and it seemed like a lot of the good ideas proposed by other students were given very short prominence in their works. It seems like in the spirit of writing many small contrasting parts to fit a 2 minute composition, they put a strong focus on trying to craft this narrative within their piece but doing so in many underdeveloped sections. From the work done analyzing solo woodwind pieces, I found the most effective compositions to be those that stuck to the core material they started with and worked them in more detail. I have tried to do this with my composition, and while I’m not sure how effective I was in achieving that, it was a very good framework to work with and to try and compose within.

The main idea for the piece was born out of one melody exercise completed for Project 7. I wrote it and had it meandering in my head for a number of weeks so I knew I wanted to develop this idea a bit and didn’t want to make excuses for it. The middle section of the piece was born out of an improvisation and it is my favourite section of the song, in particular the Maestoso opening ascending sequence:

I couldn’t find a good way to exit section A and this was a bit of a shortcut to change the mood, tempo, and to some extent the tonality. I’m not a massive fan of program music, where some outside narrative is communicated by the composition, and this was a section that I simply enjoy listening back to and I think that it has its merit.

I had many issues with deciding on key signatures for this piece, and in the end I kept it with no key signature following the experience of many, if not most, of the compositions I looked at in my listening log. In the middle section I even tried different combinations that would sort out many of the sharps evident in this section, however this only seemed practical in the transposed score, as the concert pitch score was bringing up other issues. To be fair, this got a bit confusing and I wish I understood better the process for communicating this. Furthermore, I tried to work with the transposing score in front of me as much as possible, to get an idea of how this would look.

For the recapitulation of section to A, I had originally wanted to dismantle the principal theme and to develop it further, but aside from some extended lines I liked the way it closes the piece. I think the ending is a bit short (and predictable) as it is, but I might revise this after feedback from my tutor. I think a big closing passage that explores the possibilities of the instrument and challenges the performer would be something that I would want to change about this composition.

Interestingly, while searching out for a lot of the bass clarinet repertoire in preparation for this task I ended up coming back to compositions whose focus is on everything but melody. This unit has a VERY strong focus on melodic development, so it was a bit of a struggle to keep the focus of the composition on the melody without deviating too much from the maxim of the unit. I feel like I could have synthesized a lot of the material studied in this unit a bit better, including extended techniques and utilizing the personality of the chosen instrument to greater effect. However, I’m happy with the melodic focus of the composition, as that is what I set out to do from the start.