Composition Assignment

I have completed my composition assignment.  


Here is the result.

 Glass by noHopeforJordan

In short, for the assignment, we were basically to select two songs that interested us/we wished we'd written/songs we just liked, analyse the song in depth and then take certain elements from both to create our own composition.  Our composition was to clearly show influences from our two picked songs.  The influences could be anything, from melody, to rhythm, harmony, structure, instrumentation, etc...

My composition takes influences from two pieces; "The Lake and The River", by The Dear Hunter, and "Goodbye Sky Harbour", by Jimmy Eat World.  I link and analysis of these tracks can be found below.

If I were to put my composition (which for simplicity's sake, I'm going to call 'Glass') into a genre, I'd class it as 'progressive.'

Rather than following a typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, it goes through several 'parts', which goes as follows;

From 0:00-0:50, I'll call it the introduction.

0:50-1:18 will be classed as the First bridge.

1:18-2:03 will be called the Vocal Verse.

2:03-2:18 is the Vocal Bridge

2:18-2:37 is the Gaptooth Bridge

2:37-3:43 is the Aggressive Blues section

3:43-4:02 is the Post-Blues, Pre-Ending Bridge

4:02-5:24 is the Outroduction.  

-Glass was composed entirely in MIDI, with everything, including vocals, recorded using Logic Pro 9.  

 -I stupidly didn't record everything using a metronome, so some parts seem out of time, if only slightly

- I went over everything afterwords with the piano roll and did my best to fix parts that needed fixing, but due to the tempo changes, some things I couldn't fix without having to re-record large parts of the song.  

-It should also be noted that I am not a vocalist, but I felt the song needed my own vocals in it.  Recording vocals and everything that comes with it was new to me!  

MIDI tracks used in the song are;

-Glockenspiel

-Analogue Keyboard

-Celeste

-Twangy Electric Guitar

-80s Electric Guitar

-Acoustic Pianos

-Icy Whirlpool Synth Pad

-String Ensemble

-3 Separate Drum Loops

-Various (up to 12) Vocal Tracks.

-Glass is in the key of E minor.

-Starts off with a lone glockenspiel playing a simple 4 note melody.  The analogue keyboard joins in soon after, setting down the track's guide melody, which returns several times throughout the piece.  The celeste joins in, followed by very quiet twangy electric guitars playing simple thirds over the three other tracks.  

I had written a small essay for each analytical part (for my composition and each influencing piece).  However, having reread the brief, I need to submit "brief notes".  So the essays have been deleted.  Instead of describing the piece and every little part in it, I'll leave it to you, the listener, just to listen to it and compare it to the below songs yourself.

The songs I picked for my composition are;

"The Lake and The River, by the Dear Hunter."

The Lake and the River, the Dear Hunter

I could spend days, weeks, months analyzing this song, it’s related songs, the various parts etc.  Instead, however, I am just going to write about the parts that apply to my composition.  

The main elements I took from The Lake and The River to form my own composition were the structure of the song, the instrumentation and the polyphony.

The song opens with a guiro, a glockenspiel and a drum kit, with the glockenspiel taking lead as the ‘main’ instrument with a simple melody. The bass joins in, followed by either two electric guitars or a guitar and a keyboard.  They all keep playing the same thing over and over; eventually another guitar comes in, playing a riff strongly resembling the initial glockenspiel melody, but with added notes and a more complex rhythm.  The various melodies in this song return later on in the song; sometimes the exact same, sometimes slightly edited, played by different instruments.   The melodies here reoccur later on and form the basis for many parts of the song.  This is something I have taken for my own composition.  The polyphony and reoccurring instruments can be heard in the Introduction of my Composition.

I messaged the band on Twitter and asked for any information on how the song was produced and written, since it’s such a packed song, and Casey Crescenzo [primary songwriter; vocals, guitar, keyboard] replied.  He was humble enough to converse with me, and he informed me that...

“...That song in particular was written entirely in midi first because I wanted polyphony to be the center of the track...since I can’t really write staff music that well, this is the easiest way for me to arrange.  After that it was just about translating what I had to acoustic and electric instruments...”

This is something I focused on.  Polyphony was to be the center of my track, and everything was done in MIDI.

Upon being asked what the first thing in the song was (or the idea he based the rest of the song around) he replied;

“The first thing was the opening rhythm and melody.  The song grew very organically from the beginning. “

-This is the same for Glass.  I wrote the opening melodies, went away, came back days later, added to it, left, came back, etc.  Everything from then came naturally.  I knew what I wanted to write before I wrote it.

This proves the point I made earlier about the opening melodies being the basis for other parts of the song.  

-Intro goes just to Crescenzo singing with strings and drums.  Influences Glass.

-After a 'chorus' and a 'verse', song builds up, gets louder.  Aggressive vocals, drums and guitars come in; 'loud' part of the song.  My loud equivalent is the piano solo section, when the temp goes up from 130bpm to 160bpm.

-Loud section ends, guitars ring out and the original glockenspiel melody can be heard as the introduction plays again, this time with added piano and a different rhythm being played by the drum kit. Again, the influence here can be heard in Glass, when the original melody comes through again, this time on a piano.  

My song transitions into the ‘Goodbye Sky Harbour’ part here, for the ending.  


There is one final similarity in that the end of TLATR is completely different to the the start, but at the same time, bears some resemblance.  Listen to both Glass and TLATR to see the similarities.  

The second song I selected for my composition is an even longer piece; "Goodbye Sky Harbour", by Jimmy Eat World.  

This song isn't for the impatient; at 16 minutes long, it slowly (very slowly) builds up to the climax at 13:46.  In order to see where the influence comes from, the song must be listened to as a whole.

Similarities; polyphonic vocals heard at the end of the song.

The similarity here is stupidly apparent; the overlapping 5 part harmony that ends the song.  Many artists put large harmonised vocal sections in songs, but I picked Sky Harbour as the first time I heard this was the first time I had ever heard vocals do so much other than sing a main melody.  
From 13:46 onwards it becomes more apparent that Glass is influenced by it, as the glockenspiel playing over layered vocals is something that can be heard in both pieces.

I am aware that Glass isn't as 'tidy' as it could be, and in comparison to some other composition entries my peers will be submitting, will probably be seen as messy.   But it rings true to the assignment brief we were given, and is really, the first time in my life I have ever composed something, written it down, recorded it, and spent hours and hours and hours locked in a room at a computer/keyboard, tweaking, adding, playing with, experimenting, trying to see what I can get away with.  It is the first real composition I have ever done that hints at things I'd like to write in future.  

If you listened to Glass, and the two pieces I linked, thank you.  Hopefully you got some inkling of enjoyment out of it - and by 'enjoyment' I mean 'that part of the music hit me, I liked that', not 'hahahahaha, what on earth is this?!'.  


Thanks.