Final Recital of the Final Piece

So this may be one of the few of these posts to be written relatively close to the events contained in the post. What a thought! I guess I'm a true procrastinator! To cap off these blog posts about an excellent semester of composing and what I think was definitely a big step in compositional growth for myself, I have some thoughts on the final recital and end result of the last piece.

This piece, as previously mentioned, seemed to really flow composition wise. Now thinking back to the final performance and completion of the piece, this also may be due to the fact that it is a setting of text. When setting text, the idea is to make the music serve the text. This may be a big reason why the music seemed to be guided ahead constantly. The text served as an inspiration for the mood and musical themes of each section while a phrase was being sung. It also contributed to the rhythmic motion of the piece. During points of high tension in the text, it was clearly a time to make things musical tense. Similarly, when the text transitioned from the lighter poem to it's darker counterpart, it was time to create some darker textures and make some out of the ordinary sounds with extended techniques. I also think using the speak-singing technique during the darker was definitely effective as it blended in with the uneasy feel of the text. Overall, setting a text proved to be a very positive composing experience for myself. I think it's something that I will continue to especially pursue with composing.

The performance also went extremely well. I believe it's difficult to compare the previous performance to this one as they were both very different pieces and required different steps to effectively put together. This piece was also allowed much more rehearsal time. I believe though that the piece did go quite smoothly with only minor timing errors. After the last performance experience, I began to really put the major focus of these quick recitals on making sure the piece sounds effective and it's main concepts come across. I mostly hope that even with some note or timing errors, the emotion I hope to display with the piece is felt. I think this was achieved with the performance of this piece. The intense sections felt especially intense, and the calmness I hoped to portray in others worked great as well. Once again I was supported by some incredibly talented and professional musicians. In general, I couldn't of asked for a better group of composers and musicians to work with this term and I look forward to many more terms just like this one!