Sunday, March 20, 2011

The Life of a Crayon (2008)

I wrote this solo piano piece just after my research on Synaesthesia.  It was originally titled Colors, Yellow/Gold, Red/Blue, Green, while the title The Life of a Crayon, has a melancholy suffering artist twist that seemed ironic and metaphorical at the time, but I still like the simplicity of the title Colors.  I had all of the ideas in the paper I posted previous to this link floating around in my head when I wrote this piece, but the only technique I used to really draw in Synaesthesia into the piece was to think really hard about each color while I wrote the three movements.  Sounds stupid, I know, but it is also somehow occult and metaphysical in a way that can't really be explained or analyzed (well actually it can, just read my paper posted below!) Otherwise I composed using cell based linear motives, contrasted against dense chords, similar to jazz chords with harmonic extensions.  This is the only piece I've ever written by hand.  And there are no beats, and the bar lines only designate phrasing to the perfomer.  I'll see if I can scan a page in the near future. —D.W.

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