So last night we had the undergraduate composers' concert in the Silver Building at NYU. This is the highly anticipated recording of our concert that I made. If anyone else in the class has recordings let me know if/where you post them online.
To those of you who weren't in attendance this recording is the culmination of my principals of composition course that I took this past semester. It was a great night with a great array of different sounds and insights into the compositional process. Thanks a lot to prof. Kampela for being such a dedicated instructor and everyone in the class for providing your insight. It was great seeing what we all did this semester, I wish you all the best with your music in the future!
Introduction
A Transfigured Home - David Aragona
This is what I wrote about my piece:
This is what I wrote about my piece:
First and foremost I would like to thank prof. Kampela for guiding us all along our way with our pieces. Without his direction, insight and gentle critical hand my piece, to its detriment, would not have taken the form it did. To Whom it May Concern... is about ideas and memory. About the places we go in our mind that excite and intrigue us. Whether writing a letter or composing a piece of music, turning conception into representation at any level requires fluency, logic, and the common decency of art. But what occurs between an idea and its eventual representation; the carving, the molding, the frustration, inspiration, and resultant feelings involved are all part of the creative process.
The mysticism with which the creative process is represented, as being ascribed to genius or the result of an opportunity, I feel dilutes the emotional journey involved in art, science, or even something as mundane as writing a letter. Roland Barthes speaks of Einstein as being popularly characterized by his simultaneously magical and mechanical brain. This places the realm of creativity relegated to a gifted few at one end and tediously manufactured by drones. at the other. Neither is true in my mind. My conception of conception, so to speak, is closer to that of a feeling grounded by experience, delving into the essence of ones intuition. That making and recognizing beauty is an act of involving oneself in ones undertakings speaks to the very impulse of art, thought, and science. Which is what I attempt to represent and present with To Whom it May Concern... .
As a mind begins putting idea to paper, knowledge from all areas are drawn upon, compared, related, and prioritized. Often we prepare, but if we are ruminating over the years or days we meander through our momentary recollections. If, through our efforts, we are lucky enough to land upon something exciting or intriguing (regardless of intellectual weight, revolutionary implication, or even individualism), pride bubbles through in that we can now hold on to a new facet that may have never appeared weren't it for the chance encounter of mind, effort, and experience within ourselves. Confusion, anxiety, rays of hope, and (in the case of this piece) triumphant conclusion are all part of the story of art, science, faith, relationships, and study. Day in day out. Sense, common sense, and uncommon sense are all manifested through passion and insight - always producing, jotting down, remembering, reconciling, relating and often times relenting, walking through a world with ones head blissfully above the clouds, but only if we listen...
