Reflections on Solo Composition Project

Over the last couple weeks, my classmates and I each wrote a solo composition for our primary instruments (or voices), and last Tuesday, we presented a small concert in which everyone shared their piece. With many different areas of expertise, this was a truly eclectic concert—with a Chopinesque walz for solo piano, a Bach-inspired work for solo violin, a ragtime-like piece for keyboard, and many other wonderfully original works.

For my piece, I chose to write a rather fast caprice for my primary instrument—the violin. In general, I am quite pleased with the piece. I feel it has many strengths. For example, while maintaining the same tempo and time signature throughout, the piece manages to achieve considerable variety in texture and mood. Some passages are more melodic and smoothly integrate other voices in a polyphonic texture, while other passages are more angular and driving. The piece also transitions in and out of several keys with relatively smooth modulation—most prominently the keys of g minor, F major, and d minor.

That said, I certainly encountered many challenges in the process of composing the piece and preparing it for performance. While I wanted to maintain a polyphonic texture throughout the piece, this exacerbated the technical challenges of the piece—so much so that I couldn’t play all the notes in the performance. I actually believe, for this reason, that my instrumentation choice was ill-suited to the nature of piece. After some experimentation with MIDI sounds, I’ve concluded that this same piece sounds more appropriate on electric guitar, or even, on piano. This is because, although titled “Caprice in g minor” and meant to imitate the caprices of Paganini or Dont, I believe this piece has a more modern feel to it and could perhaps be convincingly re-imagined as ragtime, or even heavy metal. Other challenges were the overall monotony of the piece—almost all parts seem high energy, and the work as a whole doesn’t really reach an expressive apex. In that sense, it’s rather a moment than a story.

If I were to do this project again, I would first make sure that my overall idea is suitable to the instrument for which I’m writing and also realistic to learn and perform in a timely manner. I would also take the planning phase of the composition more seriously, rather than roving between disparate keys and musical ideas as I please. With a stronger sense of overall structure from the start, I believe the piece could have more direction and stronger “story-telling” qualities.