Month: September 2020

Symphony No. 1 – Realizing the original intent

I’m in the middle of working on the 2nd movement, I am now, and am going through the standard concern of whether what I’ve done so far, 3 weeks in, matches my formative thoughts of what I wanted this movement to express. Once you’re “inside” the piece, the phrases can sometimes take you in unexpected places. This is good for creativity, but bad if it sacrifices focus and creates more chaos than cohesion. Improvising can be this way but that’s different than what (certain approaches) to composing is.

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Symphony No. 1 – Finishing the 3rd movement, starting the 2nd

With this movement, and with each in the symphony, I want to dwell on a single theme in the way I did not and could not with my one-piece-per-month freshman exercises of last year. This work is my first major effort after those, and second efforts anachronistically always feel like senior theses to me, eschewing middle courses and diving in with more confidence. (This is a bit opposite to the curse of the sophomore slump but hopefully doesn’t result in an overfull mess.) Along with listening to it for coherence, I shallowly looked to the length in order to get a shorthand sense of whether I’ve committed enough time. The ~9 minutes of this movement feels like I’ve dwelt enough, and more importantly its flow and expression sound like it’s achieved enough. I’m content for now.

Mixing it in Dorico, which I plan after the symphony is complete, is going to take many weeks.

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