Friday, November 14, 2014

Transcription and Engraving Work

Well, it has been another long while since my last post, but things have not stood still. Quite the opposite.  I'm currently working on a few music education projects but I thought that I would tell you all about the latest few musical things that I have done.

The last two weeks seem to have been transcription and engraving heavy.  It started with Australian composer Ric Mills contacting me to create a score of three of his piano works: PeaceIrrelevant and Grounded.   

The process of transcribing Peace and Grounded was relatively straight forward (unfortunately I can’t show the score as I don’t have copyright of it).  However, the process for creating a score for Irrelevant presented some interesting challenges.  The nature of the piece was described to me by the composer something like "a melody which is desperately trying to show itself through a thick dissonant texture".

The nature of the work lends itself to a more or less consistent four / four meter, but I thought that the composition might work better without bar lines as there isn't a suggestion of emphasis every four beats.  Perhaps I was influenced by Philip Glass's experiences working with Ravi Shankar??

I ended up creating two versions of the score; one with bar lines and one without as neither of us were willing to commit to one or the other.  I hope to hear about the performance of these works at an upcoming concert in the near future.

The other large transcription work which has now been completed was organising a team of musicians to create piano/vocal rehearsal scores for a new Australian musical “Cook”, composed by Gareth Hudson & Nick Higginbottom from Newcastle (NSW).  We had less than 2 weeks to create these scores from recorded songs.  I had to organise a team of musicians to assist me as there was too much for a single person to do.  I’d like to thank Stewart Taylor, Gemma Turvey, Sam Donovan and Joseph Beckitt for their efforts to to get this done.  Using Google Docs and Dropbox to coordinate everything we managed to complete this mammoth task. 


Tutorial on Enharmonic Spelling of Written Intervals

This seems to be something that many students have difficulty understanding, especially once you start talking about diminished and augmented intervals.  This tutorial goes through a two step process which I like to teach students which allows (hopefully) students to confidently identify any written interval between a perfect unison and a perfect octave.

I hope this helps you and/or someone you know better understand the process of correctly naming written intervals.

- Andrew



Enharmonic Spelling of Written Intervals (Tutorial) from Andrew Rostas on Vimeo.