When I started working on my composition again, I decided that I wanted to change directions quite drastically from what I had originally planned to do in my composition. I decided that I was going to take inspiration from James Humberstone’s Fantasia piece. Back in Week 5 in Technology in Music Education, when we filmed a performance of this piece, I was struck by how the pianist would occasionally play the piano with her fists. I wanted this to be a main focus of both my baby steps composition assessment and my own composition. I also wanted to place an emphasis on using the whole range of the instrument I would chose to compose for.
Seeing as I’m a clarinet player, I decided to compose a piece for solo clarinet, with a focus on extended techniques. I kept the key of A minor as well as the arpeggiated pattern from my first draft – I still loved these two things and didn’t want to completely abandon the ideas I had already had.
Before writing down any more music, I decided to improvise with different sounds I could make on my clarinet (playing music before writing music down is important!). (Recordings of these will be in another blog post.) It was really simple, interesting and quite enjoyable. All I had to do was examine my clarinet for a little bit, while thinking about how I could make interesting, unusual sounds from it. This pushed my to think about how my instrument could be used in an unconventional way.
Here is the final draft from my piece! Oh, I decided to name it Into the Eerie Night – it just seemed fitting.
I recorded myself playing the piece so that I could show it to the rest of my Composition in Music Education course – have a listen!
Rachelle Pieri 