Dr. Young and Dr. Hemmel are two of our main instructors in composition for this week. And I have to say that atonal music will take sometime for me to appreciate fully. But I will speak chronologically.
We were handed a sheet of paper all with eighth notes. Dr. Hemmel said mark it up, add ties, slurs, articulation, and dynamic markings to make something out of the piece. I thought to myself that the laziest solution to this is to tie all of the eighth notes into one long note. And come to think of it, leaving the paper the way it is would also be a unique rhythm. But I didn’t do that. Here’s my markup (hmm... reminds me of HTML):
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I have to say that I had this repeating D minor chord playing back in my head as I was marking it up. I also screwed up some counting (since I intended it to be all 4/4 time). But I figured it wouldn’t matter, so I just changed meters a couple of times. It’s a pretty amusing and different way to write music. And with Camp Royal speak, it’s definitely out of my “comfort zone.”
After this rhythm exercise with Dr. Hemmel, my class began to look at some compositions and dissected some of them. So here I am, with basically no knowledge about atonal music (except knowing that it exists), trying to listen to the piece that had a hard to discern melody. But I could see that some of these recurring patterns in the sheet music...I just couldn’t pick them up when I heard it at first. Dr. Young picked apart the piece, much like the way Litvin would do for AP Lang. And for 20 minutes, I understood exactly what was going on, and I was able to see that, say, this tritone is used again here, and that this sequence of notes is inverted, and all that good stuff. After that time, I have to be honest and say that I couldn’t follow with the rest of the explanations about how certain musical ideas were not accidents but planned references to previous material. It’s still hard for me to love listening to this music, but I can really see how much thought a composer (in this case Werbern) put into such pieces.
Then came lunch. Nothing special there...or no, I lie. I took out an ILS Landing chart for Runway 4R at Newark International Airport. I started tracing the ILS feather into staff paper, and plotted VORs in the staves. Then getting an idea from Dr. Hemmel - his piece Var. Zip - I used the radio frequencies as pitches. Like 123.45 would be, on my constructed system, C D E F G, all quarter notes, except a dotted quarter for E. And then I remembered that those radios broadcast Morse code for the airport as it’s identifier. KEWR: dah-di-dah dit di-dah-dah di-dah-dit. That could be use as a rhythmic motif. And so on. When I talked to Dr. Hemmel during my private instruction time, he showed me this honda advertisement video using only a choir:
Yeah that is crazy. And yet, it could be employed for an airplane landing (much more pleasing to my ears than a car driving along the road).
Let’s see, we also went into town, and got a look at Princeton. And I went to a record store. I bought 4 CDs...Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Nos. 1, 2 and 3 (2 disc set), and Beatles’s Yellow Submarine. That set me back about 16 dollars.
And er... I played my piano concerto to some classmates. Yeah, I made mistakes, and yeah, it sounds more boring with just piano and no orchestra.
Here’s my conclusion for our first day of instruction...if there’s so much my professors can talk about today, there must be an immense amount of stuff left over to go over in this week. I’ll see all of the stuff I can absorb and use for future reference. (for now, Dr. Hemmel’s advice...more inversions of chords, and also cut out sound from video and just recreate it using sound effects).
