Co-write Project Approaching Final Stages of Production

This week I have been extremely busy working on a musical project with a friend and am pleased to say that it is very nearly finished. We have in just a week started and finished about half of the final recordings for the piece including Piano, Guitar and Kalimba parts. Probably the most interesting part of this was discovering the most amazing mic placement for recording a kalimba; one stereo mic above and one below. This just gives the most resonant sound. The Kalimba is actually a fascinating instrument when it comes to resonance. This is something I found out when applying an EQ to it and observing the frequency spectrums it produces and as it turns out there is barely any first or second harmonic in it’s timbral profile, the third harmonic is quite noticeable but only for the first few moments of it’s time sounding, and after this there is only a slight trace of frequencies every few harmonics.

Due to how busy I have been with university deadlines, I have little in the way of new music other than for my course and for my co-write project, we are intending to only show it once it is fully completed, so for this week’s passage of music I have done a quick recording of a section of an old piece I wrote and will be recording in full soon:

This is part of a suite I wrote for classical guitar, and like much of my music, uses a theme which goes through variations. The passage you hear is one of those variations.

I chose it for several reasons. For one, I thought it would be good to have another passage on here that is relatively hard to play given what I’m calling this weekly blog, but it also has several interesting features. The two most stand out parts of this are the arpeggios and the augmented 6th chord (first bar of the second system) and I will discuss these along with several other things. This passage started as just the arpeggio which is a fairly challenging line t play on guitar especially when using the exact fingerings that are marked, the slide adds a wonderful bit of flavour to the shape of the passage and hence it is important. It is also made harder by needing to find the top C after the arpeggio. This Em arpeggio going into a Am chord also works as a cadence to mark the start of the passage. The melodic shape of the whole part is also important, it jumps up and glides down. Melodic shape is something that deserves a lot of attention as it is what leads to the music in many ways, making sense. There are also three voices in this passage, the bass, melody and middle part, all of which make sense by themselves and that grounds the passage so it doesn’t feel disjointed. Harmonically it is largely around chords I, IV, V and V7 but the voice leading is what gives these chords the impact that they have. The only nuances here are the augmented 6th chord and modulation into the next section via a secondary dominant chord at the end. This is one of my favourite harmonic devices. This is when you have a major chord six with a augmented 6th note in it (which effectively makes it a dominant chord) but the bass and the augmented 6th (which is usually at the top of the tessitura) both resolve outwards to the root of chord 5 by a semitone. This is very common in classical music, but if I were to give a favourite example of this, it would be in a piece I have studied by Brahms, and that is his Piano quintet in F minor, op.34, and specifically the Scherzo movement. It is used amazingly to create a huge amount of tension and resolution.

The point of this passage is balance. It isn’t enough in music to have just a nice melody or chord sequence. By considering voice leading and melodic shape, it can be much easier to create music that effectively works as a whole.