Tim Rohwer: Composer

As a fun experiment, a decided to take a shot at some minimalism as a weekly warm-up.  Minimalism is where you take a few basic elements and develop art from them.  The idea is simplicity, although sometimes the results can be quite complicated in sound and appearance.  For example, here is a minimalist painting on the right.  It takes a shape and colors to form a painting.  the result is quite beautiful. Composers can do the same thing in music.  An example is Steve Reich's clapping music: The composer takes a rhythm and has people clapping it.  One group then shifts the notes.  This creates an amazing effect that sounds new and fresh even though it is the same rhythm again and again. Another famous minimilist composer is Phillip Glass who wrote the music for "The Truman Show" and "The Illusionist" among others.  Again, he uses some simple ideas to create pretty neat music. I tried my hand at this style of composition and came up...

After coming back this week to work on the fugue that I had originally started last week, I found that somehow it had all been erased except the first measure.  I was a little flustered and frustrated by this, until I realized it could be an excellent opportunity to start again with some fresh ideas and some new insights.  So, here is a newly updated fugue with a completely different subject.  Again, the subject was one that I wanted to be something you would be okay hearing again and again throughout the piece, and the counter-subject something to match it in enjoyable-ness, and yet not to be too "overbearing," to drown out the subject. Thinking as well about last week's attempts, I realized too that a 4-voice fugue for piano would have to be carefully crafted to include all four voices in such a way that no voices were lost, there would be little to no crossing of voices (lower voices going higher then higher voices and vice versa), and this would all need to be c...

I've been thinking about grad school and some of the essential knowledge and skills that I'll need, and one that has come to mind is counterpoint.  Since I began learning about counterpoint, I have been fascinated with this compositional technique.  In High School, I began to write two part inventions for piano, and ended up writing about 26-28 of them.  I don't exactly remember because somehow in throwing out some old school work, I must have managed to throw these out as well.  It's probably just as well since I had a limited understanding at best of harmony, of counterpoint, and of music theory and composition in general.  My guess is that they would have ended up sounding quite gross, to say the least. However, my fascination with polyphony continued, and I eventually wrote a fugue that took as its theme the Mario Brothers theme, changed a little to sound a little more classical.  In the end, I came up with a very classical sounding Fugue on a Theme...

Having lacked time and energy, my plan to weekly spend time writing at least part of something fun as a warm-up to stretch my composing abilities has suffered considerably.  However, things have somewhat settled down and I've been able to do some composing and have a new short snippet to post, and here it is: Light-Hearted My goal with this was two-fold: 1) Write something in a compound meter (something which I haven't used quite as often).  In this case, I used 6/8 2) Write something that is happy, fun, and light-hearted (something I also haven't done as often, at least lately) The result I felt was quite pleasing.  What I tried to do to add to that light-heartedness was to make the tempo very jaunty and almost dance-like.  I also used a lot of chromatic non-harmonic tones to help add to the almost silly feeling.   I originally had the melody in the Viola (partly from personal bias, partly from necessity), but felt that brass could more effectively...

Having gotten some more time to work on some composing, I've got an update on the last warm-up exercise I've been performing for the past two weeks.  My intent was to take a YouTube video, put it on mute, and then write a soundtrack to it.  I chose my video and got to work. So far I have not heard back from the owner of the video.  When I do, I hope to put the soundtrack in the background of the video so you can see how the two correlate to each other. For now, here is what I have so far for my soundtrack: The process of doing this has been very instructive.  A few of the considerations I've had to take into account for this exercise: 1) Matching the style of the video and the overall feeling in the soundtrack with what's happening in the background. The video I chose has only one mood, which is nice for me to practice with.  I've felt that this video has a calm, serene, and even beatific quality to it, and that is what I've tried to make my comp...

This week I decided I would try my hand at trying to score for a movie.  I went on to YouTube and found a video I liked, turned it on mute, and then started writing.  It's been interesting so far.  I've contacted the owner of the video and hope to have a response soon as to whether I can put the video with the music on this blog, but if not, I'll showcase my attempt sans video. Some interesting dilemmas so far:  trying to find the right orchestration to fit the background and trying to line up the music to correspond with the video.  Also, though at the beginning stages, I'm hoping to make something that could stand on its own, with a discernible melody and form that does not get boring or repetitive as the piece/video goes on.  We'll see soon how I've done!

The results are in for this new way of composing for me, and I can already tell that it is going to be an effective change in my compositional technique.  Several things I noticed: When I felt that the piece I was working on was "just for fun," and wasn't expecting the piece to be a masterpiece, it freed up my creativity and helped me feel comfortable to try out things I wasn't as familiar with.  For example, I tried several unusual ostinatos, different special effects, and some chord progressions that I haven't used as much in the past.  When I've been composing "official" pieces, I've been somewhat hesitant to use any of these neat but currently difficult for me to use techniques. Because I wasn't thinking as much about a final result, I was also able to let the form take on whatever shape it seemed to need, and the piece I worked on didn't feel contrived or fitted to a specific pattern.  I also was having fun and feeling as...

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 ...