Composition, MM postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A customer brought a cheap nylon-string guitar into the shop where I work because the low E buzzed against the third fret. Before I adjusted the saddle, I played the open string several times. The buzz was not random. It flared on the attack, settled into a faint metallic halo and vanished as the note decayed. Fixing it took ten minutes. Afterwards I spent the evening sketching a passage for cello and prepared piano that tried to recreate that halo on purpose. I mention this because it shows how I tend to work as a composer. I start from a particular sound I have heard closely, and then I ask how it could carry a larger form.

That habit shaped my final undergraduate project, a ten-minute piece for wind quintet and fixed electronics. I recorded announcements, idling engines and the hiss of air brakes at my local bus station across three weekday mornings. I then used spectral analysis software to find the strongest partials in the engine drones. Those pitches became the harmonic material for the quintet. Studying Gérard Grisey's Partiels, which grows from the spectrum of a low trombone E, helped me see that a spectrum could generate a whole form rather than a single chord. My piece was much less ambitious than Grisey's. The difficulty I found most instructive was practical. In the first workshop the horn and bassoon could not hear the electronic cues, and the ensemble drifted. I rewrote the cueing so that each section began with an unaccompanied wind gesture that the playback answered. Students from my year then performed it at the department's end-of-year concert. My supervisor's main comment was that the middle section relied too heavily on sustained textures. I agree, and I want to develop sharper rhythmic contrast within slow-moving harmony.

Outside the studio, my work has kept me close to instruments and the people who play them. At the repair desk I restring, set up and clean guitars, violins and the occasional ukulele. Handling dozens of instruments a week has given me a physical sense of how tension, wood and string gauge change a sound. I now think about that when I write extended techniques, and I try not to ask for effects that a player's instrument simply cannot produce. On two evenings a week I also teach beginner guitar to adults, most of whom work full days. Explaining a chord shape to someone whose hands are tired has taught me to give clear, economical instructions. I want my scores to give players the same kind of clarity.

I also play bass in a ceilidh band, mostly at village halls and weddings. It is not connected to my concert writing in any obvious way. Still, keeping a dance in time for three hours has taught me a lot about pulse, and about how a slight push ahead of the beat changes the energy in a room. Recently I have been wondering whether the long repetitive structures of set dances could sit alongside the slowly shifting harmonies I like. That question is behind a trio I am currently drafting for fiddle, clarinet and electronics.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I have reached the limit of what I can teach myself. I want sustained one-to-one feedback on my scores. I want regular access to performers for workshops, and time to study orchestration and electronic techniques more rigorously than my degree allowed. I would like to write for larger forces, especially chamber orchestra, and to build a portfolio that shows a recognisable voice rather than a series of experiments. I bring practical knowledge of instruments, experience of rehearsing my own music and a steady work ethic developed alongside paid jobs.