This summer, pt. 1

I went to 4 and a half weeks worth of music camps this summer. That may seem like a huge chunk of my summer just went down the tubes, doing nothing but work and traveling from one to the other. That is entirely not the case. This was definitely the most fulfilling summer I can remember, mostly because it helped me realized that I really do want to dedicate my life to composing music.

The first camp I went to was out in the middle of the woods with no internet, no news, no phones (good God), and the only form of communication with the outside world was via snail mail. It was called Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. We played a great piece, the fourth symphony by Peter Tchaikovsky. It was a really long, intense, and insanely hard piece. Our conductor was very intimidating as well. During my week and a half there, however, I thought less about the violin part I was playing and more about the compositional aspect of the piece. For those that don't know (which I would assume is most of you), Tchaikovsky had a rough life. He was a closeted gay man living in oppressive Russia in the middle of the 19th century, thrown into a marriage he didn't want to be in, and he died of what some believe may have been suicide. This symphony reflects that terrible time in his life, and it's some deep source material for an amazing piece of art. When the conductor would stop and work sections with other groups of the orchestra, I would listen and try to see where that fit into something else I'd heard from another group in that same section earlier, or how it fit with my part. I had kind of started getting really deep into the compositional side of things.

I also went to a percussion camp this summer at Indiana University in Bloomington. This was an interesting experience, mostly because I had had no idea that there was such a huge market for solo percussion pieces. Needless to say, this really interested me. There was a speaker there, his name was Casey Cangelosi, who is fairly famous in percussion circles throughout the world. I learned a lot from him as he was a composer and amazing performer who uses a lot of repetition as well as techniques mainly on marimba and snare drum that can get a lot more out of the instrument than just a plunk or a hit. The second I got home from this camp I started working on a solo marimba piece, and have since gotten pretty much nowhere. But, because of all the things I learned about the technique and how to compose for the instrument at Indiana, I will probably go back and work on it, and try to make it sound passable. One day.



to be continued...