So we’re deep into the blogs now, I believe this is my 7th blog, we should know each other by now. My loyal readers will know that I’ve been playing the piano since I was 7, I’m now 22, that’s a very long time, I’m surprised my fingers don’t have biceps.
The piano is the biggest influence on my music, the minute I think of a musical idea, I will go straight to a piano and write it out on some manuscript paper. I even use a digital piano to electronically write in all my ideas using a midi keyboard and Logic Pro X.
My biggest inspirations:
-Debussy
-Liszt
-Einaudi
and even famous YouTube pianists such as :
-Rousseau
-Patrik Pietschmann
-Davide Stramaglia (aka David’s Pianosound)
Whilst I compose, I also practice famous pieces of piano music to help inspire a creative spark to light up in my mind ready for my next composition. I’m currently practising ‘Clair De Lune’ (Debussy 1890), to be fair I’ve been practising ‘Clair De Lune’ since I was 13 and I just can’t master it, but I’m close! Thanks to the amazing facilities at my University I have access to top of the range pianos which makes practising a lot more enjoyable.
Please excuse the tattered piano sheet music, the amount of times I’ve launched it across the room because I couldn’t hit the right note,( I know right how childish) but Debussy’s pieces are so difficult play, I even found the time to research into why this is and came across a research paper written by Chieh Chien called ‘Beyond Debussy and Ravel: Impressionism in the Early Advanced Short Piano Works of Selected European and American Composers’ (2011) Chien states that “Keeping the appropriate lightness of touch and a good balance between independent finger’s and rotated wrists is a challenge for pianists” (Chien 2011)
This reassured me reading this, I was beginning to doubt my pianistic skills, turns out Debussy is just extremely talented and difficult to replicate.
Above I have attached a really helpful video because I was infatuated with the Sound of Debussy, I wanted to incorporate his style into my music and this video helped me a lot with my own piano compositions.
In my 3rd year at University, one of my assignments was to create a track with vocals in, I wanted to create a piano part to accompany the vocals but after I composed my first draft, my lecturer said there wasn’t enough “magic” in there and there needed to be more harmony. So I asked my lecturer if he could show me how to do that, the following day he taught a whole lecture on harmony and how to bring that “magic” into your music, here are some of the notes written from that lecture:
This lecture was so helpful to me as it made me re-evaluate my own compositions and I decided to take a new approach to composing music, below is a link to the composition I composed for that assignment:
https://soundcloud.com/user-741010136/amber-durant-perfect-vocal
However, before Debussy started to influence my work, I took a less complex way of composing. This was due to my interest in ‘Einaudi’ his music is fairly easy to sight read and simple to play yet it’s written with such beautiful and calming melodies.
An example of my music before Debussy influenced my compositions, can be found on my SoundCloud link below, in this composition I wrote in the style of Einaudi, a simple piano piece, not too harmonic but full of calming melodies.
https://soundcloud.com/user-741010136/forbidden
As I mentioned earlier in this blog post, I talked about my inspirations on Youtube. Patrik Pietschmann and Rousseau
Both of these Youtube Pianist’s use a ‘reactive visualiser’ this gives music a ‘face’ to look at, perfect for non pianist’s to help them understand what these notes do and how they create something so magnificent when all combined together.
It’s not often that people get to meet their inspirations but luckily I did. In the picture above, myself and pianist Davide Stramaglia aka (David’s Pianosound) finally managed to meet up after nearly 2 years of when I first saw him perform at ‘Westfield Centre’ in London. He caught my attention immediately when I heard him playing so beautifully on the grand piano on the second floor of the Westfield Centre. I was astonished to find out that the songs he was playing were his own original compositions. Once he had finished playing, we started chatting and stayed in touch ever since. He has been a great contact to have, especially since we’re both in the same industry, his tips and advice has helped me develop into a better pianist and composer. Davide has not only released two piano albums, but has also hit over 8 million views on his Youtube video.
This type of path in the music industry is becoming more common with the rise of YouTube and the modern day ‘Youtuber’s’ that are releasing content every day are earning a good living from it. After watching these videos I have considered going down the route of Youtube and showcasing my music that way.
Sources: CHIEH CHIEN, ‘Beyond Debussy and Ravel: Impressionism in the Early Advanced Short Piano Works of Selected European and American Composers’ (2011), {accessed online}, Arizona State University, link to research paper can be found:https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cf98/eb25c3de853681711873ecb6f57d5e5c5678.pdf (accessed on 5th December 2019)
Nahre Sol (2018) ‘How to Sound Like Debussy‘ {online video} 15 Aug 2018, accessed via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ydnwI5dzts (accessed on 5th December 2019)
AMBER DURANT (2018) Forbidden, accessed via SoundCloud link: https://soundcloud.com/user-741010136/forbidden (accessed on 5th December 2019)
AMBER DURANT (2019) Angelic, accessed via SoundCloud link:https://soundcloud.com/user-741010136/amber-durant-perfect-vocal (accessed on 5th December 2019)
DAVID’S PIANOSOUND (2016) ‘PiratesOfTheCaribbean/GameOfThrones Piano‘ accessible by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDggLfw7B-s (video accessed 5th December 2019)
Film and Game Music by Amber Durant 