T. 55--Improv

In my Music 188 class, we got into groups of two to create compositions together with someone else. I had never done that before. Since Joe Robins played the piano and I played the cello, it made sense to us to write a piano/cello duet. Both Joe and I were pretty passive in this project in that we didn’t really have very many ideas for this piece. So, we decided to have one person (myself) write the notes and the other (Joe) would write the rhythms. When we realized our piece needed to be longer, we experimented further by having me write the piano part and Joe writing the cello part for this second half. The divide between these two methods is at 1:06 in the video. I came up with “Improv” for the title, for lack of a better one. This piece did feel thrown together without very much effort, though it is quite interesting to see the results of our individual efforts work together a little bit by pure chance.

When I wrote the notes for the first half, I had a few tunes from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in my head, thinking the rhythms Joe would come up with might render the sequence of notes unrecognizable. I’ll let you be the judge of that. For the piano part that I wrote for the second half, I just threw a few ideas together, leaving space for the cello part to come through. I also had the idea to have piano notes pressed down by the left hand at one point to produce a sound similar to a bagpipe. The recording we made in class wasn’t the best because, admittedly, we didn’t practice very much. We actually lost our places a couple of times. Other than that, this was pure experimentation, and for me it was a new experience to experiment on a composition without the help of Finale. 

Another confession: the recording in the video above is a MIDI file recording, made by Finale.