a learning experience!

Composition recital yesterday - the premier performances of all our pieces! Congratulations, everyone! There were great moments in all the pieces!!

Overall, I'm happy with my composition. I do wish we'd had more time to rehearse, but we pulled it off! And, with this being a whole new experience for me, I learned a TON in the process!

• Composition is challenging and incredibly time-consuming, but also very rewarding!
• Writing for piano is difficult! Even for pianists! Especially in my third piece, with all the arpeggios/scalar figures, I learned (the hard way) not too write too much away from the piano. When I started practicing it, I found much of it awkward to play and spent a lot of time revising it to fit better under the fingers. No sense making it unnecessarily difficult when I could get the same effect in an easier way. 
• Balance. I hadn't thought too much about it until rehearsals. I found that the lower register of the horn can be easily drowned if the piano's also in the lower range. And there was a section with both of us in our upper ranges where I found the horn was better supported when I dropped the piano part an octave. 
• It's hard to know when to stop editing. It seems like in every rehearsal, I saw/heard things I could have done a bit differently, but it was too late to really make changes. I will fix some things now before I submit the final score. 
• Notation. I've thought a lot about how best to notate things - especially fingering - and mostly in my third piece again. What's the clearest way to indicate which hand should play what in arpeggiation... m.s./m.d. markings? Stem directions? Keeping one hand to each staff? Some combination of them all? Or just leave it up to the performer? Although fingering can sometimes be a matter of personal preference, it is helpful to have suggested fingering in the score. I found that all methods get messy in some situations, and so I've changed my mind a good number of times. I want to be somewhat consistent... Right now, I think stem directions are really useful here - but I'd like to pass it by another pianist or two to see what they think. 
• I am a very particular person. If I find silly little note-spelling things or inconsistencies in my final score, it's going to irritate me. But it's so easy to spend way too much time picking through the score. On Tuesday we're doing some score-editing for each other in class. Excellent!

I am excited to be finished this project - it will be so satisfying to have the final score in my hands!

And I am excited to get started on the next assignment! I'm probably going to do the second option - a piece for voice and 2-3 other instruments. So the first task will be to find a text to use!