Ethan Wang IB Music Blog

For my "hard" excerpt for the Experimenting with Music Performer Excerpt Three, I selected measures 59-102 in Incantations. The main performer technique I focused on for this excerpt was rhythm—while for my other excerpts, rhythm was obviously a concern, there are many more challenging rhythmic ideas in this excerpt, hence my emphasis on it. For example, there are several key changes, such as in measure 71 when it swaps to 2/4 time briefly, and in measure 90, where it swaps to 5/4 time from measure 89, which had just swapped to 3/4 time. A sudden switch between time signatures is hard to keep track of rhythmically, so I needed to play that perfectly in order to preserve the integrity of the piece. There are also syncopated rhythms that were not present throughout other excerpts, such as in measures 63-64, and throughout 79-89, that need to be played perfectly as well. 

 As mentioned before (twice now), my stimulus piece is Tobu's Candyland. For part three of my Experimenting with Music Creation Excerpt 3 Commentary, I have finished the main melody and the simple drum pattern. The third component I will be adding to my composition is lots of percussive elements. For the second component of my composition, I added a simple drum beat as a base, much like Tobu does in his own works. The simple drum beat, as can be heard in the second excerpt, is composed of a hi-hat, clap, and 808, which seeks to keep the groove and make the beat "hit hard." I was planning to add lots of little percussion, such as a triangle; particularly lots of I was also thinking of adding a kick to compliment the 808, since the 808 in my composition is keeping the tempo rather than kicks like in the original composition. As mentioned in my second commentary, I find Tobu's drum beats to be rather dry, so I can improve on that by adding percussion.