Individual Performance Evaluation

For my individual piece I created a piece of music mostly focusing on the lyrics and how they fit to the music. It was an acoustic guitar piece which I sang with accompaniment on the guitar by Reece.  I decided to perform my song live as I have been working on my performance skills and feel that I don’t have enough knowledge in recording to create a quality piece.  This will be something that I will look into learning in the future. I will be critiquing my performance and my process in this evaluation.

For this piece I would have liked to have played a piano piece but I have not yet gained the knowledge I feel I would need to put my abilities into practice.  Therefore I created a piece for vocals and acoustic guitar. The guitar part of the song included hammer-on’s and bar chords, both of which are techniques that I have been practicing but are not quite up to standard yet. I feel these techniques were not clearly shown in my performance as Reece and I had not rehearsed the piece enough for me to get it to sound exactly how I would have liked. I would preferred to have played this myself so I could create the vision I had for the song rather than Reece playing his interpretation of the piece which is a natural thing for an artist to do when playing an instrument.

The main focus of my song was to create lyrics inspired by Gabrielle Aplin, whose songs are about heartbreak and desire in a poetic and metaphorical way. I feel I have achieved this with my lyrics and I spoke of the fire inside us living on; ‘the fire inside me still lives on’.  This is metaphorical for the ability to stay strong and keep your head up once your heart has been broken. I used minor chords to give the song more sorrow but I feel the hammer-ons helped in giving it an edge of not just sadness but a slight hope at happiness “Pointing to a happy or contented face after a major tune and to a sad or angry face after a minor tune” (Winter, 1990).

If I were to do this piece again I would consider extending the song.  I struggle with writing lyrics and it is something I am slowly improving on. I am proud of what I have achieved in my writing but I would like to have possibly added another singer to create harmonies to my piece, as well as adding a piano and possibly a steady drum to give the song a beat as Heittola and Klapuri (2002) said, “The presence/absence of drum instruments is an important high-level descriptor for music classification and retrieval”.

From doing this performance I have learned that the more time I spend practicing and working on my music, the better my outcome will be. Next time I would like to find my preferred style of singing as well as continuing to learn piano. I will be continuing writing music over summer as I feel the more I have written, the easier it has become. I really liked using Gabrielle Aplin as an inspiration as I feel I have written my best lyrics after researching her work; especially enjoying the poetic flow of her words. Although I still have many things to work on I think my final piece was successful and will keep pushing myself to improve it even further.