Hidden Line Etude - Day 22 | 30-Day Composition Challenge (Theme: Out of Focus)

This was written for Day 22 of Ryan Leach's "2022 Theme of the Day Challenge" where I'll compose one piece per day for the entirety of June, though it ended up with me somehow managing to speed compose this along with like 8 other prompts in a row on the final day of the challenge. The prompt for June 22nd was "Out of Focus". The first thing I thought of when seeing the prompt was to make it impressionistic, having a blurry sound bathed in swathes of chords. I then thought of having a hidden melody within the block chords, hence turning this into a voicing etude. Initially, I recorded myself improvising this before transcribing my recording onto sheet music, so it is (hopefully) rather idiomatic for pianists to play. It was a challenge figuring out how to represent this as sheet music, but in the end I went with a similar approach to Day 17 with three staves to put all music down. The real challenge for solo pianist is to voice the melody carefully as it is placed in the middle register. I have also been learning some Debussy on piano lately, so his impressionist style was stuck in my head and influenced my initial improvisation and hence this composition.

#etude