Experimenting with Music Performance

 The pieces I chose for the Experimenting with Music Performance are Folk Song and Shanty, and Incantations, both composed by Richard Meyer. The reasons for choosing these pieces are simple—at the time of selecting my “Music performance” pieces, these were the only two pieces I was working on for string orchestra. However, we just started learning a score for “Coco,” so that may be my third piece for the experimenting with music performance section. Although I know I am capable of playing more challenging pieces, the pieces provided in string orchestra help to reinforce fundamentals, and some sections of the pieces are also pretty difficult. Folk song and Shanty is in the British folk song style, a style of music I am not at all familiar with. For my excerpt from folk song and shanty, I re-selected measures 1-37. As for performance techniques I can use in my composition, focusing on articulation and spacing is important, as that translates to making sure my composition has space in order to breathe. The other piece I will be looking at is Incantations. Some performance techniques I will need to focus on are staying in-tune and staying on beat, because the double bass part I selected (measure 1-42) essentially plays as a musical drone. I can incorporate this into my own composition by including a drone. Given that I am also playing the double bass, incorporating a strong bass line—for the purposes of electronic music, a synth bass line is a compelling addition. The staying in-tune part is not quite as relevant, given that synths are always going to be in tune, but there shouldn’t be any out of tune notes. In Incantations (and every other great piece,) there are parts of the piece that buildup to a grand conclusion/breakdown, this should also be true to the composition: it should have one section building up to another. As for dynamics, the piece could start off quieter during the introduction, and fade out during the outro. As I work to record excerpts from these pieces, I will be learning how to play “Forget me not” from Coco in class, and adapt challenging excerpts from that to Experimenting with music. I believe the selections I have made so far, and the ones I plan to make in the future, make the most sense and would best suit the experimenting with music performance section. 


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