During this module, I have had the opportunity to work with a small group on four collaborative composition projects over the course of the academic year. This essay will explore how we composed one of these pieces of music, ‘Two Timer.’ It will include how we approached this composition as students from different pathways, arrangements, how we worked together, and how we chose to perform it.

    Firstly, starting with this project, we split into two groups, with one group deciding on a genre and chords, and the other coming up with lyrics. The first group did come up with some lyrics, although they found that they had too many ideas and weren’t sure which ones would fit. We needed to decide on what the piece is going to be about and what the overall style/mood of the piece will be. For this, the genre of the piece was critical, although we did struggle with this as we discovered that sometimes, the genre of the music should depend on the lyrics, but the lyrics should also depend on the genre. This taught us that we should always listen to everyone in the group’s ideas, which led to us playing around with some ideas that we had come up with, and eventually finding some chords and lyrics that worked.

    Our group consisted of a wide range of instruments, so when it came to arranging the piece, we had to write parts that would fit everybody’s instruments. I personally found this a bit challenging as I had never worked in a group like this before, and coming from a classical background, I’m a lot more used to being conducted, and playing the music that’s put in front of me and not having to worry about writing music that other instruments could play. Someone else in my group who is also on the classical pathway said that she found the transposition difficult to begin with, but thought it was a good challenge. We also found it enjoyable creating a new piece and experimenting with improvisation, as it is something we had all never done before. This also taught us that we don’t always need sheet music for everything, and although we found improvising difficult at first, when we work together and listen to each other’s ideas, it can be fun and interesting.

    Throughout this project, we all learned a lot of useful new skills. One person in our group had never played piano in a band before, and he said that he had enjoyed exploring that. Similarly, someone else had learned to properly accompany a band rather than just playing solo pieces, also working out when and when not to play in different sections of the piece. Someone else also said that this was the first time they had directed ideas to a group, but felt a lot more confident during this project to share ideas for structure and chords. Personally, I think that this opportunity has helped me grow as a musician as well as a performer, because it has allowed me to be more creative and put my own ideas into practice. I also found it very useful to be able to try playing new instruments, for example, I had also never played piano in a group setting and had only ever played it solo. Being able to play the piano in one of the other projects really helped grow my confidence as a performer, especially not having sheet music to read from, and remembering ideas and improvising some parts as I found this challenging, but it did help me a lot in the long run.

    I think that the collaborative element of this project really helped all of us as we were able to group together all of our ideas and create something unique to us, especially as our ideas were very varied as we all come from different musical backgrounds. Something that we learned in this project was to be aware of what the whole group are doing at all times. We learned to listen to times when we might not need to play and other times when we might. This was really useful as it taught us to be a lot more aware of our surroundings and what’s going on, especially while playing in a small ensemble. Developing this awareness also helped us to identify what areas that some other people in the group may struggle with, allowing us to support them and work out what areas need more attention, or what we could do to improve our work.

    Concluding this project, we sat down as a group and assessed the positive and negative outcomes of the project, and what areas we can improve on. Someone said that next time they would like to try a new instrument to further develop their skills, which I personally agree with, as I think sticking to one instrument does come with its limitations. An advantage that we saw in this project was that working with people from different musical backgrounds helped us to see different angles of what we were creating. On some areas of development, the group agreed that we should be more expressive of our opinions on different ideas, which would help us a lot when it comes to developing those ideas. On the same note, we also all agreed that when asked by our teacher what we want to do, change, or develop within our ideas, that we should be more vocal as it would help us in the long run to further develop our creative practices.

    Overall, this experience has been very helpful as it has helped me to step out of my comfort zone, and working with musicians from different backgrounds has helped me become more versatile, especially as this is something I had never done before.

Appendix

Two timer recording: