Welcome to Composers' Forum!

Welcome to the Fall 2018 Composers' Forum blog! Here we'll collegially discuss the music of our many fascinating guests.

Each semester, you're required to write one blog post (about 500 words) discussing your reaction to a guest's music and/or their talk. We occasionally also have prompts that require everyone to write a shorter post on the same topic (for example, the first assignment about collaboration). When you're not blogging about a guest yourself, you do need to read other people's posts and leave a comment. This needn't be very long, and is a great way to stay engaged with each other's ideas. We'll be keeping track of who participates in the online discussion, so please chime in whenever there is an opportunity to write. We do not write about guests if they are NYU faculty, so there are weeks in which we won't be writing on the blog.

When you accept your invitation to the blog, please take a moment to set up your profile so we can all get to know each other! Fill in your Blogger profile with a short about me, and upload a picture of yourself. We'd love to hear about what kind of music you love (include 3 of your favorite artists/albums/pieces/songs—I know it's difficult!), the sort of work you do, and what program you're in at NYU, and any other interests you'd like us to know about. Include a link to your website/SoundCloud/other web presence as well, so we can all listen to your music. Some of you have Google Plus set up on your NYU emails, so if you can't do all this, it's fine—please have a picture, though!

You can edit your profile by accessing "user settings" under the "settings" tab on the left, and then clicking edit.

Finally, remember that this blog is private; only students in the class can see it, so don't be afraid to voice your opinions.

500 words on Jonathan Bailey Holland

In this week lecture, we discussed with Jonathan Holland on his career as a composer and his insights. I felt very connected with Jonathan because of his messages he portrayed through his music , his stylistic choices and by being an african american composer. I very much liked the frist piece that Jonathan played for us because it used the elements of double mindedness. You could very much point of the main melody and the "harmonically stable" parts in it ; but then on top melodies that were clustered, chromatic lines, and contrasting melody were there. I feel like music that plays with uncommon harmonic and melodic tendencies should be tapped into more because it makes you think a little differently, and challenges what you think sounds "right".

I think this was the first composer we heard that composed music based off social issues which was pretty cool. As a composer myself, I ultimate goal is to be able to take social and political issues from my surrounding communities and make music that can educate, inspire and create conversation, which I think Jonathan did with his compositions.

I am guessing that Jonathan main instrument was piano but I wish I asked more about his upbringing as a student into the composer world since we are all in that journey, maybe if one of you talked to him and got more info you can comment below to discuss!

Another main point that I saw through his music was his use of use of drum kit, audio tracks and spoken word in classical compositions. I feel like in this day of age, its hard to not use those.

Overall , Jonathan is pretty dope! I wanna be a Jonathan lol