teaching-composition

[general apologies for the images in this post, which don't always link easily to the text. My parameter names kept changing over the few days spent composing this, which looks confusing now because the parameter names (descriptors) aren't always the same.] Having generated the phrases for the guitar and piano, I need to decide how this 5-mins of duet will relate to the rest of the ensemble. I decided to use the Xenakis rotating-cubes technique to generate a phrase-by phrase orchestration behaviour. Crucially, this only defines the type and size of orchestration, not the specifics: I could have generated very specific limitations on instruments etc but wanted to keep this free to save time really, and allow a more intuitive shaping of that aspect. I also wanted to avoid this being too 'blocky' and only mirroring the phrasing of the duet, so I allowed for some orchestrations to reach forward or backwards into neighbouring phrases. My first thoughts on this is th...

It's been two months between deciding the system I'd use for this duet, and actually implementing it. Inevitably a few things have shifted, but it's essentially the same as described in the first post here . Part of the delay was laziness about transferring the stream of numbers into notes on Sibelius, which it turns out was solved easily by using the 'seq' object in Max to turn the stream of numbers into a midi file, which could then be opened in Sibelius. Easy! The other delay was in trying to work out how the notation would work to (a) allow the guitar and piano to be together but drift apart at times, and (b) still allow the ensemble to play over the duet without requiring the guitar/piano players follow the conductor too strictly. The delay was one of those situations where I decided to just let me brain work on it without me (mulling it over sometimes without actually thinking about it too hard), and then some helpful chats with other composers made it f...