Today's is DEFINITELY not a 'one-a-day' composition. For our masters' degrees, the thesis component is a piece for orchestra, and Christine and I have been working hard (?) on these pieces, in advance of their deadline on the 28th.
Mine is done, although it needs to be renotated as a better score, flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones 1&2 on the same stave, and so on. This is going to happen some time after my lesson today, but I'd LOVE some feedback, as I've still got 10 days to work on it. Please tell me what you think!
Peter Looked:
This piece is an orchestrated excerpt from my monodrama, The Mermaid. For those of you who have heard it, you might remember this as the interstitial music, describing a lover whom the central character has tried to excise from her life. He looks for her, and eventually falls out of love. This piece is trying to describe the combination of cathartic joy and loss, what she internalises from the experience, and something she's not quite ready to accept in her life, even though she wants to.
On a side note, the performance of these pieces in Feb will be inside a humungous church, with very washy acoustics. ALSO, the percussion on the track is buggy as hell
Score & Audio here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mghuu0omxxoolyx/AABnZr23i7c1dXRHRvhdcJR1a?dl=0
Wow man, this amazing. I love it, the emotions you described totally came through for. I have little experience working on full orchestral arrangements and feel totally unjustified in offering any criticism after only just two listens, but here are a couple of things that maybe could be useful.
ReplyDelete- Re crazy church reverb in feb, dynamics will probably have to be reconsidered in rehearsal, as your subtle harmonic movements in the opening section could be blurred out by washy reverb.
- Oh man midi percussion fml... You could bounce out the .wav from sibelius with all percussion muted, then bounce out the midi of the percussion and get it to do exactly what you want using a DAW. Then mix perc midi and the sibelius .wav together for the submission in 10 days.
- Totally personal preference, but I was longing for that last E natural to be somehow even more delicate than it already is. Maybe having it doubled up an octave by another stringed instrument or even a woodwind, or maybe just less underneath it in from the pianissimo is all I wanted.
Really amazing though, very moving :)
Thank you! My problem with the sibelius midi is that (for some reason) it does weird tempo things with the fermatas, but I can solve that by making them non-effective in the score and changing the tempo perhaps..
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