Bird Raptures – not quite what I had planned…
Last week, I mentioned I had started a setting of Christina Rossetti’s Bird Raptures for SATB choir…
Compositions sometimes make their own decisions about what they want to be. I spent the last week trying to shoe-horn this text into an SATB arrangement…and it just didn’t want to work. I think it wants to be a piece for solo voice and ensemble, so it’s going into hibernation until I know what I want to do with it. Sometimes, stepping back from a piece is the best thing to do.
Triptych for solo piano
The second piece in this set is chugging along nicely. There was a lot less material for this piece in the original improvisation, so it’s more like writing a whole new piece than the first piece was. But it’s going well and is actually fitting with the ideas that have come from my research into Agnes Martin, an abstract painter. The focus on one small action that changes subtly, by design or human error, is something that I would like to explore more in depth – this piece may just be the starting point.
An exciting new project
I won’t go into too much detail now, but I am in the very first stages of a project focusing on site-specific music. For anyone who doesn’t know, site-specific music is music written for and performed in a certain place, like an art gallery, a park or a house. This is the kind of thing I love doing and I’ll keep you updated as we go along (it might be quite a while…these things take time).
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Previous WIP Wednesdays for Bird Raptures:
Previous WIP Wednesdays for Triptych:
Composer’s Block and Abstract Art
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Rachel Graff 