Another Year of Musical Excitement...

August 23, 2018, 3:29 PM · As the first week of my final year of undergraduate college comes to a close, I've started to realize how exciting and wonderful the year will be. Especially this autumn, I will have my musical hands completely full, and I can't be happier for it! For one, I'm taking four private lessons for piano (working on the Ravel Sonatine right now), violin (possibly a Berio Sequenzia or one of Ysaÿe's solo sonatas or a Stravinsky work), composition, and electronic composition (where I will certainly be using my violin to record sounds and try manipulating the sound in the computer software).

In orchestra, I will be playing a wide variety of music on my violin (I believe I will be concertmaster and get some solos this time around, letting my personal violin shine!). For our large ensemble rehearsals, our theme for this term (we will be taking on tour as well!) is "Made in America," with that being the title of Joan Tower's piece (2005), Coleridge-Taylor's "Symphonic Variations on an African Air" (1907), and ending with Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess Symphonic Picture," (the 1942 album cut together by Robert Russell Bennett from the original 1935 opera to form a through-composed piece that would fit on both sides of an LP record) all three pieces I'm very excited for. I will be involved in a very small ensemble for the fall opera, in which we will be playing two pieces by the Jewish composer Hans Krása: an Overture for Small Orchestra (1943) and the children's opera Brundibár (1938), which, not unlike Ravel's Mother Goose ballet, references fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel. Needless to say, I am immensely excited to play all of this music, most of it that I have never heard before, and it all seems like it will be a ton of fun. I will be happy to share our other two seasons (winter and spring) as they happen.

I also have my big senior recital, working on rehearsals for "Muse of Fire," "A Japanese Wood-Carving," and my 2016 Saxophone Sonata as I said in my last blog post, which will take place on October 14th, just before the orchestra concert. I am also going to start working on applying to both academic and media (film/video game scores) music schools to see what I can get into - graduate school works differently than college, so we will see what ends up happening. In terms of my musical academia, I also have my Senior Inquiry project, where I am hoping to study some various film scores like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and Star Wars and even some cinematic video game scores like The Last Guardian or Ni No Kuni or something that I can tie with classical music and eventually use my research to try writing my own film score for something. I will get started on the project this term and finish and present my work in the spring.

When I list all of this exciting stuff here, it makes me so happy - I have worked hard through all the general music courses and now I can focus more of my efforts on practicing, composing, and studying the kinds of music I am most passionate about: those for films and video games - and really explore my own personal enjoyment of trying to write a score in my own style. Also, because there is so much I'm doing on my violin, I can really use this time to get in touch with new sounds and techniques on it, and work harder to enjoy my practice time and being with my instrument. Plus, my three roommates and I had a jam session last night in our house with a bunch of instruments, and I had a lot of fun jamming on my violin with pop music, and then back to experimental improvisation this morning.

Hopefully you will enjoy my ranting about my youthful musical excitement! Things will all hopefully come together this year and I will be able to explore my passion of music to the fullest. Here's to a fantastic senior year at Augustana College!

I just wanted to quickly mention a couple other things. One, this morning before I headed out for improv rehearsal, I sat down at the kitchen table with my "Muse of Fire" score and enjoyed going through it, seeing some of the little motifs and things and how it was put together. In addition to doing the same thing with my Saxophone Sonata a couple weeks ago, I've been getting very excited at how the music I've written and the memories I've had writing them come together. Also, I'm excited to see myself examining my violin music and doing some score study more often and casually throughout my day. I'll still have time for breaks to chat with friends, watch TV or my favorite YouTubers, or obsess over the video game Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch, which will come out on 7 December 2018 and has over 800 music tracks in it. But I am excited more for filling my days full of my study, and mainly to start to think about my life after I graduate in May.

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Another Year of Musical Excitement...

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