This is what a finished, ready-to-conduct score looks like! The work was worth it, and so were those meter changes!

Over the past four weeks we have been preparing our final project for the semester, a piece recorded by a live ensemble and conducted by us! It’s easily been the most stressful, yet satisfying experience of my graduate career thus far.

We start in Music for Games, where we choose a clip of gameplay from the game Journey. We then have to write a piece to picture that’s for the size of the ensemble that we agreed on for the session. For this session we had eleven violins, four violas, three celli, and one contrabass. We also had live flute oboe/english horn, clarinet/bass clarinet, and bassoon.

Parts all packed and ready!

Once the piece is written and the in-class mockup is for all intents and purposes finished, we then begin preparing the score. Everyone had to dust off their finale/sibelius chops and make our scores and parts look absolutely stunning. The better part of the four weeks was all going into score prep. The amount of work that goes into making a score look truly professional and session ready is mind-blowing, just because notation software isn’t as intelligent as it likes to think that it is. Often times, your parts aren’t transposed, your accidentals disappear, your accidentals get spelled wrong, and your time signatures may not even show up! This is before adjusting the format, spacing, expression alignment, articulation alignment, and crescendo/decrescendo edits.

Conducting was a blast! Our players were so amazing!

The work was worth it, though and we all had an amazing session! There were thirteen of us, all with two minute long pieces of music. We each had thirteen minutes in the room to get the perfect recording that we needed. It was a heavily high-stress situation, for sure! But the feeling of conducting your own music and feeling REAL players respond to you was something absolutely magical. I was a bit nervous though and ended up losing my headphones in the middle of my first take! I was shocked for a second, but I was able to keep the piece going! I grabbed the headphones, got the click back, and finished the first take strongly! That said, I wasn’t as violent in my motions in the next few takes. I’m incredibly happy with mine and everyone else’s performance. The class of 2018 has some seriously amazing composers in it, and that was shown in spades on Monday. It’s crazy to think that we only have one more semester until we’re out in LA, but we’ll be ready. I have no doubts.

The Class of 2018!