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Introduction: My interest in this project developed from three primary motivations. First, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is one of my favorite composers, yet very few of his solo works are represented in the percussion repertoire, largely because he did not originally write for percussion. Second, much of the classical repertoire adapted for percussion tends to center around composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Maurice Ravel, and Jean Sibelius. Expanding this repertoire to inc

Preparing for Performance This weekend is JT's recital which we are performing these two movements on, February and March. This week was focused on getting the movements played back to back and addressing the problem spots to get things solidified for this weekends performance. A lot of the final touches came down to balance once again, we tried out a lot of different mallets for the two movements and were trying to play as similiar to each other as possible so that we sound

Final Notes This week the focus was on getting the last section of notes together for February. This third section is very deceptively difficult as it involves a lot of chordal movement in a very slow and exposed way so making sure its on track is extremely important in this section. Through this rehearsal we added some phrasing in the piece that involved more time instead of dynamic phrasing, a couple of lifts or pauses here and there to try and emulate a piano player as muc

March We started work on the second arrangement for this project, March. Its a lot more lyrical of a piece than the first movement that we have been working on. There is a lot of push and pull in the piece and it is significantly slower than the last one we worked on, which means there is going to have to be a lot of chamber communication. We started our first rehearsal on it by just trying to play through the notes without much musicality just so we had a good launching pad

Lesson This week started off with us playing the sections that we had been working on in JT's Lesson. A lot of what we discussed in the lesson was interpreting the music as a pianist instead of percussionists which is a really hard thing to manage since a lot of articulations are more felt than heard. Most of this interpretation is going to come from making sure our mallet choice is fitting for the piece, but the rest of it will come from the weight that we put behind our str

Practice: This week I specifically worked on the B section of the piece. This section has a good amount of challenge to it on my part, I basically don't get a second to breathe while I am playing through this sequencing motif and back into the main theme of the section. There is going to need to be a lot of communication between both players in the section because there is a lot of trading melody or importance. There is what seems like a lot of harmonic movement which is maki

This week was a lot simpler since we didnt do much individual practice, this week was mostly just focused on working the music out together. There were very few arrangement problems, thanks to JT, so rehearsal was fairly smooth. We mostly worked on the main theme of "Carnival" which shows up 3 times in the piece (beginning, middle, and end). Started by keeping tempo slower and working specifically on difficult transitions to smaller section in the theme. After that we worked

Receiving the Commission This week I started looking at Marimba Duet that I commissioned from JT Clancy IV. I wanted to have multiple movements of Tchaikovsky's work for solo piano, "The Seasons", arranged for Marimba Duet because of the rich and warm tones that the marimba produces, which I feel will compliment this work very well. JT finished the arrangement of the movement titled "II. February: Carnival" and gave it to me this week. He is also arranging the third movemen