What Do I Do - Fantasia for Alto Saxophone and Piano (Help give comments before I finalize the piece on Wednesday)

Hello all!

I have finally emerged from my 2 month hiatus and composed what has been a very hyped-up collaboration in my head for a long time. My amazing friend asked me to write something for her senior recital and I knew I wanted it to be both my best work and I could make it as hard as I wanted.

Maybe it is a bit too hard, but I think a lot of things have been revised since I was getting raised eyebrows regarding playability. Regardless, this has been the fruit of about 2 weeks of labor. Maybe 30-40 hours of writing.

The name comes from the difficult mental journey I am beginning to go through as I fall more into being a full time musician, unsure of how I will "make it" in the music world. My style, while unique to me, is something my teacher says needs to be more unique still. I need to have the product before my music can get me recognized and into the business. So, when I bring everything I have been busting my donkey over trying to push every boundary in my writing possible, he always says the same thing. "What do I do??????" How do I make myself unique? How do I break my style down more than I already have while still being able to write music I enjoy? How do I know I am not falling into an extremely stupid hole of pursuing music and wasting all my time I could be using to learn skills to make sure I have food/a house in the future? What do I do???

I hope this work is cool and enjoyable. I worked hard on it. I always strive for every piece I write to be better than the last. This is getting more difficult, but I always want to innovate. I have never made something as harmonically dense as this. Please help me with enharmonic spellings if you see any errors. The sax chords are multiphonics (I have fingerings I will be adding when I do the engraving tomorrow). It is definitely hard. Hopefully it can still get its premiere in mid-April like has been planned.

Thank you,

Evan Erickson

Hi @Eickso,

I enjoy this work very much! Very rhythmic and great use of the altered metre. The saxophone and piano are very punching here and I enjoy the cadenza in b.88. I like all those sudden dynamic and tempo change here. In this and also the last piece featuring the percussions I find you love minimalistic technique and build up the music with the tiniest unit, which achieves great effect here.

5 hours ago, Eickso said:

Please help me with enharmonic spellings if you see any errors.

At least for me I don't see any error in the piano since it's not quite tonal here and thus the enharmonics need not be to that strict, e.g. the B double flat in b.61 can be perfectly fine here. I don't know alto saxophone at all so I am sorry for not able to give you anything useful.

5 hours ago, Eickso said:

The name comes from the difficult mental journey I am beginning to go through as I fall more into being a full time musician, unsure of how I will "make it" in the music world. My style, while unique to me, is something my teacher says needs to be more unique still. I need to have the product before my music can get me recognized and into the business. So, when I bring everything I have been busting my donkey over trying to push every boundary in my writing possible, he always says the same thing. "What do I do??????" How do I make myself unique? How do I break my style down more than I already have while still being able to write music I enjoy? How do I know I am not falling into an extremely stupid hole of pursuing music and wasting all my time I could be using to learn skills to make sure I have food/a house in the future? What do I do???

Every artists want to be unique and they necessarily think they are. But for me maybe if you want to be unique then you write something deliberately unique, that's not the real uniqueness. We can only do what we can do. But I think you do have uniqueness in your music. Maybe we have to ask ourselves why I should be unique? What quality and thoughts do I have, what issue do I care most, and how to use these to reflect in my music uniquely? I do think only have uniqueness in music but not in our character and thoughts quite a waste. I really hope you and everyone including myself can find uniqueness!!

Wish you all the best and good luck to your premiere!

Henry

11 hours ago, Eickso said:

I hope this work is cool and enjoyable. I worked hard on it. I always strive for every piece I write to be better than the last. This is getting more difficult, but I always want to innovate.

I hope that if you continue down this path that you don't eventually "burn out"!  I think it's also important to ask - how is your music getting "better"?  Who is it getting "better" for?  Innovation I think is a more achievable goal.  You can innovate by giving each piece you write new and unique features not found in the others.  You can explore new techniques and approaches to the different elements of your music.  If you ever need specific ideas DM me!  I would be happy to brainstorm ideas with you about how you can innovate future pieces!  But this concept of getting "better" with every piece you write can only lead to exhaustion imo.

11 hours ago, Eickso said:

The name comes from the difficult mental journey I am beginning to go through as I fall more into being a full time musician, unsure of how I will "make it" in the music world.

I see you're experimenting with different types of naming conventions for your pieces - this time trying out an autobiographical approach.

11 hours ago, Eickso said:

How do I make myself unique?

I think uniqueness is something that each of us possesses already from the beginning, but it is also something that is an emergent property of our music as we mature.  It can't be forced imo, and if you try too hard you're apt to just get frustrated with the effort.  Also, in hindsight, you might find that your most unique pieces were not the ones where you deliberately tried to be unique.

Just wanted to comment on these things you mentioned in your post.  About your music - I think it is getting more mature!  And your ending is more convincing!  I hope all those multiphonics gets performed well at the premiere!  Thanks for sharing.