Week 1: Warm Up

Welcome to the first entry in my senior project blog. I hope you enjoy your stay as I ramble on for 4 required paragraphs and more in future weeks.

My Capstone Project is writing and arranging a 4 movement orchestral symphony. Simultaneously, I continue to attend Music Recording and Production with my project advisor Matt Woodard. I chose this particular project because of its scope. Having this time specifically dedicated to writing without the distractions of normal schoolwork has a lot of potential. I've been writing single piece orchestral scores since lockdown and this feels like going all in, testing everything that I've learned and developed for over a year.

This is an individual project. It was inspired by the 2013 video game soundtrack called Journey written by Austin Wintory. As a composer I've always struggled with connecting parts together. The score of the game is a textbook example of how to concoct what feels like one continuous movement with themes, instrumentation, and recognizable variation. I hope to evoke a similar structure and challenge myself to create an overarching musical thread.

My 3 goals are

    1) To branch all the songs together so they act as one cohesive whole rather than unrelated individual pieces.

    2) To challenge myself in being deliberate and precise with my choices and see the symphony as a whole during the writing process

    3) To stay fixed on an emotional foundation rather than focus on technical prowess.

  

Day 1:

I scratched out some ideas and combed through the music theory books I had at my disposal. These included Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Fundamentals of Musical Composition by Arnold Schoenberg. So if I ever have to invent a progression like G Dominant 7 to a B half diminished to a non diatonic F augmented 7/9 thank Tchaikovsky for making it comprehensible. My original idea was to include an electric guitar to act as an atmospheric texture alongside a traditional set of orchestral instruments. I also planned to write 3 movements and a small scale prelude where the electric guitar and violin play off each other.

Day 2: After fumbling with guitar tone and effects I scrapped its inclusion and started writing a piano sketch. I wrote very large dense voicings as a foundation for harmonious unison where in later movements I would shift to more chromaticism and atonalism which encourages lots of dissonance and gloomy sounds. This would be a contrast to the prelude and final movement which will be extremely rich rather than heavy. At this moment I planned for a string section to play the prelude and here is my work at the end of the day.

Day 3: Well now I just felt bad that the rest of the orchestra wasn't included so I wrote in some woodwinds and some percussion to provide a melody the listener could attach to. I replaced the original piano sketch with a harp that pans from left to right as it arpeggiates up the voicings played by the strings. After feeling comfortable with how all the instruments played I started to do some automation to adjust volume at certain points.

Day 4: I'm in the mixing phase for the prelude. I thought it would be a better idea to wrap up the prelude to give myself a grace period before writing the following three movements one after the other. I'm making sure the balance of the instruments is pleasant to the ear and that the track sounds like its coming from an orchestral hall. After the day is over the prelude will still be revised especially once I have a theme nailed down that I could foreshadow. I met with Matt to discuss the progress on the current piece and I have made revisions based on his pointers including automation and note adjustments.

Day 5: The mix of the prelude is in a good state though I wouldn't call it final yet. Maybe some EQ tweaks down the line. Overall I think it acts as a good start to the symphony but over the weekend I'll need sit down and imagine the next three movements as a whole in order to write the cohesive piece I want it to be.

Notes: Additionally each day, I write down my objectives and a list of questions to consider as I work. After that, my notebook becomes a scrambled mess of musical ideas, key words, and instructions. Etchings of a madman?

I wouldn't be that overdramatic.