Recontextualization

I've started the next assignment!

I think I started and stopped and started and stopped this project that many times... My initial idea (writing for vocal quartet) has been abandoned (it will be revisited!) and I'm now writing for piano, violin, cello, and alto flute!

The concept I've chosen is to 'recontextualize' a musical concept. To read further on this, check out Dr. Ross's blog:

http://clarkross.blogspot.ca/2012/10/project-2-fall-2012-options.html

I think it's a pretty neat idea! It can be anything from mixing a 12 bar blues with classical writing, to pop 4-chord-songs averted, etc. etc! From what we discussed in class, the possibilities here and endless. So! I've only gotten about a minute into the piece but here's my concept:

I'm taking the opening motive of "Smoke on the Water"and putting it in an art music context.

For those of you who don't know "Smoke on the Water", spend about 5 minutes in the guitar section of Long and McQuade or feel free to check out this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WX_4FNoto4

So far, my piece opens with the piano playing the motive. What I've done is displaced the second note of the motive by an 8ve and it actually masks the renowned Deep Purple quote pretty well . From there, the piece uses primarily an octatonic scale (so far anyway...) and intergrates the motive in subtle ways including varying the rhythm, retrograding, etc.

It's still got a long way to go and I'm sure a lot of the ideas will change, but with only a couple weeks to write this one, I've gotta put the pedal to the metal and get this plane in the air.

...sure hope we don't have a crash landing here.

Edits

Ah... editing.

I sometimes wish there was a place like the Writing Centre on campus for someone to proof read my pieces like the would my papers! How awesome would that be!?

We tried peer editing in class to try and achieve this and I found it quite beneficial. I've done this in other classes and find it helpful and actually a good learning experience because you get to look at other peoples' music in such detail. I had some odd note spellings and rests that were needlessly complicated (I guess where I had made changes to the bar and Sibelius worked with what I had already inputted... if inputted is a word...) that were so clear to other people and so hidden to me! It was great! Like a musical scavenger hunt (haha).

I also found that having a hard copy of the score made it a lot easier to see my mistakes. I actually find the same thing when writing papers; once I print them off, I can clearly see errors that were seemingly non-existent on my computer screen.

Well... I had initially planned on posting some score excerpts on my blog entries, but here we are... at the end of project one and not a score has been seen! If you'd like to see one, you know where to find me!