|
Wow, I'm glad I clicked on the link for this piece. It's great! I loved every minute of it. The inventive rhythms and instrumental settings keep up a constant drive and the slow passages come just at the right moments. I find the length good too.
It works rather well harmonically, but with time it seems a bit too minor-third-heavy. Diminished chords are awesome, but after a while my head starts to "ring" with this chord and desire something harmonically new. It's quite a bit like Satie's "Véxations" in this regard, only that Satie deliberately wants to avoid any feeling of "drive" or development, an idea which it doesn't seem you strived for. The theme also is -very- omnipresent. It's not that it gets boring - the rhythmic drive and the use of the instruments keep it going well - but after a while I still wished for a little bit more variation in the intervallic constellation. How about stretching the theme at one point, for example, and maybe turn those minor thirds into fourths, or even sevenths, creating really large jumps? The theme is striking enough that it would still be recognizable, but it would sound completely new and "excessive", which I think would fit very well within that style.
It would even be interesting to consider a version where the intervals of the theme change more and more every time it appears, slowly drifting off into "distortion", but that may be a little bit over the top and too far from your (really good) composition. (I just can't help going on the "what would I do" track when reviewing other people's pieces, sorry for that.)
Concerning double-sharps, enharmonic changes etc.: It is true that in several passages some things are enharmonically written strangely, in a way that doesn't seem to make much sense for voice-leading. Take bar 40 for example: In the Violins it would seem much more logical to write the fb's as e's, and in the Violas the db's as c#'s, so you get lines that move in minor seconds instead of augmented unisons. If you heard such a phrase I'm sure most people would hear it as minor seconds and not as augmented unisons too. The Cellos in the second half of this bar have this very weird line that is acoustically just "C-major" but which is written very strangely, without any apparent reason in voice-leading. Writing this bar as f, ab, f, a, b, c, c, b, c, d, e would make a lot more sense. The same applies to many other parts, like all the parts surrounding this one in the Violins and Violas.
I know that one often encounters enharmonic problems when writing diminished chords, even more so diminished 7th chords, but in cases like this, where the chords don't fulfill a specific harmonic function and you're writing for individual voices/parts (and not a piano, for example) I'd always go for clear, readable lines, and not worry to much about the vertical structure of the chords. I.e. write all notes enharmonically in such a way that the line of this instrument makes most sense, regardless how the notes of the other instruments are written. (Within reasonable limits of course: Constantly all sharps in one instrument and all flats in another may be confusing for the conductor with time. But I'd still rather confuse the conductor when it comes to pitches than the musicians, who actually have to play them.)
There are some examples where you heavily used "enharmonically uncommon" notes, where it makes a lot of sense too. Bar 72 for example may seem to be notated unnecessarily complicated at first, but all those sharps and double-sharps make sense for that line. Even though I personally might disregard "proper" voice-leading in such a situation and enharmonically simplify some of these notes. But your way of writing this passage is certainly "correct". (In some other parts, where your notation actually seems "incorrect" I get the impression that it comes from some copy-and-pasting and transposing. Is that so? Nothing wrong with that in the least, but I'd always check whether everything is well written enharmonically after transposing something.)
|