With COVID-19 sweeping the world, many of you many have joined me where I’ve been in for the past three years: working from home. As everyone is discovering, it’s tough. Here are five tips I can offer from my experience as grad student and freelancer. 1: Log Your Hours The temptation of having a fully […]
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Celebrating Ten Years
Ten years ago, on March 31, 2010, I launched josephsowa.com as the home for my music. At the time, I was a few months out from graduating with my undergraduate degree from BYU. A lot has happened since then! Here are some of the highlights: . . . what more will happen this decade? Stay […]
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Speak Your Musical Truth
A musical idea is not just something you visualize in your brain or even something you hear in your mind’s ear. It is both those things and more. It is most of all something you feel in your GUT. It is as instinctive and as personal and as urgent as the words you speak. Sometimes […]
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Those times composers wrote a low F for violin
Every orchestration textbook will tell you that the lower limit of the violin (scordatura aside), is a G3 (G below middle C). But even with a normally tuned violin, composers don’t always obey that limit. Here are two examples (plus a bonus one in viola) that show why a composer might write beyond that written […]
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A Few Observations on Suspensions
Classical dissonance begins with a consonant preparation, continues to the dissonance in question, and finishes with a consonant resolution. Wikipedia says as much. But as I was falling asleep I started wondering about the topology of suspensions — which suspensions work in which situation. There are three basic suspensions: 9-8, 7-6, and 4-3. In the […]
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The Elegance of Holst’s “Jupiter”: The First Two Bars
I love the opening swirl of violins in “Jupiter” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Who doesn’t? Take a moment and listen to it: It’s thrilling! But what really gets me going as a composer are the details of its composition. This passage is extraordinarily elegant. Here’s the excerpt from the score: What makes this passage so […]
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How Alan Menken Channels Chopin and Brahms in “Beauty and the Beast”
I watched the 2017 version of Beauty and the Beast recently with some friends of mine. Being the music nerd I am, the film got me thinking about its theme song. The more I studied it, the more my admiration for it grew. Alan Menken’s music is straightforwardly diatonic and repetitive, but that simplicity disguises […]
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2017 in Review
Welcome to the end of another year! It’s been a great one for me. Let me share the highlights below. tl;dr Just listen — Pieces Written or Premiered Motion Lines (2016). Premiered by PRISM Quartet Blossom Music (2017). Premiered at the fresh inc festival Granite and Sage (2017). Premiere forthcoming An Integrity of Clouds (2016-17). […]
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Help me name my new piece!
I originally wrote “The Integrity of Clouds” for clarinet quintet, but now that I’ve created a new version for mixed sextet, it feels like it needs a new title. Listen below and vote on what you think that title should be! Loading…
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How to Make an Easter Hymn from Pachelbel’s Canon
“I don’t know how you could possibly write music!” It’s a refrain I hear often, even from talented musicians. And I can understand why they say that. Writing music might seem like organizing thousands of isolated pitches and rhythms. For example, my latest arrangement included 2320 notes, 1273 rhythms, and 281 rests. That’s daunting. But there is another way, and […]
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