Warning about writing by hand to start off...

I thought I'd make a little warning to anyone who does composition next year and thinks that it will be easy to write by hand and then just enter it into sibelius after. That's what I thought, cause I didn't have any notation program at the beginning of the semester and I thought that would be a simnple process... boy oh boy was I wrong! It sucked and took forever, so pleaseeee for your own sanity, just get Sibelius, or whatever program you want to use at the beginning of the semester so that you don't end up with pages and pages of music that need to be entered into the computer when you need to hand in your good copy!

About that whole writing for piano idea I had....

So in my blog 'writing for piano' I said that I wanted to be more adventurous with my piano part because I had just gotten Sibelius so I wouldn't be confined by my lack of piano skills. This ended up having some troubles of its own. Since I didn't have to be at a piano to compose, Inever actually tried out any of the stuff I wrote. I ended up with chords that were too big for humans(!) and passages with really tricky fingerings that I could have avoided. It would have been a lot better if I had periodically checked my part with my pianist to see if it was playable and espeially with the limited reherasal time that we were working with, if she would be comfortable doing it in the concert.
Lesson learned! After that I tried playing/ singing everything I wrote as I wrote it so that I wouldn't need to adjust too much at the last minute!

Writing for voice

For our last project, I wanted to make a vocal that wouldn't be too hard because I knew there would be limited rehearsal time. I think it is really helpful to sing it as you write it. I didn't exactly know what the range of my singer would be but I had a general idea and then assumed that if I could squeak out a note that my singer could probably sing it properly, and so I stayed within those boundaries.
Also, to make it easier to put together last minute, I made sure that if the singer had rests, that before the next entrance one of the string instruments played her entance note. this way we didn't have to worry much about how she was going to find her note!
This (combined with Erin Milly being an excellent singer and sight reader!) made it really easy to get the piece ready quickly.
:)

That's Explains it...in the making

So, my composition finished but I thought I'd write about what I was thinking when I wrote it.
So I wanted to make the music silly to go with the text, and I also wanted the vocal part and the string parts to fit together smoothly.
To do that, I first wrote the vocal line, trying to make it express the text naturally, and then I used the material from that line to construct the violin and cello parts. And I didn't want it to seem like the voice was the only important line, so there are some parts where violin and cello get little solo's an imitate the voice.