Tuesday 22 June 2010

Emphasis as a Basis for Phrasing (part 2)

Some people have been asking for examples of this so I thought I would share one of my own pieces here which uses this very technique:

Silently Stealing Sleighbells



This piece is mostly triplet quavers (triplet eighth notes at 132bpm) which are played as a consistent rhythmic figure throughout two of the three sections which are the component parts of the arrangement for this piece.

Because each note has a different emphasis and in this performance particular attention was payed to the way each note relates to the one next to it, the piece has a melody which is shaped by emphasis rather than by rhythmic variation.