Cliche

This week I began working on the new project, a musical cliche. I was deciding between bluegrass and disco and I chose bluegrass. I have a lot of different ideas for this cliche, and bluegrass has so many particular characteristics/instruments that can serve as a starting point for cliches. For example, much of the music is dominated by a 1-4 bassline and chords on the second and fourth beat. The instruments are usually banjo, guitar, bass, fiddle, and mandoline. Hopefully these things are enough to give me a bit of a starting point.

Last composition

I finished the last of my three pieces this week. The final piece, called "The Old Hag", was very difficult me at first. I found that I had a lot of ideas that I couldn't connect in a fluid way. I kept running into mental blocks, so I decided to go see Dr. Ross. He gave me lots of ideas, including how to physically write out all of the things that I wanted to do with the piano but didn't know how to notate correctly. When I played the piece in class, I received a lot of helpful feedback. The class really liked the part where I plucked the strings of the piano with my right hand. The most popular comment seemed to be that the ideas in my piece were interesting, they were just very short. The section with the strings being plucked on the piano is only six measures long. I was told that "The Old Hag" needed more fluidity in terms of ideas. It seems as though there are several different, contrasting ideas over a short period of time. This week, in refining my last three pieces, I'm going to work on connecting the different ideas in my piece.