Computine and Other Musical Arrangements

Computine and Other Musical Arrangements

Composition Portfolio
By Rob Stanmore
Wednesday 18th November
I was researching a suitable piece in which to re-arrange, I was firstly considering a well-known rock song, however in choosing such a song there wasn’t much room for progression of new ideas in which I could re-arrange a song to sound original and to have a new mood to the piece. I then decided to research a piece that was originally written for piano.
I found 3 pieces, “Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois” by Sufjan Stevens, “Crawl, End Crawl” by Four Tet and “Comptine D'un Autre Eté” by Yann Tiersen.
I decided to go with the Yann Tiersen piece as it had the least layers – being only piano the main layer and the dynamics and expressive techniques conveyed effectively by the use of only one instrument.

I imported the notation of the song into Guitar Pro and began looking at ways in which I could break up the individual melodic lines and create more density of layers and increasing the tension of the piece by adding more instruments.
I originally had a lot of trouble with the introduction to the original song as it was very prominent in its crotchet pulses for the rhythm. So, in my re-arrangement I double-timed these chords to give the song more diversity. Staccato of a soft clean jazz guitar adds a lot softer pulses and tone colour.
For a while I’ve wanted to create a piece where I use active percussive layers to build intensity within a piece through using syncopated beats. In the opening, as it is quaver pulses, I arranged the drums to sort of ‘stumble’ in on the fourth bar to add an element of surprise to the piece and as the drums develop a beat to work with the quaver pulses of the clean guitar. The introduction has a slightly deeper mood when more performing media is added, especially the ominous tone colour of the organ as an inactive layer holding chords. I chose to keep an underlying Rhodes piano playing a slight variation of the original descending...

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