Piano Concerto No.1 : an overview of the creative process and a detailing of techiques used in its inception

Abstract

Because the emphasis of my Master of Music program was in Music Composition, I chose to undertake a Creative Project for six credit hours in which I would write a piece for full orchestra while studying various techniques of orchestration. This was a new experience for me, as I had never before attempted a work of this magnitude, and I had never actually written an orchestral piece. I knew it would be necessary to study works by those composers who had mastered the techniques. The source I found most useful was a book on orchestration by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1922/1964) that was both a treatise on orchestrational principles and a book of musical examples taken from his own compositions. I purchased four compact disks of his music so I could listen to an orchestra playing the pieces from which the examples were drawn. I also used the orchestrational texts by Samuel Adler (1989) and Walter Piston (1955). Although I wrote this piece to be played by a live orchestra, I made use of computer and synthesis technology as a compositional tool. I have several synthesizers, all of which have sampled orchestral sounds. As I wrote the piece, I used a computer sequencing program called Cakewalk to play the instrumental parts. The sampled sounds lack the expression and varied articulations one can achieve with a human instrumental player, but the timbres are fairly accurate, and I was able to gain a rough idea of the sound of the piece by doing this. I then used the computer scoring program Finale to produce the score.