This is a chronological overview and discussion of all (attempted) compositions I wrote. Here you find my thoughts on my compositions, what worked well, what didn’t and what learning objectives I want to bring to my next composition.
What I learned from ‘Willem de Zwijger’
I wanted to learn how to write a piece from one musical theme and keep unison in sound and feel without getting boring. First I added percussion as I learned from the Tango (see 2.), but I found that lack of harmonic development and new ideas cannot be compensated for by percussion. So I shortened the piece after a first trial and removed the snare drum part.
The piece is following the dramatic structure used in story telling as described in ‘The Addiction Formula’ by Friedemann Findeisen. You can read more about this in the blogpost ‘Story Telling with Music‘.
While writing I came across the phenomenon overtone series on the trombone. The use of overtone series makes pieces for trombone choir sound richer.
What I learned from ‘Gulden Sporen’
There is a way to work with different themes in one piece (up to 7), but here it did not work out. The use a the story pattern was useful, I decided to keep that and work on a new piece written from the view of one main character. It was a starting point into learning working from one musical idea.
What I learned from ‘Bore out’ Tango
The piece is a study on how long you can repeat stuff until it get’s boring. So I choose a rhythmically boring dance, the tango, to experiment. This was really on the edge. I conducted myself, so the tempo is what I had imagined. I found that adding percussion helps prevent boredom. The percussionists improved the composition with castagnetten. I found that people are really kind and willing to play your pieces if you ask them.
What I learned from ‘Thuis “
Date: Orchestra/Ensemble:
I learned that I would perfect a score I had written. I discovered you can have lucky accidents and compose a nice thing just by experimenting of making a wrong copy paste. I didn’t hear at the time, that there was a lot lacking, I just knew it was not great but could not name the mistakes. Now I can see that there is a lack of harmonic development with the first motiv, there is a lack of unity while different ideas follow each other (because of this lack of harmonic development). There is silly orchestration. This was the starting point.
