The Doors of My Mind

Here's a new piece of mine. Or rather, a piece I started two months ago and just finished recently. The aim here was to do a sweep across the entire palette and dynamic range, as well as having a simple form and a simple rhythmic motif while keeping it interesting.



I hope it doesn't take as long next time. What I've learned during this period is that limitations are awesome, especially when I tried them and wrote A Sea of Stars in 2 days. For this piece, I started with a blank page and the first thing I came up was the rhythmic motif. I wrote it on a piano and then it was more or less: "Huh, where the fuck do I go now?". I think I'm gonna stick to the limitations approach until I build a vocabulary big enough that it all becomes one and the same.

Any commentary and advice would be very much welcome.

EDIT: Lossless here

 

Thanks, Doug!

Solid advice. I do in fact have an idea for it. Will probably start tomorrow.

What a master that guy was. And Petrucci has the score, of course.

I will try!

It's been a while since I got a good wigging. This feels like a proper "trainwrecky" piece Mike could go to town on, so I might send this to Unleashed . Although maybe it's a bit too long.

 

Thanks!

Hah, this is your first post. We don't bite

Wow, thank you for all the kind words!

More than anything I'd like to make a living out of music. I know that specializing only in one branch is a huge long shot so I'm trying to become prominent in all of them; a one stop shop, if you will. I'd love to write for media. I've done smaller gigs (like radio jingles, short loopey underscores for podcasts) and these were a lot of fun. I'm probably gonna try and get some media gigs soon (gotta get a website up).

As for writing for concert, I'd love to say that I'm able to do that as well one day

 

I initially wrote the rhythmic motif. Then I wrote the melody. I was then just playing around with the melody, coming up with different harmonizations and versions. I wrote the finale version (just chords and melody). Then I wrote everything in between. I aimed for this piece to be around 4 minutes, and to have at least one pass of the B side, so that's how I decided on the structure. I think it's important to have an idea of what your structure should be, if not at least a blurry picture of it. Fully planning it out from the start could be ungrateful, though, as I never know where composition will take me. I usually write a melody, play around with it, write different variations, then think about what do I want to do with the piece, and decide my rough structure based on that. I can often imagine how it ends and once the finish line is in sight, it's not as scary anymore.

Here's the piano version. This is the final version of that sketch. Beside harmony not being complete throughout the piece, It's missing the buildup/bridge and the finale lacks all the arpeggios and counterpoint. I have a hard time really expressing myself on a piano in a way that comes across clear to someone else. I'm sure you can hear everything I meant now that you've heard the mockup first; the other way around would've been a completely different story.

However, as I was writing it, the whole final sound was already clear in my head, I just had to go through orchestration to figure out exactly what it all was. So practicing orchestration on all fronts was another reason to go through the entire palette.

I knew I was starting with solo piano which would then get colored with mallets and/or harp. I changed mallets dynamics/overall color every 8 or 16 bars. I also knew that the first melody statement was in strings. Initially just first chairs, then the sections behind them became louder for every part of the melody, and horns coming in for the fourth part.

For the tingly upper runs it was obvious what it was, there was no question about that.

So now we've heard strings, a short horn line, running woodwinds with low string pizz - what's gonna take our next melody pass? What with the range I played it in, brass was an easy and obvious choice here. Also during composition I felt I could start twisting the melody just slightly here. Then came the B side and I knew I wanted to go to forte here at the point between A and B. I just followed the ranges. I kept changing the focus between instruments/sections here a lot, as I wrote this part in a call and response way. I also paid a lot of attention to rhythm dynamics, keeping the rhythm present and clear all the time, while still changing the rhythm colors along with the melody.

The bridge/buildup was what I did at the very end. I kept making it more complicated than it had to be. I did a few versions, none of which ultimately worked. Then I just did the most simple thing I could imagine and I liked it. The finale is just your FF finale. Hits every 4 bars, low instruments keeping the backbone of rhythm, opposite arpeggios for cellos and bassoons, taikos along the counterlines. Horns, violins, flutes and then trumpets playing the melody, everything else doing either harmony or counterpoint (violas doing both).

 

I agree with every one of your points, especially now that it's been some time since I wrote and produced this piece. I wrote in previous replies that I purposely bit off more than I could chew with this piece in order to see where will I end up. But yeah, overall it's a flawed piece.

I don't know where would I begin with the reparations (probably because it's still more than I can chew) and I feel like it's just easier to go and write a new piece, applying all that I've learned here and being careful not to fall into the traps I've fallen here.

Thanks for the listen and commentary!