String Orchestra Arrangement: Chopin

First, let me acknowledge the fantastic @Alexander Schiborr who I asked to do the mock-up.

It's been a little quiet on these boards of late, and I am pretty happy with my latest work.
I took Chopin's famous Funeral March theme and used it as the basis for a fugue.

Any comments or criticisms are of course welcome.

Best wishes to all

 

Well, there is too much for me to tackle in-depth. There are different types of fugues, and you'll find pretty early on the distinction between
tonal and exact answer. For tonal, which this is, you have to have the mental awareness of which accidentals to modify to create the modulation.
Additionally the voice-leading of step wise motion

Here is the opening of what you hear

So, in bar 5 to make it sound like F (the dominant of Bb) Eb is altered as is the Gb to E and G. In measure 8 you'll see F ascending to Bb uses the melodic minor so you have 5-6-7-1, and in the bass clef it outlines 5-4-3-2-1 of Bb minor, so when we arrive at measure 9 it feels like a return to Bb minor. (here is the 3rd entry of the theme)

Make sense?

 

Fire away

Correct

Well... for that I only have a stupid answer: I often enter notes in Sibelius by using "R" and the up/down arrow as I find that to be the fastest for me personally.
The one thing Sibelius does poorly is handle accidentals, and I should have caught that. Using "R" you can get these unexplained redundant accidentals.

Both the Eb and Db are already covered in the key signature. We all need editors !!!

You must mean the 4th note in the left hand.

That I can actually answer simply: In measure 5 F should feel like a tonic, and in measure 8 the dominant. ( eb, and A natural create the "tonal gravity" back to Bb.)


Sometimes there are a few paths to the top of the mountain, and each way you explain it gets you to the same point.
For example: are you familiar with the baroque version of the melodic minor scale in which the ascending and descending versions are different? That's really all that is happening.

The dip from F to E to F in measure 5 help establish the F as the tonic, and then from measure 6 since it is all descending we get the "natural" minor. (measure 6 has a Db)

If you look at measure 5, and then measure 9 (not 8) that is where you will see the repetition of the "answer" at a new pitch level. (the soprano voice)

Horizontally measure 8 is melodic minor and the vertical implied harmony is of F dominant.

Cool?

Me? I'm not sensei. No, I think sensei is at a gun range in Florida and watching Tucker Carlson at night. Hope he is doing ok.

Often, when I have tried to write detailed explanations, I find I spend so much time having to explain the "disclaimers" that by the time I get to the actual subject I am exhausted.

I always think about how the genre and context can nullify anything you write. For example, in jazz they don't really rely on the changing contour melodic minor scale.
Rather the fact that it has two dominants and two augmented chords creates an ambiguity that jazz explored. It's really, really hard to write about music in words.

I think JS.Bach probably had it right with his instruction books (Art of fugue, Well tempered clavier) just music.

 

Hi!

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I do. This happens not via inserting accidentals, rather redundant ones appear when using "R" for note entry.

I just have not proofread the score closely yet.

Cheers