kentokhromatic

Wow, so many interesting techniques in this piece! How did you figure out the double stops with the slides - are they all with open strings or was there another method you used? I would love to hear more about what conceptually drives each of these movements, how they're in contrast with each other and interact with each other. I got the impression that each of them were saying things that were around a similar thematic idea but in different ways, but I couldn't really figure out the form and dialectic behind it (other than intuitively).

Glad you felt that text painting as well! I really liked using harsh modulations as one way of painting the text. & Thanks for listening.=)

Hey guys! I had the opportunity to perform a baritone & vocal piece I wrote for my friend recently, and I thought I'd post it on here as well for feedback. I screw up a bit playing the piano part (not the singer), but you get the general gist of it from hearing the performance, I think. I tried to make it so the piano is more active and has a more prominent role in expressing the text than most art songs. You can hear the MP3 with the link below or in the attachment: http://www.box.net/shared/875odeizei & Here's the text: A drop of rain slid down the window and I shattered it with the tip of my finger. There are two kinds of gentle: the soft and the regretful. I saw you standing next to my (sleeping?) form two, three nights ago-- hard whispers whistled through the nighted house and secrets took place, here and there. Trust me: I'm hacking through all these words and images floating through my brain: not knowing if I'm finding a single shred of meaning. --but there is love and beauty in this field for sure; fresh and ready for a muddled harvest. Kento - Car in the Rain (Baritone & Piano).pdf Kento Watanabe - Car in the Rain - David Lee (baritone) & Kento Watanabe (piano).mp3

Wow, I hadn't gotten notification that there were responses to this thread but these are incredibly useful comments! I don't know if you see my response but thank you. Yes, this is a transcribed improvisation based on the Bb minor fugue. One trouble I often have with building pieces off of a full improvisation recording is that I have too much reluctance to change the improvisation when really, to build it further, often a radical change is needed which subsequently changes so much of the dialectic that comes afterward, which means changing a whole lot more notes to accomodate the new change or else the inevitability in the music is lost. I would love to study the French keyboard music you are talking about to get better ideas of completely different changes I could give the left hand that wouldn't interfere too much with the original mood. There's definitely a need for a new theme fairly early as well, though I'm not sure exactly what as of yet unless I change the chord progressions underneath as well.

To give a more concrete distinction that's in a similar vein, musically I'm more interested in dialectic dictating the form rather than form dictating dialectic. A fugue doesn't usually have really an A and B section and so on, but dialogue in voice parts brings the music towards its own inevitability.

Someone just did a remix of my remix in Mario Paint...which is kinda crazy and full circle.

Thanks! I wanted to create something a little elegant out of it, even if it uses references to the old; a resynthesis rather than simply an emulation.

Hi! Recently I've been returning to my improvisational roots for composing by recording improvisations. I have started making Youtube videos actually, where I have randomly generated rules, such as a theme based on randomly selected pitches, or a chord progression based on card selection. Additionally, I'm going to record "conceptual" improv videos, where either a particular musical element or experiment is the basis of an improv, or to add randomness, ask a random stranger to select some abstract, like what their highest value is, and use that as the basis for an improv video. I like this move on composers especially to get in touch with the improvisation side of composition as well, because I agree with the observation that I think Takemitsu made that American composers tend to be very structure & form-oriented in their compositions. I'm making a move a little back towards admiring nature as a model for art, that is, to make music organic and intuitive as well as achieving higher symbolic or structural purposes, or using structures as a mean for compositional innovation. I'm still working on putting a great connect between my compositions and improvisations, by trying to extract and understand the intuitive structures taking place in improvisations. I was curious what you guys thought of when analyzing these pieces as COMPOSITIONS. Of course, the left hand would be inevitably more repetitive than other pieces, but I still find that subjectively interesting, and also how it is diffused in the improvisational intuition. I'm trying to better understand these elements, hopefully with the help of a third perspective from other musicians. =)

Thanks for your observations, OMWBWAY! The Flute part is a mistake in the score that I neglected; I will fix it so musicians aren't confused. I hope this quartet is recorded in the near future, if only for the fact that it plays a lot with tone color combinations. A friend of mine mentioned that they noticed these quartets have an almost early church-music-like shape in its polyphony, even though it's more rhythmically complex and so on, which I think is really interesting. I have a taste for the polyphonic and I think one of the challenges of this piece is to not make it too monotonous by making it too consistently polyphonic or have the same kind of polyphony all the time.

Here's another piano composition! This one was based on an improvisation and is lyrical but has a simple accompaniment. Feel free to let me know if I should make a more complicated version/change up the left hand more, and if so, how so. When it comes to aesthetic tastes in terms of how simple/complex something should be, I find it can be a hard issue; sometimes, things are made too complex for the sake of it, but complexity potentially can add another layer of musical meaning and depth. I wanted to attach the mp3 to this post but I can't, so here's a youtube link to it! Piano Improv 1st - Second Home.pdf

I enjoyed this as well, only wish the ending wasn't more abrupt. I like how it has that invention sound but doesn't seem to be confined solely to that harmonic language.

Nothing wrong with being neotonal instead of atonal! I think a lot of atonal pieces are really tonal anyway, even if they weren't conceptualized that way. I get the impression that even Schoenberg himself came to use twelve-tone as a kind of method for exploring unconventional tonalities rather than simply no tonality. I like your revision, by the way.

I would love to learn more percussion from someone like you. What program do you usually use to write percussion music? How do you set up the staves in the program?

Yeah, this is also complicated by the fact that swing feel depends a lot on the style. For example, Boogie-woogie is very triplet-oriented, while Bebop obviously lacks triplets in their "swing feel" (nobody would write it this way, though, but it is worth noting that they do have a "sense of swing"), but instead gain that energy from a different kind of articulation (accenting upbeats). Additionally, depending on the style (especially later ones), there's a kind of fluid switch between more "swung" (in the rhythm length sense, not so much articulation) and "straight" notes in a lot of soloists' articulation style that's hard to place. This is more what I was going for, with the way that the majority of notes switch to triplets with the first triplet being longer at one point, while having temporary quick switches to "plain" 16ths. I think this topic could go on for a long time...I've seen really different ways of notating these things! Speaking of which, has anyone ever seen the notation of "swung 16ths"? Although this is a convenient way of thinking for me at times, I have never seen it and I can't figure out how to get Finale to swing 16ths so I just usually end up writing it out as a faster song with swung 8ths, and dealing with the smaller measures.

Because I wanted all the swing 8ths in that song to be dotted, I decided it was easier to just write them with a triplet rest inbetween. Of course, this is tricky, because I most likely wouldn't have if I wrote it in swing notation, because I feel in that context most piano players would do that by default. I didn't switch to swing feel because there was too much rapid transition between playing straight eighths and swung eighths. I still find this topic of proper classical notation of jazz to be a little nebulous though, so would love more insight on it.