Monday, April 15, 2013

Exploring Q4


What is your major area of emphasis for Q4? This is where are you applying the majority of your time and energy.
·         A focus on musical expression and artistic expression in general. I feel as if acting and music have the same distinct fundamental principles that make them art; expression of life and story. Whether its acting or music, I want to focus on my delivery and interpretation of expression
Are you exploring, or are you working towards a finished product? 
·         I feel that it would be very beneficial for me to do a bit of both. I definitely want an end product, for sure – but I still want room for experimentation and space for exploration, therefor I can search for my artistic personality. If I discover this now, I would benefit greatly from this.

What do you envision as the end result?
  • I envision a collaborative acting piece that somehow ties to music. The closest thing to this would be a snippet from an opera, acting out the part as I sing. I want something in which I can express myself musically and visually.
Are you working alone or do you have collaborators?
  • ·         At the moment and most of my past time in STAC I have worked alone, though I would like to change this. I would like to work collaboratively and change my habits of “lone wolfing.” I need to be in a working environment with increase collaboration because it will help me with work production and it will help me with idea development skills.

Who are your community?
  • ·         I would prefer people with skills in acting and music; I don’t want to work with photographers, for example, because there would be no obvious artistic relation to generate Ideas. In other words, it wouldn’t benefit me very much to work with photographers, for instance, because photography has nothing to do with music and it would be a waste of my time.


Where are you now, where will you get to?
  • I’m at a beginning point of something of which I’m not sure of yet, but ideas will come as ideas and new influences come.




What are 5 criteria with which we will evaluate your work on this this quarter?
  1. inspiring
  2. intellectual
  3. impetus to something out of the ordinary
  4. flowing 
  5. “colorful”  
Minor:

What is your minor? Why? How will it be useful to you? How will it be fun?
  • ·         Architectural design. I intended on working on this since the beginning of the year but I have focused myself on other things. I have a great interest in redesigning the designed.  


Where are your starting? Where do you hope to get to? 
  •  Old sketches from sketchbooks of years gone by. I have professional drafting tools and I would like to use them for a change- and eventually create a model of my best piece. 

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

A Waltz? or not a Waltz?



Today was very much a day of intense arrangement of my Sicilian styled piece. I was initially thinking of making this piece a "canzone" which is a song, different than an aria which is a singe solo song from an opera,  but I am seeing a better outcome for this piece as a chamber piece with mandolin parts and bass and cello parts as well. In regard to my time frame, I am always keeping the idea of its practicality of completion and it seems doable to record the piano part and a mandolin and bass part. The cello and string section is a bit too complicated to arrange and write out for now; also considering the long and tedious rehearsals I would have to have with a string section- for now and I will save this for a future date. One problem that I have found was that the piece has a “waltz” feel and these are usually written in 6/8 time. The piece is written with in 6/8 time, though it has the feel of a 4/4 time and I felt I had to conduct some research to determine whether or not I am doing something wrong. First off, I listened to some waltzes and I listened for their “feel”, while in my head, my piano part played along.

Johann Strauss – “Vienna Waltz”


 The two matched and I felt I was on to something, but I still felt I needed more reassurance. To do this, I wrote out the lead to the mandolin part with the octaves part to the piano (they’re the same) and I found that 4/4 would be holding the phrase over and it didn’t flow. The temp I was looking for was that waltz feel where, as counted as quarter notes in rhythm, is 1- 2 -3, 1- 2 – 3, 1-2 -3, and so on and so forth.
With this, I found a YouTube video with a great explanation two why 6/8 is 6/8.


YouTube- Difference Between 4/4 And 6/8 In Music


 It went over the aspect of how 4/4 can be similar, but instead there are 6 eighth notes that are counted “like quarter” notes in the aspect that they are counted as one beat.