The Path: Stories with Strangers - September 21st

"September 21st" is my somber counter-seasonal piece to "March 21st". If the beginning of spring marks growth and blossoming, the beginning of fall signifies deterioration and death, though in its own way it's just as beautiful a process.

I remember playing the melody of this piece on the marimba during marching band practice in high school. It sounded quite lovely on the beautiful wooden keys. I enjoyed playing the marimba during our breaks, as I was fairly shy and didn't like to socialize much.

The writing process for this piece was incredibly quick—I can't remember a single distinct compositional moment with this one. I do remember, however, showing the piece to my brother for the first time, and wanting to impress him! I added in some of the ornamental flourishes near the end of that play-through that have stuck ever since.

The most important aspect about this piece is that I purposely wrote it to be a little too difficult for me to play, especially near the end, with octaves and filled-in harmonies in the right hand, with steady eighth notes and occasional sixteenth notes outlining the chords in the left hand. I wanted to force myself to improve, so I wrote it to be slightly out of what was my current ability level.

"The most important aspect about this piece is that I purposely wrote it to be a little too difficult for me to play. ... I wanted to force myself to improve, so I wrote it to be slightly out of what was my current ability level."

I like the intentional downward motion that I threw in wherever I could throughout the piece, to symbolize leaves falling from trees. Such a simple idea, and perhaps a bit trite in theory, though positively lovely in execution!

There's a note at the end that I added in to the final chord—Bb with C minor. I didn't understand the theory behind what I was doing at the time. I simply wanted to combine a C minor triad with an Eb major triad, and enjoyed the bitter-sweet, slightly messy sound of what you could call either C-7 (C, Eb, G, Bb) or Eb6 (Eb, G, Bb, C).

The first four notes in the Chorus part of "March 21st" make a brief cameo in the Bridge of "September 21st", and I love the visible progression and development within myself as a composer between the two pieces.

OKAY, SOthere's "March 21st" for spring and "September 21st" for autumn—where are June 21st and December 21st, you ask? Well, they don't exist, and they never will, at least not from me. There are a couple reasons for this:

1) I generally dislike Christmas/holiday music (I do love icy music, though ice and snow do not necessarily have to directly associate with winter) (and I DO somehow immensely enjoy heavy metal Christmas tunes), and I also don't usually like summertime music. I simply didn't want to add more music to all of that madness.

2) Once the thought even occurred to me, I was already venturing out to different styles, and at that point I did not want to try writing more pieces that sounded similar. I also liked that the seasons I chose were the transitional ones, the equinoxes rather than solstices, where the weather begins to warm up or cool down. I like the two pieces as they are, and I have no future plans to make a "complete" seasonal set—it's already complete to me.

This piece is jam-packed with arpeggios. I was also getting the hang of building, sustaining, then releasing intensity. The melody also "follows the chord" for the most part, where the notes in the melody are one of the three notes in the triad that the left-hand part is playing. I start to deviate from that type of melodic-harmonic strategy though in the next piece...