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Clef Club

a picture of a piano and the music notes

Clef Club provides an amazing opportunity for students of all musical abilities to try out composing music, therefore it is an amazing society. When the lockdown began, I started really missing Clef Club. Therefore, we decided to move it online and for the past four weeks, it has been really enjoyable to see fellow members and to compose some new music. This has been a great opportunity for us to socialise, create and share music online. Since then, we have met every Wednesday afternoon and it has been amazingly successful.

If you really like music or you just want to try something new, then you should really consider coming to Clef Club. You have the freedom to compose whatever you want to compose, but if you get stuck, there will always be people who will be willing to help you. It is a relaxed atmosphere and we are always open to new possibilities. 

Here are the different pieces of music that we have composed:

Sunshine in Lockdown by Shizhe Liu.

Lockdown can be really boring and most things in the news are depressing. Therefore, in this piece of music, I decided to focus on the hope, which was inspired by the sunshine. This has been achieved by using frequent transitions between major and minor (but each “section” always ends on major) and the interesting chord progressions throughout the piece, where I have “smoothed” the transition by using a chord that only uses common notes of both chords. For example if I am going from C major to A minor, I use a chord that only uses the notes C and E in between C major bit and the A minor bit, as you can find C and E notes in both C major triad and A minor triad.” – Shizhe Liu

Listen to Sunshine in Lockdown by Shizhe Liu

Read the sheet music for Sunshine in Lockdown by Shizhe Liu

Jazz Taken Too Far by Dhiran Sodha

This intentionally crazy sounding piece is meant to sound like someone’s just thrown you onto a rollercoaster without you realising and starts chucking you all over the place. Its main focus is on melody where it makes use of long stretches of ascending/descending sequences, broken 7th chords, whole tone scales and constant semitone shifts between keys. Towards the end, there is a section of rhythmic variation where the same melody is played three times repeated however every time it’s repeated a quaver is taken out of the bar and it is shifted down a semitone each time. I wrote it on a music notation software followed by a production software where I added drums and put the chords into a vibraphone/electric piano and the melody into different synthesisers. The piece was inspired by a section of music I heard at the end of a Zappa song called ‘St Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast’.” – Dhiran Sodha

Listen to Jazz Taken Too Far by Dhiran Sodha

Read the sheet music for Jazz Taken Too Far by Dhiran Sodha

Home by Shizhe Liu

Given how much time I have spent at home recently, I really started to think about my roots (not just the square roots in my maths homework). I have decided to sum this up in one piece of music. This has been achieved by manipulating a pentatonic scale, which is commonly found in Chinese music, to create a cool tune. This piece of music is rather simple, so it is suitable for beginners.” – Shizhe Liu

Listen to Home by Shizhe Liu

Read the sheet music for Home by Shizhe Liu

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