Symphony No. 1, "The Eight Universes", Part 2

Last Thursday, I posted about the symphony that a fourth- and fifth-year in our class are composing. (See the post dated May 30th, 2019).

So, having written their two themes, their 3 variations on each theme, and their bridge, Sully and Christopher finished the music for the Exposition section of their sonata-allegro form. It was time today to make a working draft that contains all of the music they’ve written so far.

Sully recopying his parts for the Exposition. We had to create special paper for the symphony since the two boys used different notation styles. Notice on Sully’s working draft that each system has a 5-line staff for staff notation and a single-line staff for stick notation. To serve as a clef on the one-line staff, the boys agreed to use a rectangular percussion clef. Just above the staff at the beginning, they wrote and circled the words “lydian re-flat”. This tells a performer which scale strip to use (lydian) and where to place 1 (re-flat).

When we last left off, Christopher had yet to finish writing his countermelodies to Sully’s themes. Yesterday he finished them.

Christopher copies his themes onto the working draft. He writes his melodies on a one-line staff, just below Sully’s. Notice his stick-notated melodies on the paper to the left of the photograph. I like the way Christopher meticulously labelled his different melodies. T.A. stands for “Theme A” and B stands for “Bridge.”.

After they finish copying out their Exposition, they will move on to writing the Development.

Close up of Christopher’s work.

More later!