Luminosa cell collection
- karencortez7797
- Jun 5, 2020
- 2 min read
I had originally planned to just provide a random selection of cells from Luminosa for use in composition activities, with the idea that removing the cells from their context would remove the worry that only cells from a particular section could be used at the same time. I used screenshots of the score, leaving dynamics and techniques intact as little "puzzles" for the students to figure out as they performed it. I finished that about a week ago.

When I completed my class arrangement of the entire piece the other day, I ended up deciding that making students transpose (not an HSC-assessed skill) and read alto clef (if you can read other clefs, you'll be fine for score analysis since it won't turn up in sight-singing) was a waste of class time and wrote out those parts again. When looking back on my wild collection of random cells, it seemed a very weak tool in comparison. So I decided to make a mixed bag "arrangement", which just had all the aleatoric cells of Luminosa, grouped into sections. Unlike a normal mixed bag, I left out TAB notation, as Music 2 guitarists should really be practicing their staff notation reading.

Luminosa's instrumentation are all very agile: strings, flute, piano, vibraphone. I realised this once I transposed the cells into parts for brass instruments and realised how jumpy the parts were. I deleted the truly impossible ones from those parts, but I kept a few in. Since it's being used as compositional stimulus, and not actually playing everything on the page, I figured that the students would be able to make their own decisions about which cells to play. While I left the mismatched instrumental techniques in as originally planned, I decided to remove the dynamics as it made no sense to lock the cells into a particular dynamic range when it was going to be lifted out of its original context anyway.
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