Entry 6.

Now comes the nitty gritty part of composition…The dreaded editing. This means going through, tweaking all the little notes I don’t like and adding in enough road mapping so that the performers know what I want without having to guess…

I’d like to start off with a rather amusing discovery of mine…If you change the meter without specifying how many bars you want to be in that specific meter, it will convert the WHOLE PIECE into the meter and you’ll be left with one heck of a screw up. I’d also like to thank the creators of Finale for allowing me to click the ‘undo’ button about 50 times in order to fix said error.

Looking back now, having finished the editing in my first piece, it wasn’t all that hard. Some things I changed just because I didn’t like the aimlessness in the melody, and other things were just menial accents and such that had to be added in. I added a bit to the middle and another bar to the end just because I wanted this piece to end on a question rather than a statement, which give it a good reason to go into the next piece. It’s still a very short piece, but I don’t think we’re being expected to compose stuff like Brahms or Beethoven yet…Which is nice. It would be neat to have to write something like a symphony, though I think it’d be quite a task.

The second piece I had already edited, so I just tweaked a few things here and there, adding a different ending to it so that this piece ended differently than the first. The first piece won’t segue into the second, but there’ll be a more prominent ending to the second piece as compared to the first, which ends with an open question.

The third piece was also more or less edited last weekend as well, so I only had to change a few things here and there, tweak a few rhythms and especially dynamics. I went dynamic happy in the piano, dividing the left and right hand by dynamics…The right hand, in the middle section, is primarily p, while the left hand is f and obnoxious. I kept the ending the same since it has the Dies Irae Dies Illa theme in the left hand, which I quite like. I changed the name to ‘Filosophy,’ because I wanted to maintain the F theme in the titles, and ‘Inebriation’ just didn’t seem to fit anymore. It sounds more like a ‘Philosophy’ anyway just with terrible spelling.

Well, there you have it. Now I just have to do my programme notes, ‘bind’ this thing, (which could be interesting…I don’t know if I have any binding things in my room, so I may have to venture to the square.) print it out and voila! Finito!

Jess