21/7
Today we started our music investigation into composing an 8 bar melody to the chord progression of pachelbel's cannon. We started the lesson by going through our theory books and looking at the same/similar chord progressions to pachelbels cannon. To capture the style of pachelbels cannon we explored the boroque period. The boroque period was the period from about1600 to about 1750. The boroque period music is a sub genre of classiccal music. A few famous composers who composed in the boroque period/style were Bach,Handel and Vivaldi. The aim of the investigation task is to compose a new melody to match the chord progression of the song Pachebel Cannon. I started by playing through the chord progression and just improvising a melody over the top of it, to get the feel of the song. Taking into consideration the style, key, pitch and tone. After this, i finalized a few rhythms I liked and slowly I was refining my melody to the chord progression of pachelbels cannon. This is all I did today and I will plan to write and finalize my melody next class.
absent for all classes until the 8/816
Today I had to catch up because we had started another assessment. This assessment was to compose a piece of music either in the style of the romantic period, classical period or 20th centenary. I chose to compose my piece in the style of a 20th century piece. 20th century music is very expressive, and impressionistic. It has no set structure and is quite free to do what you want to do in it. It can focus just on rhythmic elements and can be minimalistic in terms of an actual set melody. It is quite free compared to the other periods. It can be poly-rhythmic and have dramatic changes in tempo and melody. It normally uses instruments such as piano, brass, woodwind and strings. I planned to have a violin, trumpet, organ and bass in my composition. I started to mess around on the keyboard with the different instrument effects and the instruments weren't meshing together nicely and weren't really connecting with the idea i had for my composition. After a while i decided to intend my composition just for organ and after that see if I wanted to add other instruments, for fills and back up to the organ. I decided to have my song in a minor, playing chords from a minor. I then on the right hand started messing around with different scales in a minor, such as the a minor blues scale and mixolydian scale. My composition was very impressionistic and different to a standard classical with different elements from different styles embedded in to make it more impressionist. Now having a clearer image of what I wanted to do I started to record a bit. Though the recording process from the key board to having it written wasn't working on Sibelius. So I tried to start hand writing the chords on the left hand in. This is what I did today. I intend to start writing the write hand and finish writing the left hand chords in by next lesson.