Some friends and I have been reading Alan Belkin’s book Musical Composition: Craft and Art. We are all at different stages in our musical journey and have found the homework problems to be different degrees of difficult!

I’ve been thinking about how I can make this book part of my music education. Yesterday I did a flying overview of the whole book (chapter names and subheadings). There is a chapter a little past the halfway mark called “Rondo Form” (ch. 14) and I realized that I would really like to compose something in Rondo form.

For the last 6 weeks I have made a big change to my daily schedule: as soon as I wake up, I go outside (carrying a tray with pencil, notebook and coffee) and sit on one of our park benches. There I alternate back and forth between enjoying the nature around me, and capturing my stream of consciousness in a notebook. Many of the chains of thought are visual images. Could I express them as an animated video? I was recently inspired by a visual accompaniment to the Genesis album “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”. In this case the video was not a fully-fledged animation, but instead a series of still images, like a slide show. The still images were given motion by transitions: fade to black, zoom in, cross fade, pan from one side of the image to the other.

I would love to do that!

These morning park bench meditations could make good material for a Rondo composition. A rondo takes the form A B A C A D…   The recurring sunlight, park bench, bird calls could be represented by the “A section”, and the various other streams of thought could be the B, C, D etc.

In conclusion, I  plan to rush through chapters 3 through 9 (not doing the exercises), skip chapters 10 through 14, and focus on chapter 14, Rondo form. With each chapter I will make an outline on a separate “page” of this blog. I’ll put my questions and personal observations on the chapter in daily entries here.