I forgot to post this here last semester, so I thought it'd be a good idea to do so now. This piece is an experiment on the themes, motives and overall atmosphere of the musical landscape for the world and characters of an urban fantasy narrative I've been building this year. Below is fan art of the two lead protagonists ,courtesy of the artist Hollow Chimes, Chase & Asim, who have newly stepped into the role of hosts for the Yin & Yang spirits: The Spirits of Balance. The score and all its parts can be found below as a PDF.
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For this one, since the brief was far more open ended, I went with a more or less Binary form and took inspiration for Clara Schumann's scores for piano and voice as they were very dynamic and interesting to me. I struggled a bit with trying to nail the right atmosphere for a classical piece and have a feeling I may have just missed the mark as it sounds more "Music Theatre" inspired than an authentic romantic piece. This may be because of the pedalled and suspended piano harmony in the B section of the piece, but when analysing romantic scores, I saw suspended harmonies often enough to warrant it in this regard. We were also required to include chromatic harmony which I did so through including a flat major VII chord in the A section and switching the tone quality of the IV to a vi in the B section. I could have pushed this a little more to the foreground but was held back by time constraints as well as my desire to keep the piece as flowing as possible. The lyrics I wrote were inspired by the story of Narcissus and how in our day and age, masculine insecurities about appearances are often invalidated or misinterpreted by social media. So I wrote a song about a woman trying to tell her insecure spouse how much she loves him and wishes he could see him through her eyes.
We had to compose a minuet for out Music Techniques unit and though I was initially concerned, I got 28/30 for my score as I went simple and concise (even though I forgot to add in repeats and the end of section 2 and 4).
This was a difficult assignment, partly due to it's open ended nature and partly due to my struggle to nail down what I wanted to do / accomplish with this assignment. From the start, I knew that I wanted to mess around with sampling, additive synthesis and vocoding as it was what engaged me the most during class. However, my initial ideas gradually felt more and more stale to me as the semester went on so it took me a while to get started.
When I finally asked myself what I really wanted to make, I discovered that I actually wanted to make something dumb and light hearted; something I didn't have to pour my soul into and could just laugh at with some friends. So, I downloaded the audio from an episode of a let's play that I'm a fan of, cut it up and sampled it into additive synthesisers to remix it with loops, play around with logic's sculpture synths and generally have a fun go about it. I'm surprisingly chuffed with the outcome, after seeking some help from a few friends who are more well versed in the world of sampling and synthesisers than I am. The link to the track can be found below on my Soundcloud. Oaki's Pilgrimage (Trial By Arrows)
This piece took me a while to construct but I was super excited to begin analysing how to develop and transform a theme using different compositional techniques whilst at the same time ensuring that the work functioned as a whole structure. Some of the formatting for this score was a bit funny (I have a tense relationship with Sibelius), however, I was able to include all the different techniques I was keen to write for including harp harmonics, buzz rolls, flutter tonguing and brass mutes. I am intrigued to see this score get marked so I know what to work on in regards to my arrangement skills. The title of the piece is "Yurahi: The City of Balance".
A link to the midi track on Soundcloud can be found here: Yurahi: The City of Balance Soundcloud
Below are the files for my composition for my first structures assignment as a "block form" piece. This was an interesting challenge as I had to manurer my way through different overlapping key signatures and figure out a way to make all the different blocks as unique from each other as possible. I decided to use this assessment to help work out some thematic ideas for a story that I am building upon for a project later next year, thus the reason for the title "Motive Mapping". The first file is the clean score and the second is the annotated score
I got permission to build upon my previous assessment for sound recording by adding more instruments and re-recording some of the tracks that I knew I could've done better. My notes of the process are in the file below. The link to the final bounce for my sound mixing project is right here: "Oversaturated" Sound Mixing Project
I got the wonderful opportunity to work with Nina Brown on her 3rd year recital. Her piece was based on the mythos of Pandora's box and she extended this meaning to surround how we treat each other - with contempt and pettiness or genuine love and care. To get this across, she used 2 different composers, including myself, to make the different sections. I was asked to compose the second half of the piece, that was all about "hope" and the best parts of human relationships. So we traded back and forth for the kind of vibe she wanted with reference tracks and after creating a vague mock-up of the track, we messaged back and forth to make tweaks to it, sometimes with me coming into rehearsals to edit on the fly. Nina was fantastic to work with and had a really strong vision of what she wanted - but I felt like I got to slip in some stuff of my own including this waltz at the end of the section that she liked so much, that she choreographed new material for it!
"Thanks so much @Hannah I just listened to it and its perfect exactly what I needed thank you!" - Nina Brown You can listen to the final draft of the piece on my Soundcloud right here and the final performance in a later post. Soundcloud Link "Pandora's Hope" |
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Artist SummaryI'm a WA Fremantle based singer-songwriter / composer. Here, you can have a gawk at my studies, compositions and performances. Archives
August 2022
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