Cello Sextet

Here is my Cello Sextet. I wrote this composition for the cello ensemble at my school, a very accomplished ensemble. I've showed this piece to my private composition instructor and another professional/university composer. Most of their reviews have been positive, but I'd like to see what the composers on this website think!

First of all, welcome to the forum!

About the piece, I found it fairly boring, but that may just be because this is not my preferred ensemble (I'm bored by Apocalyptica, too). I also think that this could be truncated to include five or perhaps only four cellos. This piece doesn't seem interesting enough in terms of harmony or form to lack timbral variance, but a wider variety of instruments may reduce the novelty you might be aiming at with a cello sextet. However, this may work better live, as the cellists could articulate to make different sounds, rather than just six channels of midi track 42.

Well, unfortunately a midi cannot effectively play timbral changes, especially when you are writing for more than one of the same instrument, but I will have an instrumental recording of the work by mid May and I will post it. Also, the harmonic and melodic changes are much more pronounced with real performers because Sibelius does not really recognize the individual importance of certain musical lines.

Yeah, I figure that this will sound thousands of times better when played live. For now, you might try to just use different amounts of reverb on each track or something to accentuate certain lines.

Also, if you have a nice sound library, you can just export an mp3 of the score and post that on a website like Soundclick and link it here. Otherwise, you could record each track individually and use a freeware program like Audacity to add different effects to each.