The Stars in their Eyes | Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon | Isabel Goodwin, 2018
The Stars in Their Eyes was written as part of a challenge in The Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s High School Composition Intensive. We were given 3 days to compose a woodwind trio consisting of bassoon, clarinet, and oboe. When I started this piece, I had had the melodic motif stuck in my head for days, and kept thinking about variations on it, and decided it had to be written into a full piece. I experimented a lot with speeding up the piece without changing the tempo, through the different rhythms and changing from quarter notes to eighth notes to triplets to sixteenth notes and etc. Eventually, the motif is layered so far on top of itself that it just becomes noise for a few measures. Emotionally, this piece stared out as sort of just an experiment with 'how long can I make these five notes be basically the entire piece?' But eventually, the piece became more of a conversation between the three voices, and it almost sounds like it leads up to an argument, and then calms back down in agreement. Even without changing the repeating melody, the mood can be shifted and a story is told.
The Stars in their Eyes was also performed at the University of Colorado Boulder at the "Rhythm in Music Since 1900 International Conference" in November 2019.
Clarinet- Anoushka Divekar
Oboe- Curtis Sellers
Bassoon- Ethan Shuler
Oboe- Curtis Sellers
Bassoon- Ethan Shuler