Schoenberg & dodecaphony; or, How I Need to Stop Worrying...
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 2:18 pm
As some of you may know, i'm a music major in college and nearing the end of my tenure there. That means that coming soon will be - you guessed it - my "Senior Recital"! Every graduating music major has to have one.
But interestingly, mine will be a first at my school, in that I won't be performing a song or playing/singing a single note, for that matter. Instead, my recital will be several of my compositions, performed by far-more-talented-than-I students. I've been studying composition at school for about two years now, and the recital will make for an interesting timeline - since some music will be performed that I wrote very early on in my studies, it'll show just how my music has progressed over that time (a LOT).
I have to admit though, that i'm slightly worried about how my music going to be received. I *know* this is going to come off as at least slightly egotistical, but I feel as if i've been writing above most casual music listeners, who don't understand what it is to be immersed in Arnold Schoenberg or to painstakingly analyze the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams. There will be a lot of music people there who will "get it", but what about everybody else?
For example, one of the pieces is a two-part invention for flute and clarinet based on Schoenberg's Twelve Tone Technique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique). To put it simply, the composer takes all twelve pitches, arranges them in an order so that they don't form any tonal arpeggios or more than two-note chromaticism. Once the pattern is established, the composer writes a piece using it, but the caveat is that you MUST use all twelve intervals in the order they were written, and can't go back to the first one until you get past the 12th one. They could also be inverted, reversed, but MUST follow the pattern still.
As you can imagine, it sounds totally atonal, well, because it is!
As I progressed in my writing, I got a bit more freedom to do what I wanted, instead of having to be avant-garde all the time. The last piece I wrote - and it was a doozy - was a six part choral piece set to the Billy Collins poem "The Parade". It's a far more "tonal" sounding piece that even ventures into pesudo-jazz a bit, melodically speaking.
After logging hour after hour after hour of tedius, painstaking writing that often had me completely creatively drained, I am a tad worried about the reception the music will get. Should I be?
(BTW: I have MIDI files of my compositions - i'll work on getting them up here somehow)
But interestingly, mine will be a first at my school, in that I won't be performing a song or playing/singing a single note, for that matter. Instead, my recital will be several of my compositions, performed by far-more-talented-than-I students. I've been studying composition at school for about two years now, and the recital will make for an interesting timeline - since some music will be performed that I wrote very early on in my studies, it'll show just how my music has progressed over that time (a LOT).
I have to admit though, that i'm slightly worried about how my music going to be received. I *know* this is going to come off as at least slightly egotistical, but I feel as if i've been writing above most casual music listeners, who don't understand what it is to be immersed in Arnold Schoenberg or to painstakingly analyze the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams. There will be a lot of music people there who will "get it", but what about everybody else?
For example, one of the pieces is a two-part invention for flute and clarinet based on Schoenberg's Twelve Tone Technique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique). To put it simply, the composer takes all twelve pitches, arranges them in an order so that they don't form any tonal arpeggios or more than two-note chromaticism. Once the pattern is established, the composer writes a piece using it, but the caveat is that you MUST use all twelve intervals in the order they were written, and can't go back to the first one until you get past the 12th one. They could also be inverted, reversed, but MUST follow the pattern still.
As you can imagine, it sounds totally atonal, well, because it is!
As I progressed in my writing, I got a bit more freedom to do what I wanted, instead of having to be avant-garde all the time. The last piece I wrote - and it was a doozy - was a six part choral piece set to the Billy Collins poem "The Parade". It's a far more "tonal" sounding piece that even ventures into pesudo-jazz a bit, melodically speaking.
After logging hour after hour after hour of tedius, painstaking writing that often had me completely creatively drained, I am a tad worried about the reception the music will get. Should I be?
(BTW: I have MIDI files of my compositions - i'll work on getting them up here somehow)
