Composition Journal

Sandro’s Piece is Completed

On Tuesday I completed the piece for Sandro, fully engraved and looking beautiful. I emailed it over just minutes before I had to go teach. I was quite nervous about how he would receive it. I know, the most important thing is that I was happy with the piece. I put all ...

Workshopping with MIDI

It is very hard to be objective when you are composing or playing through your piece. So it's a real benefit to be able to take the listener's seat for a few minutes and listen to Finale's playback of the notated score. It's true that the playback quality is not very good, ...

Engraving Begins for Sandro’s Piece

Today I begin engraving Sandro's piece! But that doesn't mean it is finished, because it definitely is not. I have the skeleton of the piece in place, and I just need to fill it out. Here's an example. This shows an idea for a line where I knew how everything else was supposed ...

No Empty Gestures

Since Sandro is a virtuoso, a goal for this piece is to showcase his outstanding technique. A common feature of virtuoso works is the flashy scale or arpeggio run meant to thrill the audience with its super-human difficulty. But it is soooo easy for these gestures to be all flash and ...

Ready for Rewrites

The piano piece for Sandro is coming along nicely but slowly, not because of a lack of inspiration but from a lack of time. There is much to do in setting up the sheet music for sale on my website, a very exciting thing to do and to see it come ...

Stressing over Sandro

This is very exciting. I am writing a piece for the great pianist Sandro Russo. Sandro is a pianist in the tradition of the greats like Horowitz, Cziffra and now Marc-Andre Hamelin. To write for a musician such as him is a great honour. An honour not without pressure... I have been ...

Acting With Notes

Over the last four days I worked on two demo pieces for a film I am being considered for. (I am not sure if I can say the name of it, so I won't.) These demo pieces do not represent underscore but source pieces written by the main character, who is ...

Feeling Sentimental

I have just completed the piece for saxophone and piano. It is all composed, filled in, nipped and tucked and carefully engraved.It is called "Uriel's Anvil". I was feeling a bit sentimental as I emailed the PDF by to the pianist Sandra Joy. Here's the email I wrote as a ...

Beauty is in the Details

Add a little here, take away there. As I complete the piece for saxophone and piano, it strikes me (yet again) how much small details make a big difference. I just added two little empty beats before the closing section, it's nothing right? Now the whole section feels 100% better, without ...

Laying Down the Bones

The skeleton of the piece is done! It's 4:40 on Friday! This was an intense day and I managed to write just over 5 pages. Not bad.It's a skeleton because there are some headless stems and empty measures that need to be fleshed out. "Laying down the bones" (as I call ...