Announcing my latest composition, a small piano work in four movements.  This work explores four different emotions using four different keys and modes, and each movement has a small subset of notes it’s allowed to use (the first only uses three notes!).  This was a composition exercise to learn how to compose under some unusual restrictions, and I learned a lot.

I don’t know what my next work will be, but I’m sure it’ll be something.  And hopefully even better than this one.

I learned several things from this endeavor.  One thing I learned is that it’s the constraints of a piece that give it its identity – if you go too freely afield, it paradoxically becomes a lot more difficult to compose.  That is the issue I ran into with my second concert band composition (which is atm barely started):  I didn’t have an identity for it, and because of that, I couldn’t compose it.  That’s opposed to the first band composition, which did have a purpose and identity, and while it didn’t come easy, it eventually came and turned out well.

Another thing I learned is that the rhythmic identity of a piece is very important.  If you go too far afield rhythmically, you sacrifice the identity of the piece, and you run into a similar issue.  Each of these four movements have a particular rhythmic as well as harmonic identity, and because I was constrained in what I could do harmonically, the rhythm had to take up the slack.

All of these were interesting things to learn and should prove to be very helpful when creating my next piece.

And so… the next piece begins.