Annotation of Composition

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Romy Noonan 11M2

Annotation on Blues Composition

Brief

I have been asked to compose a piece of music that would be suitable to be played in a cocktail bar of a cruise ship.  The piece must be composed for Piano and have a minimum length of 1 minute 30 seconds.  It must have a blues theme and have one contrasting section.  I have chosen to write in C major, as it is an easy key to play in.  I chose 4:4 time as this is a characteristic of blues music.

One blues/jazz piano piece which inspired my composition was George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in blue’.  It is mainly a jazz piece and has many blues characteristics.

For this piece I wrote an 8 bar long introduction. I composed 4 bars of blues music and then adapted it to make a further 4 bars.  The music is syncopated, and the position of the accents enforces this, thus adding a ‘blues feel’.  I have used to notes of the C blues scale, which flattens the 3rd, 5th and 7th notes.  The introduction flows well into my first section (section A).  My melody has a very strong catchy tune, which sounds improvisatory and compliments the homophonic bass part.  

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At first I composed the A section with my 4 bar chordal bass part running all the way through. After performing my piece I decided to add more rhythmic variation as my piece began to sound repetitive.  I changed the 4 bar block crotchet chords to quaver chords with sustained notes.

As a development of my original idea I inverted my melody and kept the bass to quaver chords and sustained notes.  This adds rhythmical variation and flows very well on from my original idea.  To adapt my bass rhythm further I added semi quavers ...

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It sounds like the writer has considered all the important aspects of a composition. The excerpts from the composition really help the reader to understand what the writer is referring to. I would like to see more justification for some of the statements that the writer makes.