the compo session with john sharpley was immensely thought-provoking. hmm... he asked so many questions which i haven't thought about. though i must admit i should have anticipated the question on the rumba. bleah... i did do my research for the write-up for jct, but chucked it aside after completing the write-up. guess i should have familiarized myself with it before going to school today... hahaha. but i did mention in the write-up that it wasn't meant to strictly follow the rumba style, it just contained some elements of the rumba. maybe i'll elaborate more in the next write-up... and probably change the marking of that variation so that it's less suggestive of a rumba.

i was wondering about the two pianos and how he asked if i actually wanted the listener to distinguish between the two. i dunno! i'm so confused. as in, i wrote for two pianos cos it's supposed to enable me to write for a bigger tessitura. cos it's obviously impossible for a single player with even big hands to play chords spanning four octaves. but then like he mentioned, if the two pianos are supposed to merge and sound like one, that would also be problematic cos of tuning. hmmm... so many small little problems in my compo. mozart's double piano concerto was more of like a melodic line divided between the two pianos... only at times when he actually used the advantage of having two pianos to write big chords. i was just so caught up with how beautifully the melodic ideas and stuff are passed between the pianos... especially in the second movement... that i think i overlooked the tuning problems, and failed to think about how such writing would actually make the use of two pianos quite redundant. except if i justified that i needed them to play big chords. then why not write for one piano four hands? big question mark!

he also said that the compo sounded eclectic. (not his exact words, that's what i derive from what he said) when mr sharpley asked if my piece was meant to be humourous, i really didn't know. of cos i didn't think it was humourous, but when people heard it they laughed. but that's not really something to convince me there's humour in the work. after all, people like emily and kankan often laugh at other things... or, in fact, nothing at all. but mr sharpley said the way i jumped from the buildup of the theme to being mysterious in variation 1 and the sudden change to a rumba makes it humourous. actually, it sort of made me think of jacques ibert's divertissement. the way he portrayed the comedy of the plot of a story, or play or watever, it was so vivid. of cos that's after you find out about the story behind it, but before you find out about that you can actually sense the humour and playfulness of the work. (the story was about a bride and bridegroom on the way to a wedding... one of their hats was "kidnapped" by a horse and the comedy's about how to chased after the hat etc) and i was also reminded of mike oldfield's tubular bells. that's what i'd really call eclectic man. in a way, it is humourous, especially if u had no idea what was coming next and when it hits you, suddenly it makes you want to laugh. and the way he switches from one mood to another... it's sort of like watching a very temperamental person having extreme mood swings.

the question is... did i even intend my compo to turn out like that? i don't think so, unlike gerald's the reds, which was meant as something humourous/satire-ry, i only intended to write a theme and variation based on the four-note motive. so why write in so many different styles? why not stick to one style but vary the theme? actually, the compo started with only the last variation. i was actually trying to write an atonal fugue for two pianos, and the subject included the four notes... one on each beat of the first bar. but i wasn't skilled enough to write really a fugue. i don't even think i understand enough of fugues to have started writing one in the first place. i think at that time i was influenced by the fugue in ravel's le tombeau de couperin. but since i couldn't write a complete fugue, it became a fugato section and of cos i had to develop other things out of something disastrous. then came the realisation that the rumba, which was writen earlier as a feeble attempt to do a jazz compo and then discarded, consisted of the same four notes. okay, not the exact same la, as in, the same degrees of the scale, i.e. 1525... so i transposed the rumba into the same key as the fugato. and out of nowhere came the mysterioso variation... at that time it was totally a last minute effort so everything was chucked together and submitted as a theme and variation. guess i should have put in more non-last minute effort huh.

die! after all those mind boggling questions, i dunno what to do to the compo! there's no time to discard it in favour of doing a new one... but there's no way i could re-write variations in the style of any one of those i used! isn't that as good as writing a new compo? i still need a third compo... which was totally a flop during jct. duh! which of the last minute compos not turn out to be flops... probably except murder la. but in my opinion, it's disgusting. probably it's my last resort when all else fails... though i think much more work can be done about it.