Haro Kazandjian

‘Reminiscence’ is a piece I wrote for an assignment in University in my composition module. The brief was that we should be able to create a piece of music using older composed music. 

For this piece, I decided from an early stage that I wanted to use Chopin’s Nocturne in Eb Major as inspiration; a piece that is impossible to dislike, and one that has been amongst my favourites for a while now. There are a number of processes I went through in order to write it; I used an inverted version of the basic melody line (then putting this in the violin part); I studied and analysed the techniques and ideas that made Chopin’s piece such an original and much loved work (including chord progressions, structure, rhythmic feel, and melodic ideas) and incorporated many of them subtly into my composition; I utilised some of my newly discovered Jazz theory, adding extended chords and other such ideas to the mixture. 

Over all I feel that the piece has been successful and I am very proud of my achievement (this being one of my favourite compositions to date). The idea for this piece was to be very faintly reminiscent of the Nocturne (perhaps more so for people with a better familiarity of the piece), and I believe that I have achieved this.

The piece was performed using Sibelius 6’s in-built MIDI sounds.

This is a extract from a track I wrote as a sample for The Sims video game (not officially commissioned but written as an example of what I can do).

The idea came to me after playing a version of The Sims on Wii and thinking about the approach that I would go through if I was asked to write for them. This particular piece would be one that could be played in the background, perhaps more appropriately in the background for a menu screen, although during game-play could work as well.

The music was written up on Sibelius 6 and performed using the MIDI sounds that came with it. In this particular situation the MIDI sounds aren’t too out of place when comparing it to previous Sims music quality.

This is a track that I wrote in the style of a electronic/pop song. Although the song was composed by me, it was co-produced and edited with a friend and colleague Iyad Assaf.

This song allowed me to experiment with a range of techniques using Logic Pro’s vast range of plug-ins, effects and production capabilities. I experimented with a variety of the in-built synthesizers, bettering my understanding of how they work and how to create the perfect sound I need.

I also used recorded ‘found sounds’ in order to create the percussion effects (excluding the bass drum). These sounds included key rattling, biscuit wrapper scrunching, book flicking, and many others. This really expanded my mind in terms of what noises I could create and, in the process of recording and perfecting their effect, I noted the possibility of being able to use this in the creation of sound effects for movies, television, and video games.

This was a piece I wrote for a competition at University to create an original composition under the theme of “the Olympics”. The audio is taken from the MIDI sounds on Sibelius 6 as I, unfortunately, did not get a chance to record with a live orchestra.

There were a number of details that were required of the piece, including a maximum number of orchestra players, a limit of 3 - 5 minutes, and the fact that it should be suitable for children (i.e. preferably tonally centred with little extreme chromaticism). The winning piece was to be played as part of a scheme designed to get children more interested in orchestras. Unfortunately my piece was not the one chosen but it was an incredible leap for me, having never properly committed to finishing a piece before and being very nervous about letting others see it.

The piece I wrote was called “A Race Against Time”.

When it came to writing the piece, I decided that the approach I would take would be not to write a fanfare to celebrate the Olympics but rather a fanfare to celebrate the athlete. This lead to the idea that the piece would linearly dictate the range of emotions and feelings leading up to and during the race.

It starts relatively solitarily and then almost instantly moves into a more determined, pumped, excited state of mind, with only the tiniest twinges of unease. As the piece progresses, the athlete becomes more and more tense, nervous, and anxious with their time looming ever closer. Just before the race begins with a bang, the roaring chorale-like chant of the crowd makes everything more and more real. It finishes open ended, the outcome of the race being overshadowed by the adrenaline at the climax of the piece.