Exercises, Warm-Ups and Having Fun

I have been struggling lately in finding time, energy, will-power, etc. to compose.  Dealing with this frustration and a desire to move on soon to grad school, I've been pondering what's been inhibiting me from composing.  Several different things have come to mind:
1) I've been trying to compose often when I get home from work after working sometimes more than 8 hours.  I'm too tired by this point to want to do much but sit back and not do anything.
2) I've been working on official pieces, ones that I'm hoping to use for grad school, and there has been too much pressure to get them all "perfect," each one needing to be a masterpiece.

Several solutions have come to mind:
1) Work in the morning when I'm not tired and I still have energy left to compose;
2) Spend time pondering as I'm going about my day about what needs to come next on certain pieces; and (most importantly)
3) Spend time every composition session (hopefully this will turn out to be every day) just warming up like I do when I practice:  do exercises, try stuff out, and especially have fun.

To help carry these three things out, it is now early in the morning, and I am about to just do some different warm-up pieces to try and compose different feelings with an orchestra.  This won't be anything that will likely to turn into an actual piece, so there's no pressure to "get it right," or get it perfect as I write, just a chance to have fun and experiment with what effect I can get from an orchestra.  A post will follow with the results of the mornings efforts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Harmony Postlude: Mary Had a Little Lamb in Minor

Image
As a precursor to an upcoming discussion on harmonies (or a "postlude," if you will pardon the musical pun), I wanted to rewrite "Mary Had a Little Lamb" again with the same melody but different harmonies, placed in such a way to put it in a minor instead of a major key.  This wasn't too hard, as there are only three notes (4 notes in some versions) in the whole song.  Here's the minor version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb:" While this is the same exact melody, a change in the harmonies can give the song a different feel, in this case quite sinister and very dark.  Since the melody used only DO, RE, and MI in the original key, I turned these into ME, FA, and SOL for the minor version. I've utilized a similar technique for my Piano Sonata to help change the feel of different movements but to connect them together.  The first movement is in A minor and starts out in the melody with a B-flat grace note going to the tonic, A.  The second move
Read more

We Three Kings: Free Sheet Music and Free Tutorial

Image
In order to teach some of the skills I've learned in my 16+ years of working with notation software, I've created a small arrangement for piano of the song by John Henry Hopkins Jr. "We Three Kings of Orient Are."  There are several things that I'm going to be doing with this small arrangement: 1) I'm going to be putting this arrangement for free on this blog (follow the link to find the free sheet music) for anyone who would like to download it. 2) I'll be creating stream-able music on YouTube and on SoundCloud for anyone who wants to hear the song. 3) I'll be creating a YouTube tutorial series showing how you would go about transcribing music (specifically this arrangement) into MakeMusic's music notation software "Finale." 4) I'll be taking suggestions for future things that I can create arrangements of and other videos that anyone would like to see.  :) I'm excited for this opportunity to share some music and some
Read more

Rohwer Skill Acquisition Pyramid

Image
I've been talking to my students for a while about my pyramid of learning skills and wanted to share some of the insights I've gleaned as to how people learn how to do stuff, more particularly as it applies to the arts. These are kind of the rambling thoughts I've had on the subject, and might be a little scattered still a the moment as I am still developing the ideas that are here. As I got finished teaching a few students one day, I realized that their pattern of learning followed a certain path, and that that same path was the same for me as I was beginning to learn how to play, and it has continued since then down that same path.  With these insights, I started to formulate a model for how people not only learn how to play music, but how they learn to a number of different skills.  What I came up with was this: Learning a new skill first involves the basic technique of how to do it.  For musicians, this involves the functions of holding an instrument and mak
Read more