Compose a study, 3–5 minutes in duration, that Ulrich might perform in our final performance-for-video project and post it on your portfolio website by class time next Tuesday.

Notate it using whatever tools and techniques are accessible to you and best communicate the instructions to the performer (e.g., standard musical notation, descriptive text, graphic shapes or symbols). Give the piece a clear shape from beginning to end, keep it relevant to the cello in some significant way, and keep it focused to exploring one or a few ideas/inquiries/performance situations.

It might end up being expanded into your final project, but it doesn’t have to, so feel free to try your most promising and exciting experiment here.

You don’t have to write out every note, but your étude should be realizable into a full performance, so at least provide verbal descriptions or graphic depictions of what should happen in each moment. For example, you might write out two short gestures to be used as motives/themes (recognizable when they are repeated and transformed during a piece) and connect them with descriptive text like:

“Morph from one motive to the other over 30 seconds: repeat the first motive in a meandering chain, then gradually change one note at a time to match the second motive, while gradually moving from low range to high range over the whole section.”

Or you might depict this graphically instead.

Finally, provide a brief commentary like you did for the Moorman pieces:

• What would be seen, what would be heard?
• How is the performance structured over time?
• What concepts are behind the creation or structure of the work?
• What does it have in common with a traditional classical cello performance?
• What is different from traditional cello performance, and what are the impacts of those differences?
• How is it relevant to the cello—why does it need to be “for” cello?

Refer to these notes on graphic scores for ideas on how to notate your étude. Think about the techniques mentioned in the Eco for composing without tying down every detail; and remember the aesthetic opportunities of “openness” in a composition. Think about the framework and relationships among every element in the performance as discussed in the Kapuscinski reading. Think about the Barthes reading and semiotics—how each motion, each sound, each object used, can contain meaning that could build meaningful relationships within your piece, and remember the mapping discussion for ideas on how to connect those relationships across media/senses.