Cavies is a cadence I wrote in high school, inspired by an excerpt from the 1993 Cavaliers show. Four years after I graduated I went to a concert band performance and one of the drummers told me they were still playing it. I had no idea! Turns out they were still playing a few of my pieces at the time. Not sure about now. The drummer asked me to play along with him on Cavies ... I was good for the first measure or two, but after that I choked. Strange how something I wrote could leave me so quickly. Guess that's what college does to a man.
Two months ago I decided to rewrite most of Cavies. I've made progress but the cadence continues to suffer from too many notes and phrases that run on blindly. I axed most of those phrases and have addressed cohesiveness between the voices, but not the piece as a whole. It's possible that I need to backtrack more and really try to pull away from the dead-end roads my high school version went down. It's hard, though, because the flow and placement of the more prominent rhythms is burned into my brain. Must ... stay ... away ... from ... them.
The original Cavies show excerpt is fast-paced, has varied rhythms, accelerates and decelerates -- all of which I consider to be beyond the difficulty level I'm going for. This makes it hard to continue to draw inspiration from the original, but it's a learning process. I'll figure something out.
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