A Marimba Solo Composition and Performance by a Geohydrologist Natalie Camille
Music
University of Wyoming Performance
Music, Honors Benicia, CA
Music is a large part of most people’s lives, even if it is just road trip music or the school bell. Despite this, not many people dedicate their lives to creating music. As a geohydrologist, science comes much more easily than any creative activity. However, I have been playing musical instruments in some capacity since I was 4 years old. In an effort to continue my involvement in music and keep sane, at the collegiate level, I joined the percussion ensemble, wind symphony, community band, and marching band. As a culmination of the last 17 years of my musical life, I have spent the last semester composing and recording a performance of a marimba solo. This document contains a brief description of my musical history and a reflection of my experience composing and performing this piece.
A Reflection
First and foremost, I am a scientist. I am your typical left-brained, can-do-math-but-can’t-write-an-essay scientist. Despite this, I have been a musician for 17 years. I began by playing piano when I was 4 and at the age of 11 I transitioned over to percussion. I was never amazing at piano but I quickly realized that percussion came much more naturally to me. Over the course of middle school I fell in love with the marimba, and in high school I had the opportunity to serve as front ensemble captain for the marching band for 3 years, where I was able to play marimba every single day. In college, I knew I needed to keep music in my life, so I joined the percussion ensemble, wind symphony, and later the marching band and community band. Percussion ensemble gave me the greatest opportunity to play marimba every day and it has been my favorite class throughout all of college. Many people attribute their sanity to reading or running or even listening to music. For me, nothing clears my head and makes
me happy as much as playing percussion does. Being a part of the music program has provided me with motivation in my geology classes and has taught me the time management necessary to complete two degrees, a minor, and my music classes in four years, even while working two jobs.
There were two main events that influenced my decision to complete my senior thesis in music as opposed to geohydrology. First, in the fall of 2019, Ivan Trevino came to the University of Wyoming and performed with the percussion ensemble. Ivan Trevino is a world-renowned percussionist who studied at Eastman School of Music and specializes in marimba composition. I have looked up to him since I was in high school and meeting him and performing with him was completely surreal. The day of our concert he gave a masterclass about composition. He provided us with tips on how to begin the process of composing and how to hang in there when it gets difficult. Hearing him teach us that there is no perfect way to compose and that every piece of music is subjective made me realize that it was something that even I could do.
Second, I remembered a talk I had been given in high school about how important musicians are in science-related fields. My band director brought in a motivational speaker to get us mentally
prepared for the intense season and he began telling us how he truly believed that a musician will find the cure for cancer. It’s a bit of an extreme example, yes, but his point was that music teaches you everything you need to be successful in the rest of your life. It teaches you teamwork, focus, leadership, listening, dedication, and most of all hard work. So many successful doctors and engineers played an instrument in high school and that experience, whether they knew it or not, set them up for success in the real world. There aren’t as many opportunities to learn these important skills in high school and this is what makes band kids stand out no matter their profession later in life. Remembering these words, I realized that choosing to do my senior thesis in music could only help me in the long run. Of course, the support from within the music and honors departments only helped to solidify my decision.
Beginning to compose this piece was probably the hardest part of the whole process. There are so many possible melodies, how does one know where to begin? I spent many nights in the fine arts practice rooms just standing in front of the marimba hoping something would pop into my head. It took weeks of experimenting with melodies to come up with something. The piece didn’t come together in order, however. The first melody I came up with is the one around the 2-minute mark in my solo. Then, after more trial and error, I came up with the very beginning part. The melodies were written down and recorded but I wasn’t able to string them together until I composed even more. I decided that what I had composed at this point in time was two melodies that were pretty, but generic. My inability to think outside the box showed as both of the melodies were predictable and in 4/4 time. I needed a change of pace in the piece.
By complete accident through trial and error, I created the middle melody. I had been in the practice room, attempting to find something that sounded good and wasn’t in 4/4 when I got frustrated. In my annoyance, I just played a 7/8 rhythm while hitting random notes, and surprisingly it sounded okay. I took that idea, changed the chords a bit to sound better, and transposed it into the same key as the rest of my melodies. Now, there was the beginnings of a middle section for the solo!
The next difficult part was to string the different melodies together in a way that flows and captures the listener without sounding repetitive. I struggled with this part for quite a few months. Andy Wheelock (my percussion professor) helped me through it by showing me different ways to approach the problem and giving me a few ideas. It took a long time and a lot of nights in the practice rooms but eventually, all of the pieces of the solo came together. Then COVID-19 happened.
With the rest of the semester online, all of my music classes were cancelled. This was
devastating news. Knowing that I wouldn’t have a last percussion concert or wind symphony concert or community band concert was more saddening than graduation moving online. However, I still had to
finish my solo and record it. Luckily, the music department allowed one of the marimba’s to be checked out, so I took it apart and brought it into my apartment. This instrument took up the entire living room but at least I would be able to complete this project. Unfortunately, some chronic health issues decided this would be a good time to show up and I was bed-ridden and unable to practice for about two weeks. Once I started to get better, I began making a game plan to record.
On a nice sunny day, I wheeled the marimba outside and set it up below one of my friend’s apartment windows. She set up her camera in the window to get a higher camera angle, and my other friend brought his go-pro and handheld camera. All together, we did 3 takes with 3 cameras each, giving me 9 videos to choose from while editing. However, the audio quality from playing outdoors wasn’t sufficient. I borrowed my friend’s high-quality microphone, hung it from the ceiling in my living room, and recorded the piece indoors. The audio recording process took much longer than expected. I kept making little mistakes every now and then and had to restart multiple times. After about a week of video and audio recording, I had everything necessary to begin editing them together.
Using Sony Vegas Pro, I spent about five days hunched over my computer piecing video and audio together. The most difficult part of this process was that I didn’t play the solo at the exact same tempo in the videos and the audio recording. Thus, I had to choose which video I selected for each part carefully and had to adjust the speed of the video to match that of the audio. After many hours of hard work, the video was finally complete!
The last, most important, step was titling the solo. I came up with many possible options but they were: too cheesy, sounded too much like it was connected to the pandemic, or not meaningful. I wanted a title that related to the difficulties in creating this piece of music. When I think about it, my main struggle was trying to think less like a scientist and more like a musician. Thus, the title “The Box” was born. This piece is titled “The Box” because it represents my struggle to think creatively and
“outside the box”. As a scientist I am used to solving problems logically and for there to generally be one right answer. This thesis taught me that the only right answer is the one I am proud of.
While the big “deliverable” of my thesis was the final video, this reflection serves to document the process and my feelings throughout it. Overall, I learned that while I tend to think very logically, there is always that hint of creativity that is hiding away and accessing that creativity can lead to great things. There is no doubt that my musicianship will continue to affect my life in a positive way and, as I continue on to graduate school, I will keep playing music as much as possible. I am extremely grateful to the music department for helping me on this journey and to the honors program for encouraging me throughout. It has been a wonderful experience and I am so proud to have a finished product that I can show people in the future.
A large thank you to Andy Wheelock, Dylan Hollis, Erin Heink, and Joslyn Cassady for helping me in various ways to bring this project into fruition.
