Music Baroque Music Composition Portfolio
Thesis/idea:
My general plan for this composition task was to have quite an upbeat, ‘jiggy’ feel. To achieve this I decided to select 6/8 with a moderate pace (moderato: 108-120). I felt as if using quavers would best suit this ‘vibe’ so utilised them in my piece.
1st time working on composition:
This was the first time I worked on my composition. I decided to have 2, 8 bar phrases. With this in mind I created the chord progression for the first 8, working around the circle of fifths. With the chord progression figured out I laid out the chords in the bass line and begun to work on the melody in the violin 1 line. I also made sure of having a cadence point at the end of the 8 bars and thought about potentially modulating to Gmaj from the cadence into the 9th bar. The last 4 bars of work were done by Ben when I was out the room. However, I do like the sound of what he did so I may keep them or scrap them.
2nd time working on composition:
This time round I had little time to work on my composition so I did not make any huge advancements or changes. Although I did add another 4 bars on to the original 12 bars. I then moved bens work to the last 4 bars and up an octave, as I believed that in respect to the piece it would sound better as a closing phrase.
3rd time working on composition:
Again, I had little time for this session of work. So I only made a few changes, these were: figuring out more of the chord progression for the latter part of the piece and discovering how to change the speed on Sibelius. With this knowledge I changed the piece from around 40BPM to 100BPM, this allowed me to have a greater knowledge of where this piece was going.
4th time working on composition:
In this session I had begun to extend on the melody and focused on the violin II and viola part. To get the instruments working and intertwining with each other I worked of the notes in each chord and vertically aligned them. I decided to make the violin I part I had made previously as the recurring motif. In doing so the violin II and viola part were very similar to the violin I part. The main difference was that they were spread out and had different entrances in the piece (creating a bit of a canon). I also took out all the slurs just to see what the effect would be and if it would benefit the piece.
5th time working on composition:
In this session I started working on incorporating rests in the piece and sharing the melody between instruments. I had made this decision as I noticed that the majority of the piece was focussed on the violin I part and made it like a lead instrument. However, a key feature in baroque string quartet pieces was that all of the instruments other than the bass line were “equal” and the melody was shared.
