Music Composition Brief 1

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Ivan L        Composition

Brief

My school’s music department wants to encourage students to start to learn to play instruments. To help them choose which instrument they would like to learn, students who already play will be demonstrating their skills by performing a composition. I have decided to write a composition for a violin accompanied by a piano.

Compositional Process

The piece is in rondo form (Area of Study 1) for a violin and piano which contains 3 sections in the format ABACA, with the A section as the returning theme, but varied slightly each time to keep the theme interesting. The piece was composed in simple time: 4/4. I chose to use this to counter the difficulty of the piano parts, where semi-quavers and quavers are played in both parts for a large proportion of the piece. The first A section was composed mostly in G major, with 4 bars in the middle in D major, the dominant key of G major. To start the piece, I created a violin melody accompanied with a piano playing arpeggios and broken chords. I made bar 8 an exception: a scale was used instead of an arpeggio in the piano right hand. I decided to do this to contrast with the other bars which were playing arpeggios. This section started off as mezzo-forte with two mezzo-piano’s in the middle of the piece, as the note lengths were swapped around for one bar: usually the violin part is in crotchets, right hand piano semi-quavers and left hand piano quavers, which was changed to violin - semiquavers, right hand piano - quavers and left hand piano - crotchets. I did this to vary the rhythm of the piano and violin parts, so that no one part was playing just semi-quavers for a whole section. Also, in bar 15, the left hand piano part only plays a single G note, which was changed from a crotchet rhythm like in the preceding bars. I did this so that the piano parts would not just keep playing quavers, semi-quavers and crotchets throughout the whole piece without a break and to allow only one piano part playing for the rest of that bar. There is a crescendo from the bar 17 to bar 20, during which only quavers and semibreves are being played. I decided to do this so that the violin and the right hand piano part were playing the same rhythm whilst the left hand is only playing a single note every bar after playing many bars full of semiquavers. This section ends with a perfect cadence as forte, which gives it a strong ending.

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The first half of the B section was composed in G major and had a I-VI-II-IV progression. The second half was in the relative minor: E minor, and had a I-II-V-I progression, but the rhythm was dotted. Originally, the first half of the B section had a I-VI-II-IV I-II-V-I progression, with the second half with the same progression but in E minor. However, I decided to cut this down as it made this section become too long.  The change of rhythm in this section contrasts this section from the other sections of the piece, as the lack of semiquavers ...

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