A Motivating Day in My Music Composition Camp 🎹

Today was a very motivating day for me!

I mentioned about two weeks ago that I got accepted to a virtual composition camp with a scholarship. It's been more than a week since it started and I'm loving everything about this camp! I will talk about the camp in detail in another post. Now, I just want to briefly explain what happened today and what motivated me this much.

Throughout the whole camp, we had workshare sessions every day in which students could share their original work and get feedback from the instructors and fellows. Those workshare session hours have been my favourite times of the day so far for several reasons. However, the most important one is probably because everyone was getting very constructive and inspiring feedback. Also, the discussions and comments that were being made about the shared pieces were extremely valuable I think, since realizing that people actually CARE about what you've created and that they take it seriously is something you don't encounter very often.

SO, today was my turn. I signed up for today's session earlier last week and had no idea about which one of my pieces I would share. Luckily, my brother is great when it comes to evaluating my pieces (I feel like he is my first fan, he literally knows my pieces better than I do 😅). He told me to share the piece I composed very recently, which was around 3 weeks ago. Actually, he has been making me play that piece for all the time being because he was in love with that piece. I trusted him and shared it in today's session with the background information like what inspired me to compose and how I composed it. I was a little bit nervous before the session since everyone except me is from the U.S. in the camp and I'm the only one whose native language is not English. I was scared that I wouldn't explain my piece properly and that I wouldn't be able to answer the questions they would ask me.

This is the cover I made for my piece

But, none of the stuff that I was worried about happened! On the contrary, everything went very well. The coolest part is that everyone liked my piece very much and I received several positive feedback and questions about the piece. I was even asked if I could share my composition with them in our Facebook group since some of the people wanted to listen to it again.

My instructor also said that my piece might be difficult to notate because it had very flexible parts. I responded to her saying that I never notate my compositions because I'm the only one playing them. 😂 Most of the comments on my piece were about how emotional it was and how the emotions were purely revealing themselves. I can't describe how important it is to hear these comments, because these are the exact sentences that I want people to say about my music. Another comment that I remember now is that though my piece included many repetitive passages, it never felt like a repetitive and monotonous piece about which I feel happy.

Anyways, despite in a small audience, seeing that my music gets recognition is something that makes me feel like I want to keep going.