January 2015

My Composition Spring Premieres - me playing violin! :)

There’s some good news, and some bad.

The bad? Well, I did not make senior concerto. However, I am very proud of my performance, and I will still be able to play the piece at my teacher’s recital and inspire lots of young(er) violinists and violists and parents in the room. And, of course, for Solo and Ensemble.

The good? Well, my orchestra teacher is allowing me to have one of my compositions played by my orchestra for the spring concert in March! I am very excited, and I picked out a piece I wrote last February (2014) called “Into the Forest”. Last night I actually changed a small section of it to give the piece a splash of my composition style of today, but overall I think it will be a fun piece to play and I’ll get to play the violin! The piece is scored for strings and harp, and my friend will be playing the piano, actually, which in my mind is still a foresty instrument. The other piece on the program (for us) is Holst’s “St. Paul’s Suite” for string orchestra, which is another fabulous piece, so I’m feeling very excited for both of these pieces to be played by our orchestra!

Additionally, yesterday afternoon (after walking to their house while composing that section of the “Into the Forest” piece), I played through the first few movements of “Sea-Pictures at a Gallery”, the string trio I wrote last November (2014), with my viola and cello friends (just three of us). It was very neat, hearing the moment where the thoughts in my head translated to Finale’s MIDI now came to life with live, acoustic instruments. I wasn’t focused on my own part; rather, helping them out with theirs, and just enjoying the overall sound of all three of us. In October I did a duet for cello and violin, and adding just one other instrument created a whole realm of possibilities compositionally I took advantage of with this piece. So, in conclusion, just this spring I’ll be getting, essentially, three premieres! Four if you count the piece I did last fall. Which wasn’t in spring… Anyways. It’s very exciting that I can really focus on performance in terms of my own compositions, and these will be wonderful recordings to take with me to college next fall! (Which, by the way, it’s officially my last semester of high school!)

Tomorrow, I have an audition for a scholarship at Augustana. I’m doing it on piano, just because I feel I’m more prepared for repertoire on piano than on violin. However, I’m also going to see the composition professor for that “interview” audition, and that will be a lot of fun to see him again and tell him about these premieres, I guess. For the portfolio, I’ve put in “Little Snow-White”, the violin concerto, since I got a recording of it. I’ve also put in “Les Larmes de L’ange”, the piece for flute, cello, and piano I wrote during my camp last June (2014), as well as “Birds of Prey”, my large summer project. I’m very pleased with all of this work I’ve put into all of this music, and now it’s going to pay off. Once all of this college business is done, and my schedule finally becomes a little freer, I can finally officially start another composition project! I have lots of plans for the summer for a big project like a symphony, or even writing a film score if we do that this summer, but for now I should just enjoy these other works up until then. I can’t wait to write down the events of these future dates where I’ll be playing my own pieces on my violin, as I get through my last semester of high school to become a music composition major at a college that’s TBD! :)

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'Little Snow-White' - recording

Here is a recording I did this morning of my violin concerto, "Little Snow -White", I've been talking about in previous entries. I'm proud that I've been practicing it since July, and it was a great experience. I hope the audition on the 6th will go well for me, and I'll let you know about that in the future! Hope you enjoy! (I'm just about to take my violin to my piano teacher's house to rehearse with my violin teacher watching, so hopefully that will go well.)

Watch it here!

Happy New Year!

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