Two notes on music composition

First Note :

I had my music composition lesson with Steve Kuykendall yesterday, and he brought up a good point about tempo.  I'm writing a psalm setting of Psalm 69, and there's alternating slow and fast sections.  The fast sections were almost too fast to be understood.  I couldn't say the lyrics fast enough.  But if I slowed the song down, then the slow section would be too slow.

He pointed out that I could slow down the fast section without slowing down the whole piece.  Composers do that all the time.  It never occurred to me to do that.  Almost all the modern music I'm listening has a constant beat to it, probably because most music is composed on computers and looped and layered, and that doesn't work at all if the tempo isn't maniacally consistent.

I learned about that while trying to record tracks in the Digital Music / Technology class I took last fall.

If I change the tempo in the piece, it will solve a musical problem I'm having, and also make the music stand out and sound different.  Interesting.

Second Note :

Youtube threw up an ad about Hans Zimmer's online master class while I was searching for Barber music.  In the ad, he says that music is like a story.  There's a call and response.  I hadn't thought about it that way before.  Thinking in terms of call and response might add more natural counterpoint to the pieces I'm working on.  I'm going to have to give it a try.

Also, I might have to take the class. 

Petrushka and Barber

I've been listening to Pandora stations while I code, and made a "David Newman" channel.  He wrote "Once Upon a December" from Anastasia, which came up when I was listening to the "La La Land" channel.  

The "David Newman" channel is an odd mix of film scores and 20th century piano music.  The channel just played "Petrushka", a piece for piano solo by Igor Stravinsky.  I didn't know Igor Stravinsky wrote any piano music, and I thought it was pretty interesting.  It's very difficult, and fairly long, so I would never be able to actually play it, but I wanted to make note of it here, so I can come back later if I want.

Here's a link to the song on youtube.



I also ran into some piano music by Samuel Barber.  I've only known him by his "Adagio For Strings", but he's got some interesting piano stuff, including these three sketches.  Each one is fairly simple, and about a minute long.  A lot more like something I would play, I think.

All three have interesting countermelodies in them.  Movement 1 is a waltz; Movement 2 is a slow waltz with some interesting chord progressions; Movement 3 sounds like something by chopin.

Movement 1; Movement 2; Movement 3