Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Music

Project Advisor 1

Renée Anne Louprette

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Artist Statement

From the outset of my time at Bard, I have been interested in being both a composer and performer. In this spirit, I created two concerts for my senior project. One, focused on performance, and the other focused on composition. My first senior concert featured a range of solo guitar repertoire from Spain, Central America and South America. I decided to present both standard and non-standard repertoire stretching back from the 16th century up to the 20th century. This concert included many disparate compositional elements that I aspired to integrate into my own writing: the dissonant modernism of Manuel Ponce, the romanticism of Augustín Barrios and the excitement and drama of Heitor Villa-Lobos. While preparing this first concert I began to entertain the idea of improvising in the style of each of the composers, and therefore blending composition with performance for myself. While this did not make it into my first senior concert, I had tried improvising (although somewhat haphazardly) over these various pieces in composition lessons. Many of the pieces I composed in the first semester of my senior year, such as “A Turtle’s Flight” written for the Da Capo ensemble, were a direct result of these short improvisations.

For my second senior concert, I decided to more practically focus on ways that I could begin integrating improvisation into a classical idiom. I took two approaches to this: one was learning the historical practice of baroque improvisation on the theorbo with a group of musicians, the second was to make a baroque jazz fusion piece with improvisation. In my second senior concert I also included three composed pieces of mine, each of which represents a compositional style or tool which I hope to be able to improvise with in the future. One challenge of this second concert was that it involved the organization of many moving parts. There were three ensembles that had to be recruited and rehearsed as well as two solo pieces. From this experienceI have learned the importance of early and prompt communication. These two Senior concerts have allowed me to solidify what I have learned at Bard, and begin to synthesize these experiences in pursuit of new musical directions.

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