Tonight's concert went extremely well, and I congratulate everyone involved! As I said to Dave in a conversation after the concert, if you added up the number of person-hours that it took to make this concert happen, I suspect you would get an impressively-large number. Not only are there the hours each composer spent writing and editing their work, there are also the hours spent learning and rehearsing the music by the performers; a concert like this represents a tremendous commitment and is a remarkable achievement, and I think you all should feel proud.
As well as it went, though, the one unfortunate aspect was that we were unable to hear the works of two students, one because the performers' schedules were impossible to coordinate, the other due to a technical problem in getting the prepared piano sounds on CD to play in the hall. I'm sure this must have been a great disappointment to those students as well as to the rest of us, but these things do happen from time to time, and there will always be more performance opportunities in the future.
Speaking of performance opportunities in the future, this is the end of the road for this course, but I hope not the end of your development as composers. Some of you will continue on with Music 4100 next term, but even if you don't, you can always continue to write music and try to create opportunities to have it performed. I will talk about this a bit further in tomorrow's class, and I will also set the deadline for score submission, blogs, and class blog comments.
Well done, everyone!
P.S. Does the use of the word "raging" to modify "success" strike anyone else as odd? It is a very common word pairing, but I wonder where it comes from. I found this in the online Webster's dictionary definition of "raging": 3 : extraordinary, tremendous, e.g., "a raging success."
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Final Recital of the Final Piece
12 years ago
8 comments:
Congrats to everyone!! I thought the concert was just great! Everyone's pieces were fantastic. The concert really showcased a lot of growth and development of each persons compositional pallet. I thought that the time was just right too for a concert with so much music! In and out in an hour and a half I think! Which is not too shabby! There were not many long delays between performances either.
I was also very glad, and surprised, at the size of our audience! We weren't just performing for our class. We actually had outside people! Wahoo!
Great job everyone!
I thought last nights concert was amazing. It was fun to finally hear everyones pieces put together. It was also really cool to hear how different everyones pieces were, everyones personalities can out it was very cool. The crowd was pretty big to which is awesome. Overall I thought the concert went great and it was an excellent evening of music.
I was very pleased with this concert overall. I feel like everyone stepped it up from the last one and really showed maturing signs within their writing. Everyone had their own creative approach, and the concert was an appropriate length.
As one of the two students who chose to write with the basis of a musical cliché, I was very impressed with everyones writing for voice. I find dealing with words and voice as a melodic element very intimidating, and I usually avoid it at all costs. You all did very well and inspired me to give it a try at some point!
I think the greatest surprise for me was how well everyone managed to set English text. I avoided an English poem because I found I couldn't do it without making it sound cheesy. I find English to be a rather boring spoken language (or more specifically the North American dialects I've grown up with), and does not lend itself to be overly poetic. I've heard several English songs, which I never cared for at all, but this recital proved that perhaps there is some worth, if you've got the right words and the right person working the magic...
Everyone did a great job! Congratulations to both the performers and the composers!
As for "raging" modifying "success..." The dictionary I consulted said to refer "rabies" for further etymology, which then directed me to "rave," where I was told that it can be traced to the 16th century, but is of an unknown origin.
However, there seems to be a trend amongst the definitions of "raging" and "rage." They all deal with great passion or uncontrollable force, or something along those lines. So in that context, it doesn't seem like such a stretch to call a success that is beyond successful "raging."
I felt the concert went extremely well. A lot of time went into composing and rehearsing for it and we really pulled it off.
It was sad that we didn't get to hear two of the pieces. It was really disappointing but understandable as it is so hard to get everyone together to rehearse, and technical issues will arise more often than not. I would really like to hear the recordings of these pieces once they're finished.
And that is an odd definition for raging... you would think of rage.. hmm.
I am really looking forward to Composition 4100 next term!
Yes this was a great concert. One thing i noticed was how much the music changed from the class room to the stage. Some tihngs that sound great in class do not come out as expected in a preformance. Generally peoples pieces really came to life. There was a new energy in the music that really completely changed the composition.
I guess after listening to alot of class presentaions in Sibelius, it was just great ot hear acutal people interpeting it.
Good Concert! everyones music was great.
"I'm sure this must have been a great disappointment to those students"
its just a performance. =)
that aspect isnt a primary concern of mine. i have it in my head. and on paper. and a (subpar) recording.
i would also like to echo the sentiment that there was a [i]huge[/i] leap forward in terms of maturity when comparing this concert with the last one. wow. i certainly dont mean that to sound insulting regarding the first concert we had, but the amount of growth in just a few weeks is pretty mindblowing.
I think this concert was indeed a "raging success".
I was very impressed with how well everyone managed to pull their compositions together with such a short time frame! Some of the compositions were never fully presented in class before the performance, but they still worked quite well.
Also, I was very impressed with those of us who were intimidated by atonality at the first assignment. There were some creative sound worlds created in this concert.
Congrats!
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