The Belkin Project

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Some friends and I have been reading Alan Belkin’s book Musical Composition: Craft and Art. We are all at different stages in our musical journey and have found the homework problems to be different degrees of difficult!

I’ve been thinking about how I can make this book part of my music education. Yesterday I did a flying overview of the whole book (chapter names and subheadings). There is a chapter a little past the halfway mark called “Rondo Form” (ch. 14) and I realized that I would really like to compose something in Rondo form.

For the last 6 weeks I have started the day with time outside. I sit on my favorite park bench, write in a notebook, and frequently look up to enjoy the nature nearby. These morning park bench meditations could make good material for a Rondo composition. A rondo takes the form A B A C A D…   The recurring sunlight, park bench, bird calls could be represented by the “A section”, and the various other streams of thought could be the B, C, D etc.

So here is my plan: I will rush through chapters 3 through 9 (taking notes but not doing the exercises), skip chapters 10 through 14, and then pause to focus on the Rondo Form chapter (ch.14). For each chapter I will make an outline on a separate “page”  (visible at the top of the blog). I’ll put my questions and personal observations on each chapter in the daily entries here.

Belkin ch. 4 — “Playing”

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Main divisions of ch 4, “Playing”

1.Writing for solo instruments
2. Chamber Music
3.Orchestral Music
4. Accompanying the Voice
5. Orchestral Accompaniment of the Voice
6. Choral Accompaniment
7. Concerti

As a church musician I observed examples of many of the topics discussed in ch. 4.
We never had a case of the choir accompanying an instrument (6) or performed a concerto (7), but did perform 1 through 5.

In most of our church services, there was a meditative interlude before communion. This often featured an instrumental or vocal solo.

One of the settings for the Lent liturgy was accompanied not by the usual organ but instead by 3 musicians — cello, bass, and piano. I think that might be considered a chamber group. We also had a guest appearance by a local Medieval group, with one instrument on each part (one soprano recorder, one alto recorder, one tenor recorder etc).

There were two years we had “singalongs” of Handel’s Messiah, complete with full orchestral accompaniment. The instrumentalists were from a local high school orchestra.

Belkin ch. 3

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Main divisions of ch 3

Writing for the voice
Setting words to music
Recitative vs Aria
Musical form and the text
Composing for choir

Personal reflections on ch 3

I was a member of a Lutheran church choir for about 15 years. During this time I composed a 20-min piece for soloists, choir, and instruments called “Cantata for Lent”. A cantata is a sung piece, usually religious in nature. It resembles an opera, but without costumes or physical action.It includes characters who play different roles, with sung monologues, dialogues, and reactions from a group. Some sections are like opera recitative, in the form of exposition — “Here’s what’s going to happen”.  Other sections are like aria, expressing emotion –“Here’s how I feel about what is happening”.

In my cantata, most of the lyrics were taken from a modern translation of Psalms and other passages from the Bible, written in familiar, natural prose. The melodies I used followed the rhythms of normal speech. I often used “word painting” (voice raises in pitch when joyful, lowers in pitch for grief), and changes in texture to indicate emotion.

I had already been a member of this choir for several years while working on the composition, and so I knew what the choir was comfortable with. For example, splitting the choir into male and female sections singing an octave apart was a lovely way to change the timbre without taking up a lot of rehearsal time.

I used a variety of textures:
solo voice
unison choir
unison in octaves (women, men)
3 groups — soprano & alto, male
4 groups, homophonic texture (different pitches but same rhythm)
rarely — 4 groups, polyphonic texture (independent pitches and rhythm)

The composition was sung by choir and four soloists:
“Wisdom” — a “matronly” alto
Prophetic voice — a soprano with a dramatic timbre
The Devil — a spoken role
Jesus — a tenor

While writing the parts, I conferred with the soloists and changed things to suit their voices.

I feel very grateful to have been given the opportunity and to have received so much support from my choir director. The “Cantata for Lent” performance took place during the busy pre-Easter season, and she was working with limited rehearsal time and a very inexperienced composer! For me the experience was terrifying, and joyful, and included moments of skin-crawling humiliation which I still shudder to recall.

Afterward I was completely burned out and did a 180 degree turn away from church music. One day while wandering at a Rennaisance fair, I was attracted to a booth with beautiful bamboo flutes. It turned out that these flutes were made by a master musician, Peter Olwell. This led to several years of exploring Irish Trad music. But that’s another story 😉

 

 

Synchrony

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I’m having a creative phase right now! Several things have lined up —

We’re finally settled into the new house. The seedlings I brought over from the old house are doing well. The plants and I are putting down roots.

I’ve been meeting with my Discord group for about a year! Because of this group I’m getting more consistent about working on music. It’s great to have some people to report back to every 2 weeks.

I JUST installed some software that I purchased 6 months ago. Now I’m exploring these new plugins.

I hit # 500 on my Random Note compositions, and decided to kick it up a notch by entering the latest ones into FL Studio, at least in sketch form. Because of this I’ve been spending about twice as much time on music every day.

These little compositions were interesting enough that it gave me the craving to make videos again. My previous video editing software is gone (motherboard from previous computer died). It was called Movavi and much as I loved it, its latest upgrades have gone off in a direction I didn’t like. I decided to bite the bullet and purchase something different. I picked Pinnacle Studio because it’s a one-time purchase, NOT a subscription model. It’s by Corell and I’ve had good experiences with their software. …So I’ve been struggling with learning Pinnacle Studio for the past 2 weeks. I made a sort of test video and now I’m working on a “welcome back to the channel” video.

A couple days ago I installed Audacity 3.0 on my new computer. This version of Audacity is a little different than what I worked with 5 years ago — it saves projects with a different file extension — but otherwise very similar. The interface looks the same. …I had been putting off this decision because I wanted to force myself to learn Reaper, or, the new Audacity with the new interface and features. But I finally decided to just take it easy on myself and stick to the familiar. As soon as I started editing a sound clip in Audacity I got such a wave of nostalgia. Memories came flooding back — layering and transforming sound clips in a journey of discovery. It’s a safe and familiar place. It surprised me to get such a strong emotional reaction to some SOFTWARE. But wow, it’s good to be back!

Here’s Tantacrul (Martin Keary) talking about the latest changes to Audacity. I have such positive feelings about Martin so I will definitely try it some day.

And just for nostalgia, here’s the video that came out when I was first learning FL Studio. I still think this song is a banger lol

 

Some Videos about Modes

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I haven’t posted here for a while — it’s great to have a reason to come back!

Today at our “Synth Nerds” Discord group, part of our discussion was on modes and how we feel about them. I realized that I had absorbed a lot of my intuition about modes from various videos over the years. So here I will list some of my favorites.

Here’s a video by David Bennett. He teaches music theory from the viewpoint of someone with encyclopedic knowledge of popular music. For every music concept, he can come up with several examples to illustrate it. He’s a little stiff in this video, but when he’s talking about the Beatles he really lights up.

 

Here’s the video with the mode mnemonic that we were laughing about. “I do pot, leave me alone, Locrian”. The whole video is worth watching, but I fast-forwarded to the most pertinent part.

https://youtu.be/DFFqVFNVcYM?si=S7if-6ql9iCMMAdI&t=141

 

What is so weird about Locrian in particular? “This is Locrian, there’s a reason that we don’t use Locrian”. You can never feel at home, because the home chord, the tonic, has a messed up note (the flat fifth).

 

And here’s a group of You Tube friends challenging each other to compose something in Locrian that doesn’t suck.

 

Seven examples from Belkin chapter 2

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Alan Belkin’s text Musical Composition, chapter 2, uses these seven examples

 

Fig. 2.1 Mahler Symphony 3 , Last movement

Fig. 2.2 Beethoven String Quartet # 9 in C major ( op 59, no 3)
Fig. 2.3 Béla Bartók – String Quartet No. 3, Sz. 85
Fig. 2.4 Domenico Scarlatti Sonata in D major K 336
Fig. 2.5 György Ligeti: Sonata for Solo Cello
Fig. 2.6 Debussy plays Debussy – Estampes: No. 2. La soiree dans Grenade (Evening in Granada)
 fig 2.7 Avatar soundtrack — James Horner

Trouble with Focus and Organization

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Since the change in “regime” on Jan. 20, I’ve had a lot of trouble with focus. This past 2 weeks I didn’t hand in any work — even my daily random note exercise had been impossible. I would sit in front of the piano, unable to think. After 300-some random note exercises, it’s interesting that that behavior was knocked off the rails. “I was so upset I couldn’t even do my favorite thing”.

I had my bi-annual meeting with my psychiatrist the previous week and we talked about some behavioral strategies to help with the anxiety. These have been working, and my hum of background anxiety is growing quieter. Yesterday I was unexpectedly gifted with a beautiful set of bookshelves. I decided to make a tapestry fabric panel for the front, and use the rest of the fabric for a screen for the other end of the room. This process took several hours. By the end of it I felt the most normal I had in weeks, and I woke up this morning feeling clear as well.

But even when I am anxiety-free, I still have a lot of trouble deciding WHAT to do. Ex. what to work on first! I think the problem I have with clutter and disorganization also relates to my difficulty with making decisions. The times I’ve done the best with organization and decision making are when there’s a beautiful, singular creative idea that over-arches and unifies the process.

I also have the occasional day when I wake up with clarity and look around and say “I can’t stand X any more, and I know just what to do to fix it”. And other times something makes me angry to the point where I think “fuck it, I’m throwing this stuff away”. But I can’t be too angry, because that leads to destructive decisions! There’s a Goldilocks zone which doesn’t happen very often.

In conclusion, I’m able to make decisions when
it’s just the right kind of project
I’m in just the right mood.

Here is a video I watched today while having lunch. It inspired today’s line of thought.