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Category: Composition Blog
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Now that the semester is over I have started giving some thought to what I want to accomplish this summer in terms of the music composition domain.  I have some active projects that I will work on, specifically the Mass (p0341) and some Spanish language songs but for the summer I want to go through the The Music Management System (MMS) and select a small subset of composition ideas on which to focus my attention.  As I was going through some of the resource material I have accumulated to compile a list of method books and other music collections to write reviews for the website I came across Successful Lyric Writing by Sheila Davis.  I had originally purchased this book in the late 80's or early 90's and did not make much headway at that time.  As I was looking through it this morning I came to the conclusion that it would provide an excellent framework for me to use for that specific aspect of my compositional interests as I have been exploring the course offerings at UGA to see if there was a poetry or music class that addressed similar material.  The deciding factor was the brief tables on page 104 of foot names with accents, scanned examples, and musical notation along with the table on foot lengths which, when combined, define the meter of poetic phrases which was one of the specific topics that I was want to learn about from any class I might consider taking.  I am considering using it as a framework for songwriting (as distinct from 'composition') for this summer and tentatively plan to cover about a chapter each week for the next 10 weeks applying the content of each chapter to a minimum of four song ideas selected from the MMS for development during this period.  This will still leave me with the Mass to work on and I'll have to set my own artificial deadlines for completing that.  It will also give me my primary justification for working more with Finale as that proved to be the more effective way of scoring out that type of composition.  The final leg of the composition efforts for the summer will be recording improvisational segments of my practicing.  When I finish the modifications to the studio this process should be relatively seamless but I should be able to start doing it easily even now.  There have been a great number of improvisational practices that produced results I feel would be more than sufficient for structuring a song if I had a specific melodies and lyrics to put on top of them.  This process has become quite easy for me and I look forward to turning some of my  improvisation sessions into completed songs in the near future.