Holly Mead - Composer, Pianist

In September, I went on tour with the amazing and talented ONIKHO! We performed in NYC, London, and Berlin. Here is a photographic/videographic retrospective of some of the highlights. 

We kicked things off at Nicky's Unisex in NYC:

Soundcheck…

A musical send-off will take place at UMA Gallery in Oakland this Thursday, May 5th, 2022, 7:30pm. This hour-long program of original solo piano will be my last performance as a Bay Area resident. Thank you for everything. I…

I will be taking a brief leave of absence from my current residency at the Dorland Artist Colony in Temecula, CA, in order to attend Awesöme Orchestra Collective's EOY concert and fundraiser on Sunday, December 12th at the Freight and…

With only two months left on sabbatical before I return home, the time has come to assimilate my newly minted skills and check a few things off of my composerly to-do list. Here is my capstone orchestration project, Syrinx Symphony…

I have enjoyed sweating my way through "Part One" of Paul Hindemith's bootcamp-esque Elementary Training For Musicians. I was initially dismayed by Hindemith's cosmically grumpy introduction which is rife with abrasive/exclusionary language, but I'm glad I shrugged off his…

I had the privilege and pleasure of collaborating with ONIKHO to create an orchestral arrangement of her new song "Love Bold" for Awesöme Orchestra! You can see/hear it (and two other beautiful new works) in this documentary produced by…

Here are exercises 1, 2, 4, and 5 at the end of Chapter Six of Twentieth Century Harmony, pg. 158-159!

Here are exercises 2, 3, 6, and 7 at the end of Chapter Five of Twentieth Century Harmony, pg. 133-134!

Here are exercises 1-7, 9, and 11 at the end of Chapter Five of Twentieth Century Harmony, pg. 119-120!

Here is a combo of Wednesday and Thursday's experiments:

Today, I combined a Phrygian-Major tetrachord with a Lydian-Major tetrachord to create a modified v.2 of yesterday's tune. Tomorrow, I'd like to try combining/lengthening yesterday and today's snippets to create a more substantial piece.

I've been puttering my way through Ron Gorow's Hearing & Writing Music: Professional Training for Today's Musician for quite some time, and I was able to finish it this week. There are already plenty of descriptions/reviews of Gorow's book floating…

Here are exercises 7-10 at the end of Chapter Four of Twentieth Century Harmony, pg. 107-108!

In Chapter Four of Twentieth Century Harmony, Persichetti discusses quartal harmony.

The chapter concludes with ten compositional prompts. Here are exercises 1-4 and 6!

Here are exercises 6, 8-13, 17, and 19 at the end of Chapter Three of Twentieth Century Harmony, pg. 91-92.

In Chapter Three of Twentieth Century Harmony, Persichetti discusses the cycle of fifths, thirds, and seconds, and sevenths, ninths, fifteenths, seventeenths, and twelve-note chords.

The chapter concludes with twenty compositional prompts. Here are exercises 1-5!

Here are the remaining five "applications" at the end of Chapter Two of Twentieth Century Harmony, pg. 65!

Here are exercises 14 and 16-20 on pages 64 of Chapter Two of Twentieth Century Harmony.

Here are exercises 8-13 on pages 63-64 of Chapter Two of Twentieth Century Harmony.

In Chapter Two of Twentieth Century Harmony, Persichetti discusses scale materials: modes, synthetic scale formations, pentatonic and hexatonic scales, and the chromatic scale.

The chapter concludes with twenty-five (!) "applications" (i.e. compositional prompts). Here are exercises 1-4 and 6-7.

…

Here are the remaining six "applications" at the end of Chapter One of Twentieth Century Harmony, pg. 30.

In Chapter One of Twentieth Century Harmony, Persichetti discusses the overtone series and why we perceive some intervals as consonant and others as dissonant.

The chapter concludes with twelve "applications" (i.e. compositional prompts). Here are the first six!

In the introduction of his book Twentieth Century Harmony, Vincent Persichetti says:

"This text aims to define harmonic activity and make it available to the student and young composer. A detailed study of the essential harmonic technique of the twentieth-century

Kaleidoscopic Ostinatos

Russo uses the term Kaleidoscopic Ostinatos to refer to two or more ostinatos of differing lengths that occur simultaneously.

For this next exercise, I created an accompaniment with four ostinao patterns of different lengths:

• Pattern a is three…