Music Composition Using Romantic and Contemporary Techniques

Abstract

Suite for Piano is a four-movement solo piano suite, influenced and composed utilizing Romantic and contemporary compositional techniques. This paper, and the accompanying score, are the culmination of over a year’s worth of creative labor and growth through my work in the Honor’s Thesis sequence. In this paper, I will be detailing the technical contents of each movement before proceeding to describe the creative process behind each work. Each movement began with the idea of an image I wanted to convey to the listener—and while that image may not have remained constant, those images still influenced how the piece turned out in the long run. Alongside that, I often found myself turning to social media, or other genres outside of what is typically considered “classical” music, for inspiration as I continued to hit creative roadblocks in my work. For those reasons, I decided to more clearly detail the process behind each movement and describe how I arrived at the work I did.