My Senior Composition Recital (INFO)

October 13, 2018, 10:20 PM · I just played our Fall Concert tonight for orchestra, and tomorrow is my senior composition recital! I have mentioned all of the specific music in a past entry (August 2018). It was cool being concertmaster again and playing several solos in the orchestra concert.

However, I wanted to talk more about my senior recital, which will be tomorrow at 2pm! The process for putting it together has been crazy. My big chamber piece ("Muse of Fire", England vs. France from Shakespeare's Henry V) has involved 14 members - some faculty (strings) and some students (winds, brass, percussion), and we started out rehearsing the piece in sectionals, before slowly adding more people to the project. (I am conducting.) The final product is really amazing, with some wonderful orchestral sounds that make me very pleased with all the work I did on the composition starting Christmas 2017! I still remember sketching out chords for the battle sections before writing melodies and realizing those chords, and then orchestrating them out and adding even more details in the spring... Additionally, besides my 2016 Saxophone Sonata, which I performed in 2017 and am performing it again for my recital now, the Jenny Lind Vocal Ensemble of 50 female choir members has joined forces with marimba, violin (me), and clarinet to perform my final piece of the program. It's very much based on a love of Japan and woods, and so all wooden instruments was the right choice - that goes back to my love of different woods and such, like 2014 taking walks in the forests. So yeah - I'm conducting, playing piano, and playing violin! Doing it all - happy to end with my favorite instrument. That will feel really special. :)

Overall, I guess this recital is actually quite personal to me, and all of these extra things reference things I have enjoyed throughout my past, while all being in my unique musical style, akin to Ravel's. Unlike some of my earlier pieces, like coordinating some chamber pieces in high school, and even some of the pieces I wrote in 2016 and 2017, having this large-scale half-hour work that I am conducting as well as a choir piece and getting full, live performances of both is really an incredible feeling. I am so proud of my colleagues and so happy I have gotten such a wonderful recital together, and I can't wait to see how it goes tomorrow afternoon!

I just thought I had to share this very exciting musical weekend for me. It's been wonderful to prepare all this music in so many different styles - and I look forward after it's over to untie the hands around my back and start feeling free to compose new music again! I've got a waltz orchestral work, a piano-only Charlie Chaplin film score, and a video game score for Game Developers Club to write as my three big projects next! After "Muse of Fire" I'm happy to scale down some of these works. I've also got my 2017 orchestra piece, "Music for the Galactic Palace," that will be performed by my orchestra at the winter February 2019 concert! And, of course, we are taking our fall program on tour, which is really exciting!

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My Senior Composition Recital (INFO)

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