Lessons with The Hourglass Mind

First assignment - post a piece on this thread which you feel best portrays your compositional style, as a basis for troubleshooting.

I've chosen two parts of a musical (titled The Hourglass Mind) I very recently sent to a competition and is scheduled to be performed in the fall. I find it sums up my ability and style...insane.

The musical is about an 18 year old schizophrenic boy(the characters name is NAME), who begins to have psychological delusions of an imaginary "soul doctor" named Rayman Minz who offers to "fix" the "problems" he has. Name begins loosing touch with reality and is taken to a psychiatric care facility by his mother


SCENE 2-"fix-er-up"

In this scene Dr. Minz gives Name an in-home brain surgery on stage, blood and gore and everything, as this is happening the music is playing, and they are singing over the sounds of bone-saws and medical drills.

The intro to this piece simply seeks to set the mood and make the listener uncomfortable. I used implied chords to maintain an open sound and yet add a certain fullness to the quality of the section. after the two fermatas, I depart dramatically from this almost early romantic introduction to a very waltz like harmony, as the piece progresses and the "brain surgery" progresses the music gets more and more unstable, harmonically, to mirror Name's growing mental instability. The end of this piece is my homage to Gershwin after whom musicals declined.

INTERMISSION

This piece was composed to ensure the audience gains no mental rest, so as to facilitate the state of things to come in Act 2. I worked many hours on this piece and feel it's perhaps the most insane, but I welcome any criticism.

I'm eager to see where your insight might take me.

Audio Xanga

Audio Xanga

Thanks. That'll do nicely.

First thing:
We need to get you thinking contrapuntally. Your writing shows evidence of counterpoint, but it's not really contrapuntal, because the counterpoint is only used to bridge between sections of homophony. The result is a very thin sound with very little change.

So: Assignment #2 - write a short piece (no more than a minute or so) that uses constant counterpoint. I don't mind if you choose to use or ignore Fuxian rules - but the lines should show use of differing contour, contrast between divergent/convergent and confluent motion.

One more guideline - all note values must be of a quarter-note or less, and the beat must be no slower than quarter=108.

so, this assignment took forever...but well worth it.

I did ignore fuxian rules, however i ensured no parrallel fifths and octaves. I also tried to make each line independantly melodic.

I hope this is what you asked for. I'm eager to see how i did.

Sorry this has taken me so long to get back to you about. But my deadlines are over, so I'm here.

You did very well here. What I'd like you to do now is to take the melodic and harmonic implications of this counterpoint exercise, and create a piece of homophonic music - that is, melody and accompaniment - that does not use the exercise verbatim, but rather draws on it for thematic and motivic inspiration.

I wasn't sure if you wanted simple whole note block chords, but i tried to keep the harmony as basic as possible. I'm not entirely sure what this exercise was supposed to teach me (perhaps i did it wrong, or it's a sort of cumulative thing). In any case, here is my Assignment.

What the assignment was meant to do was to get you thinking about the motion of homophony. So often, homophonic lines tend to stagnate, because they don't have the same sense of motion that polyphony does. What this exercise did was forced you to use the motion of polyphony in a homophonic idiom.

ah, i see, thank you for elabborating, and i appologise if i sounded indignant. whats the plan now?

Well, now that we covered contrapuntal implications in harmony, we move on to harmony in and of itself.

I wait in eager antisipation.