Abstract music piece

The purpose of this piece is to understand the pattern of Elmer's vibrant colors. In this piece, we have used only 1 instrument which was a grand piano. Regarding the ciphers, I think we have done an amazing job because each color on Elmer's body has a certain code. Using Morse code for our ciphers enhanced the ciphers within the abstract piece, which made them even more detailed and overall greater. We used ciphers instead of serialism and minimalism because we had initially thought that it would have given our piece of music more complexity and the whole group had understood the term more so it would have been easier to make our piece. We got our first inspiration from an abstract piece of art which had squares, rectangles and a variety of colors (you can find the image in a previous post). However, as time passed by and by miraculous the advice of Ms. Cross, we decided to use Elmer the Elephant as our inspiration. The ciphers we made, which are within the piece, stood for each color and that specific note would be repeatedly played in different places throughout the piece, using Morse code. We did this for each color and eventually editing it into the shape of Elmer the Elephant.

Composition Task Week 1

The first lesson of the week, we were told to make groups and make abstract music so we decided to quickly finish our work and used the following picture as the stimulus of our music from which it gave us ideas to finish our abstract piece.

The next lesson however, after discussing our ciphers and how we were going to do our abstract piece with Ms. Cross, we were able to realize that the piece of abstract music would be better if we did it with Elmer the Elephant instead of the rectangles as he is made up of different colors. That was a critical advice from Ms. Cross because I can see that our music would have been a lot worse if we had only used the rectangles.

What is a cipher?

In cryptography, a cipher is a process for carrying out encryption. It includes sequences of detailed steps that can be completed as a method. Another way is, a not as much of collective term is encipherment. To encipher or encode is to change info into cipher or code. A cipher is any technique of encoding text. It is also occasionally used to mention to the encoded text message itself though the term cipher text is more frequently used. Its origin is the Arabic sifr, translating to zero.

What is Minimalism?

Minimalism is a huge movement which occurred during the 1950s in sculpture and painting. In music, it is typically seen by the multiple repetitions of diverse repetitions of short phrases which consequently created a mysterious hypnotic effect through the slow and steady changes. Minimalism is amazing as it is created from something to small, simple and fragile but it progressively changes to a more complex and hypnotic piece of art.

Minimalism started when composers attempted to tackle the wall of the traditional rules and effects that the music at that time had. Music started to grow excessively unrealistic and out of the box from around the early 20th century. As time passed, American composers said that it was best to go back to the basics of making music where the more popular formula was rhythm and pitch equals music. However, this decision was not efficiently used in a long long time because of the innovation and development of music in other composers.

By the middle of the 20th century, classical music was becoming less popular