Holly Mead - Composer, Pianist

This week, I gave a talk about composing music to the 6th graders at the Julia Morgan School for Girls. A big thank you to Phil Gorman for inviting me to speak! 

Here were some of the take-aways: 

You don’t…

Chapter 2 begins with an explanation of major and minor triads, diatonic chords, chord symbol notation, and a preliminary exercise which requires students to practice writing out the tones of various chord symbols. 

For ex.2, we will construct a…

​In Composing Music, Ch.1 Ex. 4-8 introduce students to the first three modes of the major scale and familiarize them with William Russo’s General Rules and Basic Note Values. If you are curious about these tenets/tools, check out the book. 

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Our saga continues...

The guard doesn’t speak. She leads you down a deserted path to a row of small huts behind Edrevol’s castle. She stops at the threshold of the last hut and turns to address you. 

“Here…

Continued from previous post...

Luckily for you, King Edrevol likes your first performance so much that he decides to spare your life and declares to the revelers at the feast, “we have a new court bard!” The Lorac…

In the hopes of capturing the imaginations of my students and keeping them engaged as we work through our Composing Music textbook, I will spin a Scheherazade-esque tale that requires the students to create/perform new compositions that…

I have tasked myself with staying one step ahead of my students as we work our way through William Russo's book, Composing Music: 

"Aimed at those who have some knowledge of music but not formal training in composition, this…