Vestiges is finished!

My string quartet, Vestiges, is finished! Cool! I completed the final (fourth) movement last week, and just finished revising the piece as a whole. Awesome! The score is ready to be printed and bound, and I should also consider submitting it for inclusion at a new music festival this year so it can be performed. The trouble sometimes is that to submit materials for such festivals, a recording is usually required and MIDI realizations don't really capture the piece. Too bad I don't have my own personal string quartet at my disposal for recording a reading of the piece! Whatever!

At any rate, this week I will share a MIDI realization of the second movement with you. This particular MIDI rendition sounds quite synthesized. Real string instruments would sound a lot different, but the track gives you a basic idea of what I have written. Here is a description of the movement:

The primary material for this movement is a driving sixteenth-note theme, first introduced simultaneously by all four instruments played in octaves. This theme appears throughout the movement in many forms—inverted, played backwards, and in canon at various intervals between the instruments. Its form is in two large parts; the second section begins with an imitative treatment of the main theme in retrograde (played backwards).

Here it is:

Time for Challenge No. 2

It is the new year, and upon completing Susannah Conway's "Unraveling 2014", I decided that my theme for 2014 is CREATIVITY. Last year’s themes, for me, were CONFIDENCE and POSSIBILITY, which resulted in me starting this blog.  A year ago I began with a challenge for myself—to record roughly (without succumbing to perfectionism) some of my favorite songs I have written for myself over the years.  Posting just about every week until the end of May, the project had played out and with the busyness of the end-of-spring-semester and several weeks of summer travel, I let the blog go, wondering in the back of my head what my next challenge would be, if I would continue the blog, and what my next post(s) would be like.

Over the course of the months that followed and in tandem with my unplanned hiatus from this blog, I did less songwriting, but more composing.  I began writing a large-scale four-movement piece for string quartet.  This is the largest creative project I have taken on since my last sabbatical leave in 2008–09.  As I opened myself up to being more creative (basically whenever I made time to sit my butt in front of a piano with a pencil and some manuscript paper), I found several musical themes would emerge, which seemed to work perfectly in various permutations, and I was writing a serious piece of music.  I was out of practice, but the more I allowed myself to write, the more easily it all came back to me.  I am dedicating the piece, titled Vestiges, to my first composition professor, Dr. Robert Lombardo, in memory and honor of his wife, Kathleen, who passed away at the end of the summer.  I did not engage this project consistently, but rather worked in spurts, fits and starts, here and there, and by the end of the year, I had written three of the four movements I had planned.  That's pretty slow work, but better than nothing.

Fast forward to January 1st and my new theme [CREATIVITY] for the New Year . . . I decided that since my creative projects are important to me, yet for whatever reasons I let other things that are less important take precedent, I need to make my composing/music making/songwriting, i.e. creative projects, more of a priority.  So fitting with this year’s theme, my new challenge—Challenge no. 2—is to engage one of my creative endeavors EVERY SINGLE DAY even if only for a few minutes.  That means even if I have let the day get away from me and it is after 10 pm and I still haven’t engaged a creative project, I wait to go to bed until after I have done so.  And so far, it is working.  I am almost finished with the last movement for the string quartet, and as I type this blog post, we are only five days into the New Year.

For this new year, then, I plan to post about my progress toward this new challenge for myself, hopefully the tracing the genesis and evolution of my creative projects—right now involving some serious composing—as well as some musical content when appropriate.  Thanks for reading, and I wish everyone a 2014 filled with CREATIVITY.

I leave you with a MIDI realization of the first movement of Vestiges.  Caveat: MIDI realizations are generally awful and do not resemble live performance, but at least it may give you a basic aural idea of the music I have written.