DISCHORD

June 7, 2018

This is a revised version. Thank-you for commenting on the first version. To those who commented, it gave me a lot of insight and new directions.

Also, I've noticed that there were some confusion on "grade". Grade is the difficulty of piece. When something is grade 3, for example, it is not for 3rd graders, but for a high school level band.

This link will tell you more about the grade levels.

https://www.bandworld.org/pdfs/GradingChart.pdf

DISCHORD

Grade 4+ Approx. 5~6 minutes

"When putting chaos into music, there's always a perfect chord in it."- Samuel De Jesus Garcia

Intro to The DISCHORD Project

As a personal project, my goal was to create my own voicing; after listening to various examples and even using some in my compositions, I began to re-create my own (even though it has probably been done already). Some examples of voicing that I have adopted in my compositions are "So What", "Kenny Barron"-style and many more. After listening and even looking at the chord structures, I then noticed a particular pattern and went ahead constructing mine.

The "DISCHORD" Chord

Here's how the chord was created:

I started with 2 perfect 5th chords (any given note) and I stacked them to where they would be a minor 2nd interval apart from one another.

For example (F-C) and (F#-C#) after establishing the correct notes for this voicing, I then began to invert the whole thing for more possibilities (in terms of the root position).

Using this chord as a foundation, DISCHORD was created.

What is DISCHORD?

DISCHORD is a pun from the word discord. With the piece being named this, you'll expect to hear a lot of dissonance. As fascinating as creating dissonance just from 2 perfect 5th chords, DISCHORD does tell a story both powerful yet emotional.

Inspired by...

Just by listening to other composer's pieces and looking at their style of writing (via pdf scores), these pieces helped me generate the idea of composing DISCHORD:

John Mackey's Turning

Michael Markowski's Dreamland

Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima