hey this is shoujin and this is my, er, composition reflections. my debussy work will come a bit later cause i just realised that the entire thing got accidentally deleted by my mum >.<

Comparing and contrasting the cat-and-bird composition with the whole-tone work.

In my opinion, the cat-and bird composition was the easier assignment as compared to the whole-tone work. This must be due to the fact that there was a decided scenario for us to think up themes on to compose, and not an open-ended assignment where we would have to identify our own particular scenario or genre before being able to compose something regarding that. Open-ended assignments do give us our own freedom to compose works; however, it is also more difficult in a sense that if we do not have a fixed scenario, our composition may have a chance of being non-comprehensible as a musical piece. In addition, there are many choices regarding this matter of open-endedness and sometimes, it does get hard to make up our minds.

For the cat-and-bird composition, the limitations are that we have to entirely base our composition on the scene of a fight between a cat and a bird for example. If not, the piece would be out of point. However, the instructions given for completing this assignment is more flexible and less restricting compared to the whole-tone work. Therefore once more in this case, the cat-and-bird composition is an easier assignment.

Generally for both assignments, I have encountered more difficulties when trying to complete the whole-tone work. When the melody is formed in my mind, sometimes I would have trouble trying to write that melody out on manuscript paper with the correct note values. For me, the rubrics given like the whole tone scale and the banning of the middle registers are fine, as it only serves as a larger challenge to compose a relatively different piece. Most of the time as well, when I have no inspiration, I find it hard to form a theme or continue from where I had left off, and I would have to spend alot of time trying to form a link between the bars to finally create a decent melody.

As a “fledging young composer”, I find playing my own piece of music for everyone to hear and have everyone comment on it really nerve wrecking, and that it takes quite some courage to play through the piece live. However awkward it can get for me, I think that it is actually a useful thing to do as receiving comments from others serves not to embarrass one, but to improve one’s learning capacity.