Compose Along With Me

AIM Music Mart
Your Destination
for Best-of-Breed
Online Music Sellers
* * *
Home
* * *
AIM is a proud
sponsor of
DC-ACF's
New Music Salon
* * *
Sample My Music
East of the River
Interviews
Discoveries
Honorable Mentions
From the Collection
Composer Talk
Spotlight Artists
Sign of the Times
Commentary
My Music
Track My Progress
What They're Saying
Humor
Shopping
Free Music for Students

Track
My
Progress

A more-or-less monthly chronicle of the piece I'm working on now.
Compose along with me....

Past Works -
Jung Again
Dark Energy
Man and His Cymbals

March 2008

Finished! It ended with a bang, not a whimper as previously envisioned. (The unexpected always happens.) Overall, my music is beginning to incorporate additional compositional techniques. I am finding the beginning of artistry. I've been writing counterpoint for some time and Dreamanicity contains its share, but here I also develop a previously stated theme, transition with a direct modulation, and write over-the-bar phrases where the concluding notes don't end on the strong beats. Over-the-bar phrasing, when done smoothly, is not overtly noticeable but does give the music a natural, improvisational feel, in the manner of great vocalists like Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald. Here's an unorchestrated clip with just enough instruments for you to hear all three techniques clearly.

February 2008

All the pieces of the puzzle have been sorted out or discarded. I now see the whole work from beginning to end. I have one major section left to wrote, plus the ending. The major section will provide contrast in terms of harmony, tone color, and texture, but that's all I know about it so far. I want the ending to ascend into the ether, like the beginning.

As a whole, the work has ended up less ambient and more directed than I originally conceived. Writing ambient music where nothing much happens doesn't come easily to me. Which is probably a good thing because I tend not to like ambient music very much anyway.

November 2007

My study period is over and I've come up with a dozen or so snippets that I'm now trying to organize into something coherent. It's like working a jigsaw puzzle - I found three clips that go well in sequence, but haven't found the pieces that make the outer frame, i.e., the beginning and the end. For me, this is the toughest part - organizing my material when everything is murky.

I did find useable elements in earlier parts of the Jung Again Suite. Dark Energy yielded two ideas. First, I've come up with chord progressions in an electric piano voice that go up in runs instead of sounding all at once in blocks. Second, the tension between 3/4 and 4/4 time in Dark Energy has gone a step further in Dreamanicity, to 7- and 10-note cycles. The cycles occurred to me naturally and were not something I consciously set about to devise. They fit the dreamy atmosphere I'm trying to create so I kept them.

Here's a sample where you can hear the chord arrangement and rhythmic ideas.

September 2007

I've started a new project, Dreamanicity, which continues the Jung Again Suite. The title melds two Jungian references, dream analysis and synchronicity. I've started, as I always do, with a study period. This time, I'm looking at four pieces of music that have the kind of floating dreaminess I have in mind - Debussy's symphonic work Nuages (Clouds) from the Nocturnes; Holst's Neptune for chorus and orchestra from The Planets; a slow Largo from Haydn's Piano Sonata No. 7; and a few bars from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 where the same theme enters in different voices a measure apart (canonic imitation, like 'Three Blind Mice').

I decided not to write 'ambient' music that floats and never goes anywhere for its entire length. Brian Eno is credited with starting the genre and contemporary 'new music' composers have picked it up. Instead, I will be looking for usable elements from earlier parts of the Jung Again Suite.

I'm paying special attention to Nuages. It's the first time I've gone over a score so carefully in preparing a new piece. Brahms explicitly modeled some of his pieces on the works of earlier composers, which goes a lot farther than I'm doing with Nuages. I'm not trying to model Debussy; instead, I'm trying to see how a master solved certain technical problems, developed his material, and created a mood similar to the one I want to evoke.

I'm starting with a melody that came to me when I first started doodling with ideas for the Suite.

Here's an early idea I'm considering.