Creating the Wheel

The outline and guidance on Dr. Ross's hand out about how we should go about Composition Project 1 is very interesting.

"Week 1 will be spent creating a chord progression"

To me, a full week for a chord progression seemed like a lot of time. I mean, sure... we had to create our OWN (not the Oprah Winfrey Network... she's got that covered) chords that weren't functional in tonality, but still. A week seemed a little excessive. What I found to my surprise, however, is that a week is a great amount of time for creating such a progression. These chords are what your piece is based on. It doesn't get much more fundamentally important than that. When I began writing, I knew I wanted around 14 chords (not only because we were told 12-16 and that was a happy medium in the middle, but I thought it was a good number to achieve a "golden ratio" that had grown for just the right amount of time).

I found three distinct difficulties when trying to compose my chords:

1. Starting
2. Creating the climax
3. Coming down from the climax

...so essentially the entire process of writing the chords start to finish.

Once I got past the initial "Start" point of composing the chords, I found that after writing a couple you had a sense of what kind of atmosphere you were really going for here. If you listen to the different progressions even within our small class, you'll hear very different characters emerging. After the first couple chords, I found Chords 3-7 fell in to place with relative ease.

Around Chord 8, I was approaching where the climax should be, and found several "tension adding compositional techniques" beneficial. Some I found helpful were: simply adding more notes in the chords; adding m/M2 and m/M7 intervals around notes you already have in the chord; writing polychords (I found this surprisingly great!); and expanding the range of the outside voices.

Finally (mind you, this was after a couple days of tweeking the chords I already had... my indecisiveness is sure to shine through this Blog- no, not just this post... likely the entire blogspot), I tried to bring the piece down to a tension level of about 2/10. Even up to the point of playing them in class I wasn't sold on the end of the progression, but have since worked on it and am relatively pleased.

The reason why I say I agree with a week being a good amount of time for creating the chord progression is because the whole process really should take about that long. I wrote around 9 chords in one night and the other 5 the next day. However, it took more than a day and a half for me to reach the chords I have now. To me, you really want to set yourself up for success here. To ensure that when you go on to write the piece you are satisfied, you want to go back and play your chords, adjust a few things, and play them for your peers to get some feedback. Even if on Day 1 you write a complete chord progression and after seven days of playing, adjusting, and getting opinions, you wind up with the exact progression you had started with on Day 1, that process of developing the colours and securing your faith in the chords is essential.

At least that's my opinion anyway. Like I said, by nature I'm pretty indecisive, so if I'm making a decision, I want to be pretty sure about it!

And now... on to picking instrumentation!