May 2015

High School Graduation!

Tomorrow is the day I will enjoy Elgar's "Promp Circumstance", as it's the evening I graduate high school officially! It will certainly be a very exciting occasion to celebrate all I have done in these past thirteen years of my life. Musically, I have really grown from a young child humming video-game tunes to a composer, pianist, and violinist, playing and listening to music every single day and always elated about this wonderful phenomena in the world. Like Elgar's march, played during the BBC Proms to celebrate Britain and during graduation ceremonies, music has a wonderful way of impacting our world, as it's used for everything - video games, films, television, or just for concerts. Music has certainly impacted my life, from back in 2008 writing a couple of violin and piano duets with my sister to use in our films, to writing full film scores in 2013 for our Doctor Who special. I have been playing the violin for a good eight years now, and the piano about twelve, so I have had a wonderful grasp on music even during my childhood. And even in the recent past, with all my entries on violinist.com, discussing orchestra concerts, practice sessions, compositions, musical epiphanies, tragic moments, or fun games to play on your violin, I have managed to encircle my love for the instrument and for music in general, and throughout college, playing in the Augustana Symphony (hopefully!), I can't wait to continue my love as I begin the next chapter of my life.

Looking ahead to the summer, I plan on focusing almost exclusively on writing my string quartet, which I went for a walk this morning at 11am in the forest preserve and sketched some music for it. The piece is very disorganized in my head right now, so I'm just writing bits and pieces of movements and later I can decide what I want to expand on, so that eventually I will have a finished piece of four or possibly five movements. Some of the stuff I've looked at from when I wrote ideas for the quartet in Italy, but the majority of the piece will be new material I come up with. It should be a cool piece, and my friends are hoping to play it for a competition, so I have to make it good!

As I will soon be a college student and no longer a high school student, I can't wait to write about all my future musical adventures here on violinist.com. Thank you for reading since I began in March 2012, obsessing over the violin and beginning the love for music that I have now, and I hope you'll enjoy my future entries!

...And speaking of the violin, I just put together a new binder of random violin music I printed throughout this past year 2014-2015. There's a lot of Ravel, The Skater's Waltz because it was in Nintendogs Plus Cats for the Nintendo 3DS, some of my pieces, Stravinsky... Great! It'll be a fun summer! :) Although I am going to play some Mozart and stuff as well as some staples to work on in private lessons...

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Iyer - Symphony No. 2

Our final project in AP English IV asks us to use some form of media (play, sonnet, short story, music, painting, etc.) to explain our thoughts on what it means to be human. For my project, which I just finished today, I chose to write a symphony with the four movements ranging from life to death (Birth, Childhood, Adulthood, Death). Not only did I do music, I put together two videos with pictures and quotes and performed guitar and violin solos within the piece. The project in its entirety took roughly two months to complete (I began planning the piece as soon as I got the paper back in March), as I had a break from working on it during spring break going to Italy where I sketched other stuff instead like my string quartet. I included lots of content within the videos themselves besides the music to help explain what's going on. Hope you enjoy!

Note: The link below leads to a playlist of two videos, each containing half of the symphony.

Click here to listen!

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