Thursday 25 October 2012

Assignment 1 week 6

Over the last couple of weeks, I have spent a great deal of time polishing up my first two movements of my piece. Since I am the piano player for the performance, a lot of this time was spent trying to make some sections more playable. After actually learning my own piece, I found that certain phrases begin with a chord or a motive which involve giant leaps from the end of the previous phrase. I found that in these cases, I also don't have much time to get there. So I spent time making changes so that there are no "panicked leaps". A few other things I changed involve the addition of ritardando's, especially in the first movement, in order to make the music flow a little better and to be less metric and "choppy". I have also fixed the notation of several chords. Many of my chords were notated poorly: either all in the bass clef when they could be spread to the bass and treble, or they made use of unnecessary enharmonic spellings. Besides this, I only changed the cello part at the beginning of the second movement. As Dr. Ross pointed out, I made use of the exact same rhythm with every arpeggio in every second bar. In order to add variation, I changed each chord's rhythm after the second repetition of the rhythm. In other words, I used the first rhythm the first two times and used new rhythms for the remaining times. As for the 3rd and final movement, it has only been completed recently and I never got a chance to play it for the class. Because of this, absolutely no changes were made to it.

Evan

Tuesday 9 October 2012

Assegnment 1 Week 3

There were 3 main comments on the last presentation of my piece that I have been working on/polishing up.

1.) Placing the piano below the cello on the score
2.) Indicate which notes trilled notes are trilling to
3.) Re-write the two-handed piano parts in one stave notation to two stave notation so that it becomes clearer as to which hand plays which notes.

I agree with all of these suggestions and have finally, after many hours of fooling around with Sibelius, figured out how to execute them in the notation program. All three help make my score look more professional, which I like.