Reverie, Op. 5 Essay

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For this year’s benchmark project, I decided I would perform a piece and challenge myself. I ended up choosing Reverie, Op. 24, by Alexander Glazunov, a highly melodic and romantic piece written in 1890. Glazunov was a well known and accomplished horn player, and tended to write small solos like this often, favoring the emotional, expressive pieces. Reverie was a beautiful example of this. Written in the romantic style, going back and forth between major and minor, the piece is a wonderfully intricate solo to play. Reverie wasn’t anything close to his “big hit” as far as his compositions went, but it was a beautiful piece, written for horn and piano just before he left Soviet Russia. Some say it was his goodbye piece to the home he had to …show more content…

The tricky combination of rhythms in the piece made keeping time harder, and I had to make sure that I was counting during all of the solo. Timing, as a result of not counting the rhythms, would be off as well should I stop counting. I noticed that I was messing up simple things -- either playing eighth notes in the style of a triplet, or not counting the duration of a dotted half note. The fix -- a metronome. I had to be extremely rigid with how I practiced, or else that would be the way it would sound when I performed. I did notice improvement over the course of the week and a half, but I’ll admit, rhythm is still the weak point of my performance at its present composure. Along with my constant battle of seemingly simple screw ups in rhythm, I had to work on endurance. Reverie was, at some points, out of my range, peaking at an 턭A above the staff, and at its lowest it reached to the bass clef, which, let me tell you -- wasn’t gonna happen. I ended up rewriting a few sections of the piece, eliminating the whole bass clef section, and going down the octave with some of the higher notes. Regardless of the cuts and rewrites, it was still a very challenging piece in the realm of endurance, and I had to practice it in sections in order to preserve my chops for each

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