[Abhorred]

As a few of you may know, I have an alter-ego of a modern classical composer. I've been trying to get my music "out there," and properly start my career, but it's been rather difficult for a no-name such as myself, especially in a musical climate where my sort of atonal cacophony isn't readily welcomed.

I recently put the final touches on a 10 minute piece for solo piano, and submitted it for consideration in a major local new music concert. I didn't hear anything from the organization for quite some time and assumed the worst, but tonight I received news that it was accepted for at least one, and potentially two performances in mid-March.

Some of the piece is gruelingly difficult, so there's still no guarantees that the pianist will be able to pull it together in the three weeks until the concerts, but I'm trying to have faith in his talents and hoping for the best.

With any luck, I'll have a recording to share from the evening.



Addendum, March 15th: Here's the newspaper article on the concert: Chamber music premieres on tap

The full article text is quoted on page 4, and here's the group photo:

[Lee]

Perseverance pays off

[Luan]

That's cool!
I wrote for piano once, it's one of the coolest instruments ever

[Trespass]

I've been playing piano for 10 years, and I still find new and interesting things every so often that I'll take and transpose to guitfiddle.

[MerlinTKD]

Dude, that's AWESOME!!!

It's not easy to write dissonantly, despite what some people may think! The hardest stuff I ever wrote in school were 12-tone exercises... it really does make you stretch for things outside the box.



Kinda like metal!

Do you have any samples up? I'd love to hear some stuff! What kind of composition style do you use? Is it truly atonal, or are you using a center pitch, like 12-tone?

Sorry for the third degree... been a long time since I got to talk to anyone about this kind of stuff!!

[Desecrated]

Congrats!

[Blood Tempest]

Congrats! Can't wait to hear it dude!

[Naren]

I'd love to see a video of it or even just hear an MP3.

[Abhorred]

Thanks a lot, guys. I'm so stoked on getting the piece accepted, and I sure hope that I get some sort of recording to share. I do have a digital rendering of the work on a free piano sampler, but it really doesn't do justice to the music. Still, if anyone really wants to hear it now, just PM me your email address - as long as you can accept a single big file (about 15 megs). I've had some trouble with cetain mailboxes bouncing them.

Originally Posted by MerlinTKD

Do you have any samples up? I'd love to hear some stuff! What kind of composition style do you use? Is it truly atonal, or are you using a center pitch, like 12-tone?

Sorry for the third degree... been a long time since I got to talk to anyone about this kind of stuff!!

No worries! I love talking shop with those who share a passion for the crazy musics of this world.

This particular piece moves around fairly fluidly - some sections are free from any pitch centricity, while others are quite the opposite. The slow middle section, in particular, fluctuates around Eb. It's not serially composed, though; the work is very personal in nature, and I wasn't prepared to try and force my emotional expression into a predetermined pitch system.

I guess I've really blended serial techniques into my overall language - I use a lot of permutations of certain intervallic sets for a sense of motivic continuity, and occasionally serialize a passage, but I don't often feel the need to pre-compositionally organize my pitch content any more. I've found that, contrary to what Schoenberg envisioned, the 12-tone system has untimately proven quite a hindrance to the expressivity of music. While he saw the system as removing the compositional problem of pitch organization ("How should I follow note X? How can I avoid overly implying any given key?"), it eventually became a situation of "Okay, I basically need to follow note X with note Y if I want to stay true to form - now how can I make it interesting?" While that can be an interesting challenge, I often find that the resulting music is all too commonly devoid of the surprises and the tension that results from a composer's natural intuition. I still greatly respect Schoenberg, though, but even he found himself chafing from the system later in life...

I don't have any samples of my work publically out there at the moment. It's partially due to copyright issues, and partially because I don't have clearance from all the performers on the recordings I do have. I don't really mind sharing them privately, though.

[xoi]

just curious man, how long have you been writing/studying classical composition?