Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Juggling School and Composition

Been extremely busy with schoolwork BUT I have had a little bit of time (mainly weekends) to start a new composition. This work is inspired by a myth I read in my current World Religions class. The story is a Native American myth centered around the First Butterflies. I've become rather enamored with the text. The story relates how the Great Spirit created the Earth and how he wished humanity would love his creation. He came to realize, in the myth, that the mountains he created were cold and therefore he worried that humanity would not love them. To fix this, he created stones of all colors and placed some within/on the mountains. After sometime, he realized that the stones themselves weren't doing the job - then he transformed them into butterflies so that they could lead man up to the mountains. Beautiful story! The work takes this story and attempts to transform it into music - obviously. The opening is what I have completed so far. I'm rather impressed at this work of mine, not only has it been painstaking to gestate and write BUT it has also been something I have been taking great attention to the minute details of it.


The work can be viewed in process here: Story of the First Butterflies

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Extremely busy... again!

School started a week ago and I have been EXTREMELY busy this semester. I haven't posted a post here in almost a month - largely due to going to Indianapolis to see family during the Christmas holiday and school starting up last week. Haven't really had much time to do composition sadly. I partook in a wonderful discussion on Young Composers Music Forum regarding the organization of the various 'periods' of music in a timeline. Fascinating hearing how younger composers and musicians feel on this topic. I never really had a problem with the common timeline (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, etc.) I always felt that grouping composers in any manner is difficult due to overlaps existent in each epoch. Certainly, there are some rather Classical moments in Handel and some rather Baroque moments in Beethoven. Bach, and his sons, at times had rather Romantic moments as well! Beethoven's Grosses Fugue, to use a unique example, is strikingly modern in content and scope - truly a work centuries before it's time! Ah, thank God I'm not a musical historian. :P