Week 2: Develop // Mar 29th
Welcome to Week 2's main thread! Here you can find the outline of materials and sample exercises to get you started. Then, post your finished exercises (either all at once or one at a time depending on your work flow.) Please use the following format when posting:
- Type(s) of development exercises used:
- Things you found easy:
- Things you found difficult:
Feel free to include any other thoughts in your post!
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Okay. It was the Holy Week, andI had little time. So, I stole some time. Tempo rubato not the case of this exercise.
worked on: a 7 note theme, in 2 motifs, the 7th note appearing only in the second motif. I tried some voicing and rhythmic variations.easy: once established the theme, find ways to work with it.
difficult: work with brain and sound, my brain wants to maintain order while the sound ( playing on the guitar) tells me it’s too cerebral and rigid.. very hard to find a true expression.but okay it’s just the beginning, an exercise, to explore composition techniques
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Hi Ash,
I created a 5 note dotted rhythm motive. Then did a bit of Fragmentation and voice switching with straight 8th note rhythm. Next, introduced some scaler lines and chords. Ended the exercise with back to a dotted rhythm and retrograde melody.
It was relatively easy doing the mechanical variations.
It was difficult thinking of a musical idea and starting the exercise, and not sure about the logic of my dotted rhythm motive along with the straight rhythms.
I welcome your comments/suggestions. Thanks!!!
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OK - I have used my previous theme and I got bossa-nova (the title was created because I have no inspiration and I'm lazy for Easter). I don't think I can afford more today. I don't know if it will be possible to record it for the Monday livestream ...
In Poland, the second day of Easter (Monday) is called "Śmigus-Dyngus" and people pour water on each other on the street. If I stay at home - maybe I can record it For now, I'm sending a computer generated mockup...
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OK Debbie , Marek Tabisz and Blaise Laflamme , you twisted my arm.
Here's a recording of the piece. Er, you didn't ask for a good performance, so... you get what you wish for . I did my best with the time I had. Thanks for your encouragement!
There is an added cat this time to make up for it though.
I gave it a title - "Arisings and Passings"
Oh, and I forgot to say what was easy and difficult:
Easy - the task of just doing the diminution, transposition etc. and exploring the musicality of the material
Hard - I had ideas for how I wanted to relate all the materials, but often the natural development of a single phrase would go in a slightly different direction to the one I was planning, e.g. I was planning to direct the melody to a specific note at the end so that it would resolve to where I wanted later, but that melody ended up progressing to far, or it needed too many repetitions to get to the point I wanted and became too repetitive. I also found that the melodic transformations I was doing here prodded me towards a more Bach-type texture, which is OK, but I found a little tricky to maintain a style I like and use more interesting sonorities on the guitar. Also, just deciding clearly on the harmony - I knew the types of chords I wanted, and I didn't want to do anything particularly classical, but as soon as you attempt to do things untraditionally, you deprive yourself of all the technical resources the traditional systems have.
I also made some minimal changes to the score too, so here it is again: