Projects!
So, I’ve sucked at updating this thing daily. I might have to change the name… right now it’s pretty inaccurate.
Anywho, there hasn’t been much going on in my life except for working on some music projects, but I figured I could talk about those, since they’re really the only thing I have to talk about anyways!
Lately I’ve been pouring most of my time and energy into preparing pieces for the highSCORE festival. The highSCORE festival is a music composition festival lasting about 2 weeks that takes place in Pavia, Italy. I’ll have intensive composition lessons and masterclasses, and my music will be performed professionally! Ahhh! Needless to say, I am excited. I am also intimidated as fuck. I googled the festival to see what I could find out about it, and the blogs of a few fellow participants came up. I stalked their pages mercilessly, as I am wont to do, and made a discovery: they are older and much more experienced than me. We’re talking people who have had pieces performed by professional orchestras. Why the heck did they accept me??? I’m only 22 and I haven’t even done anything yet!
Well, for whatever reason, they did accept me, so I am working on 2 pieces for the festival. The first is a piece for solo cello. I had the option of including electronics, but I wanted to challenge myself a bit, and frankly I didn’t feel like lugging any equipment halfway across the world. So solo cello it is. The piece is still nameless, but it’s pretty cool so far. I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from the Bach cello suites.
The second piece is optional, but I wanted to do it. It’s a piece for clarinet ensemble, we could choose from a buttload of combinations. I chose a quintet consisting of 2 B-flat clarinets, 2 bass clarinets, and a basset horn (which is between regular clarinets and bass clarinets in range). I didn’t really know what I was writing at first, but it has kind of turned into a theme for Littlefinger from Game of Thrones. I’ve been both reading the books and watching the show, so I guess it was on my mind! Anyways it’s really cool, and I named it “The Shapeshifter.” It’s very mysterious sounding and always changing key. Never lets you get too comfortable ;)
Another project I’m working on is scoring a short film for one of my favorite people to work with in the whole world, Matt Liljegren. Matt is an IRL friend who I met in Intro to Video Production during my secret life as a film minor during undergrad. Check out his reel (that’s my music!) He’s way talented. Also we discovered that he has the same birthday as John Williams and I have the same birthday as George Lucas, so we declared ourselves lifelong collaborators (hopefully I won’t start to suck at life when I get old). Aaanyways this project is a bunch of timelapse stuff, real pretty, and I can’t wait to score it. We’re also going to be on a team with a bunch of other people for the 48 hour film project when it comes to Chicago. I really hope it won’t be while I’m in Italy! They apparently haven’t figured out the dates for Chicago yet.
I also have a few other things, like adding flute to some church-y songs for a friend of mine and redoing my website. And don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about hitRECord! I just started a really cool cover tonight (won’t tell you who I’m covering though, or what with!) and I want to do sound design for Jelly Babies since I’m good at that shit but haven’t really done any for hitRECord.
Hmm, this was long. Hugs if you read the whole thing. I’ll try to be better about writing every day. <3
