This week, I haven't felt like doing much at all, to be honest. But there is some progress in the cello piece commission I have coming up.
A semester ago, 10 student composers from BU were invited to collaborate with 10 performers from the Rivers School. The general idea was that each composer was expected to craft a piece for the performer they were assigned to, and this was an ongoing project between Rivers School and the other Boston area universities for a while now. After multiple students initially saying 'yes'and then dropping out of the project, the professor in charge of facilitating this approached me and some of my friends, among other 4th year students, and that's how we got onboard.
The performer I chose to be assigned was a cello player, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to write for strings in a somewhat professional capacity. However, I didn't anticipate exactly how challenging this was going to be: she liked Haydn, and generally wanted the piece to be bright and lively, sort of like his works. Having ignored Haydn repertory for the last 3 and a half years, I can safely say that everything she suggested was out of my wheelhouse. But I'm not exactly complaining, either: I do need some variety in my writing every now and then, and I've found the process of working on it quite engaging. For instance, how do I generate the same sort of energy as Haydn repertory without sounding like him? The answer, at least for me, lies in how performers used different articulations to drive the music in a certain direction. (I guess this would be a no–brainer for a performer, but it took me an embarassingly long time to come to this conclusion.)
This idea became a springboard for more thoughts in a similar vein: using articulation to drive musical gestures was one of the more appealing concepts to me, so it's stuck, even as I'm still writing the piece. Combined with ideas from other friends (for example, thinking about my background as a percussionist and how that affects my view of rhythm and timbre), and borrowing how Haydn utilizes musical material (limited material developed over the course of the piece), I think I'm starting to get the hang of what I'll be writing. Problem is, I have to submit it by mid-February...
On a random note, I found the hearts I mentioned in passing two weeks ago.