Category: composition1

Due: Friday, May 3, by noon. (turn in to my MU 207 office). Your final composition is a duet, approximately 1.5 – 2 minutes in length. One of the instruments should be from an instrumental group that you haven’t written for in either of your solo compositions. Both instruments should be from the woodwind, and/or…

Complete the worksheet I handed out in class (First and Second Species Counterpoint). Due 4/8 or 4/9. For the first melody, change the first C5 to a Bb4. I realize that I told the T/Th class I wouldn’t assign this until Tuesday, but given that you have done some first and second species counterpoint in…

UPDATED: NEW DUE DATE Due April 1 and 2 Compose a 3.5 – 4 minute composition for solo, single line instrument. Your composition should explore diversity and extremity of expression than your first composition. Consider using adjective prompts like we used for the last melody assignment, but don’t necessarily go with your first idea. Give…

Now would be a good time to point all of you to a recent blog post I wrote about consonance, dissonance, and beauty. I posted it on my rather sporadically updated blog, processed_sound. You can poke around, but other posts are all much older. (I’m trying to get into a habit of posting twice a…

Due Friday 3/1 (both classes, before you leave for spring break!) Compose four melodies, two to three phrases long, using the following prompts: frenzied serene searching/questioning M/F: adventuresome, T/R: foreboding The melodies should be for specific instruments, and should include at least two for an instrument family (woodwinds, string, brass) different from the one used…

Your next listening and score study assignment involves works that are quite different from what we have been listening to in class, and probably quite different from your normal listening habits. Iannis Xenakis: Mikka (violin) Brian Ferneyhough: Time and Motion Study no. 1 (bass clarinet) Download XenakisFerneyhough.zip You should understand that the musical selections for…

Due 2/21 and 2/22 Write a composition for solo wind (woodwind or brass) instrument of your choice. The piece should be either chromatic tonal or non-tonal and approximately 2.5 minutes in length. The work should have at least two important motivic ideas, but how you present and develop these ideas is up to you. You…

Two new works to look at for next week: Vincent Persichetti, Parable for Solo Horn Elliott Carter, Gra for Solo Bb Clarinet Scores and audio are together in one folder, downloadable from my iLocker. Look over these two works for motivic/thematic content. We will probably also revisit the second and third movements of the Stravinsky.

As you prepare your next set of melodies for performance on 1/31 and 2/1, here is a list of basic notation, instrumentation, and composition issues that you should make sure you address. Always include a tempo marking, in the form of durational value = number of beats per minute. It can be useful to also…