Wind Ensemble Reset

So after about three weeks of doing some extensive national anthem listening, coming up with a general form of what i want the piece to do, and doing some initial spreadsheet work for ease of actual composition, i think i’ve come to the hard conclusion that this piece needs to be shelved for the future. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Deadline. I’m at the beginning of October and the piece needs to be done by Christmas. The scope and concept i have for the piece is incredibly complex – there’s a lot that i want the piece to accomplish and to do it in the right way, i feel like i’ll need a few months to sketch and compose the piece before i even deal with first level of revisions.

2. Time restraints. The piece has to fit within a time restraint of about 7-10 minutes, and given the amount of musical material that i have to work with and how i want to develop it, i don’t think that that’s enough time for me to say what i want to say.

I’m still going to hold on to the work that i’ve done already and maybe make some progress on it when i have more spare time energy in the spring. The piece has started taking shape, and i think it has a lot of potential, i just need to give it its proper time and weight so that it doesn’t end up being something much less than it should be or ends up being close to what i want but in the sacrifice of me putting way too much pressure and stress on myself between now and the holidays.

So what i think is going to happen is i’m going to take the sketchwork of a piece i did in a Composition for Orchestra class i took in grad school, revise it and reflesh it out for wind ensemble. There’s two sections of the piece that i think are really strong, it’s just a matter of how to make the rest of the piece strong as well. I’ll probably start looking at that starting on Thursday.

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