Tri-M/Musical Anecdote

September 24, 2013 at 1:47 AM

I'm joining Tri-M this year, which, if you don't know, is a music organization that basically will help out musically in the community, whether it's doing fundraisers, or just helping out in concert. This evening there was a ceremony for induction (which I was a part of), and Mr. William Jastrow, the coordinator of music in District 204, was our guest speaker. He explained to us about what music means to him by telling a story of when he was in high school. He played in a community orchestra, a percussionist, and he was playing Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, the "Pathetique". And he was playing the cymbal part! There are four notes for a forty (or so) minute piece, in the third movement. I won't go into details of the whole story, but in the end he found the end of the third movement, the last forty-six seconds, to be 'magical', or, as I call it, the 'goosebump moment', and we even got a copy of the score to follow as we listened to it. That's when he began to open up and listen to the music played, not just play what's on the page. I can definitely relate to the 'goosebump moment', as I have those all the time. In my own works, I try to include as many of those as I can, although in composition it's more for when I create a magical moment inside my head that I write down on paper. The point is, you should always be not just playing violin in the orchestra, but listening to how you play. Listen and feel the music. I try to do this on a daily basis every day in class. We even discuss why certain accidentals are placed in the music. Although I've taken AP Music Theory and can usually find these on my own, it's nice to go through them in class, and it's a lot of fun. So yeah! Lots of fun stuff going on.

By the way, I'm also busily writing my film symphony I believe I talked about before. Currently, I have the basic structure of the four movements down. I just need to expand them so each movement lasts at least a couple minutes long. So far, it's not going too good, so we'll have to wait and see. I get scared to touch parts that I already have because I don't want to break what sounds good away, so... Yesterday I walked around the lake by my house and composed, so it was like walking and writing. :P

Oh, I guess I never talked about it? Well, you know how before I got into the Doctor Who movie stuff, in May I was talking about a film? Basically, as Shore's Lord of the Rings Symphony is to his film score for the trilogy, this symphony I'm currently writing (and will share come early-November) will be the basis of the score I'll write next year at about this time after filming that movie this summer. Kind of make sense? I'll probably talk about it again later. :)

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