#waltercommaalex

[wumbleberry-fc]

My Progression So Far As A Composer

Hey everyone! It’s Walter again, with another long boast post

As most people on here are starting school this week (or did a while ago jeez aaah), I still have 4 more weeks until I have my first class.

However, I’m in the mood to reflect on the past fourteen two years and how I went from wanting to be a high school maths teacher for my entire life to deciding I want to be a music major instead, and now doing that 18 months later. Really though I just want an excuse to show off my noticeable improvement.

The following five pieces are the most significant pieces for me, and the most telling in how I’ve grown in my time of fiddling around with the software:

Groovy Grove (published 28 February 2017) was the first thing I ever composed, and the one idea repeated endlessly was what drove me to download music notation software in the first place. It’s pretty boring and repetitive and annoying now, but I thought it was really cool and it’s pretty significant because I would probably be suffering in math classes right now if it weren’t for this. 

Summer Clouds (published 4 April 2017) came just a month after Groovy Grove, and it’s my first concert band piece. I wanted to make a full band piece, and slapped a couple of rhythms together and this thing was born. Again, I thought that I was the shit after making this, and was like ‘Hell yeah this is easy I’m so good this will be a fun and a not hard at all hobby or something hopefully I can make money for this I’m awesome!’ and spread it around like crazy. In my AP Lit class, we had to take a character from our current novel and make a CD of five songs and five poems that character would listen to and explain why that song/poem would be significant to them. Naturally, I hadn’t yet read a page of the book and so I picked a random character and said that they listened to this song as well as two of my poems because why not. I think I got a D-. Everyone was bored half to death when I presented it, but afterwards one person told me that he thought it was cool that I made a thing, and so I decided one week later to not go to the college that I was going to go to to become a high school math teacher at, and go to the other college instead and be undecided.

I soon found that writing music is not easy, and though it was still fun, I was not always in the mood to compose. Graduation happened, and I was like, Yay! And then later in the summer, I missed my best friend, and I wanted to write something that reminded me of her. The New Complete (published 30 August 2017) is the product of that. It is a Tuba/Violin duet, and we hope to one day play it together. The New Complete was featured in @future-struggling-musician‘s Pride Month Composers Project, where Hot Luke Kevin featured one LGBTQ+ composer of tumblr every day.

Enter college. College is great! I love college! I’m actually doing homework and everything, and my grades are leagues better than they ever were in high school or elementary. I even found a lot of friends, and we remained friends all year AND all summer! It’s wonderful! But in between classes and actually doing homework for the first time in my goddamn life and having a social life for the first time in my goddamn life and also not having a computer to compose on for 5 months, I didn’t compose much during the year. I got a new computer on 3 April 2018, wrote Practice Room on 4 April 2018, and retouched it and published it on 5 April 2018. For someone who doesn’t know much of anything in how to play the piano, I sure wrote a lot of doodles on it at college. Practice Room is really the only one worth listening to though.

This last piece -- the one that really shows that I have gotten better since last year and the hope that once I actually know something about theory and voicing and structure that I’ll be able to produce thoroughly sound pieces that a band might one day want to play -- is Swaying (published Sunday, 26 August 2018). I started writing Swaying within two weeks of publishing Summer Clouds, back when I thought that writing full band pieces would be easy. I thought I could finish this one in a month as well, or maybe a little bit longer because percussion is hard to write and I would need maybe a week or two to learn it. Yeah, no. I wrote most of the beginning and I got as far as writing the tuba/euph part to the halfway point of the piece, and I got the snare and bass drum written through the first quarter of the piece, and then I ran out of steam. I didn’t know where to go from there, what instrument to introduce next, or how I could expand upon the melodic line and the sax/trumpet counterpoint. And so I stopped. In mid-May, 2017. And I tried to work on other things to generate ideas for what was then called “ooga booga.” But I had nothing, and I couldn’t bring myself to add another note to the score until Monday 20 August 2018. Now, 9 days later, and the piece has been done for 3, it sounds the best of all of mine by far, and I still don’t know how to write percussion at all. But that’s okay, because I’ve also learned that I can’t force it.

I think I’m in a decent position right now, and I can’t wait for what will come next!

#composition #original composition #my music #update #college #discussion #progression #long post #Groovy Grove and Summer Clouds and The New Complete can be found on my musescore account #waltercommaalex #Groovy Grove and Summer Clouds were originally posted on my old account petethehotdog #The New Complete was originally uploaded to here from musescore #and I wanted them all to be in the audio post format for ease #I'm also still waiting to hear if I am accepted into the composition program or not #that decision still isn't due for two months though so #we'll see

[wumbleberry-fc]

Hi friends!

I just got out of a meeting with my symphonic band professor, and he has asked me to talk to my composer friends about sending him some pieces for us to try and put together this work from home quarter.

We are trying to do what other universities and professional groups are doing, and recording all of our parts individually and mixing them all together to make a finished product that (hopefully) is all together and sounds beautiful.

And while we are at it, he wants our band to play new music.

So. If you have a piece written for any combination of woodwinds, brass, and/or percussion, and you would like us to try to put it together, please send (preferably) a PDF and MP3 of the full score and PDFs of the individual parts to me!

School email: [email protected] Google email: [email protected]

#Western Washington University #Symphonic Band #Wind Symphony #composition #composers of tumblr #composer #call for scores #If we get flooded with scores #We may not get to yours #And I apologize in advance if we don't play your piece! #But please send us some music! #We would love to have material to play so that we can make something of this quarter when we are all online stuck at home!