I sat down the other day and was able to write a good first draft of "Music of a Dream," which is a new title that I've given to a song previously called "Seranade." I don't like generic names in my song titles.
It's the piece that William sings in honor of Annabel but based on another piece which Roderick had written and discarded. There can never be an uncomplicated song that a character, you know, just writes for themselves.
I guess that's the point.
Anyway, what's more exciting is that I've been meeting with Duncan Neilson, my fall semester advisor, and he's been very helpful on tweaking my existing songs. We were able to look at "A Love That will Never Die" earlier this week and make it, in my opinion, about five times better by changing only three notes in the entire song. That's not three notes which repeat over and over, but three notes total.
The issue, as with every song, lies in the musical shaping. You can imagine this easily by picturing a song you like and forgetting that it has notes. Just think about the contour- the general idea of where it's going. You could think of Holst's "Mars" as a series of increasingly big hills angled softly on one side and steeply on the other. You could think of the opening of the Jaws theme song as a series of upward sloping lines which become shorter and shorter. Etc.
By changing three notes, we altered the song from two mirror-image lines with bumps at the end to one long line that makes the entire thing cohesive. Perhaps I'm explaining this very poorly. I would do a better job and draw graphs and things, but I have a paper for Strategic Management due this afternoon. Yay school.
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