'Tok (for Flute, Vibraphone and Harp)

Well this is the first composition (completed anyway) I have uploaded here. I submitted this at Uni on Monday for a piece I had to write using harmonic fields and unison notes.

On reflection, I am not sure if it entirely fits this but when I wrote it I was in the midsts of computer problems and a chest infection and so my lecture notes made no sense but I do like the piece generally.

Just the audio for the moment - score to come.

'Tok @ ACIDplanet

Cool piece, I quite liked where it's headed. Are you planning on expanding it in any way?

In the shoutbox you mentioned using a Bartok scale, and I'm curious as to what that is It's a cool sound, and you create some very cool textures with the flute floating on top, I especially liked the really low harp near the beginning.

Keep it up, and thanks for sharing!!

Originally Posted by robinjessome

Cool piece, I quite liked where it's headed. Are you planning on expanding it in any way?

In the shoutbox you mentioned using a Bartok scale, and I'm curious as to what that is It's a cool sound, and you create some very cool textures with the flute floating on top, I especially liked the really low harp near the beginning.

Keep it up, and thanks for sharing!!

Thank you.

I don't really have any plans to extend it. If it was something that was to be more than just an exercise then maybe but as it stands I have a lot of compositional plans and coursework in motion already.

The Bartok scale I mention is something I came across through Sibelius. There is a plug in which you can use to quickly put, for example, all the major scales into a score. I was bored and looking for something a little different and so had Sibelius create all the altered scales - Bartok was on of the them.

The scale I used uses the notes of

Cb, Db, Eb, F, Gb, Ab, Bbb, CB.

The main problem with the audio is that the chords in the harp would be played arp as I haven't made it non arp. So the delay between the first note of the chord and the second isn't there.

I finally found a program which will turn .sib into .pdf except at present all I can get is the score up-side down . So I hope to get the score up soon.

Originally Posted by raining_hail

I don't really have any plans to extend it. If it was something that was to be more than just an exercise then maybe but as it stands I have a lot of compositional plans and coursework in motion already.

Fair enough, I think there's definitely stuff worth exploring further. Someday.

Originally Posted by raining_hail

The Bartok scale ...

The scale I used uses the notes of

Cb, Db, Eb, F, Gb, Ab, Bbb, CB.

Neat.... In jazz terms it's a lydian-dominant scale. ...Same thing. An interesting sound nonetheless.

The score looks pretty good. I'd move the bottom stanzas up about an inch from the bottom margin - you might lost part of them when printing. And I have NO CLUE about harp - something I've been meaning to explore.

Originally Posted by robinjessome

Fair enough, I think there's definitely stuff worth exploring further. Someday.

I suppose there is but like I say it was just a quick exercise done for coursework. If I hadn't been ill, I might have made it slightly longer (the required duration was 1-2 mins.

Originally Posted by robinjessome

The score looks pretty good. I'd move the bottom stanzas up about an inch from the bottom margin - you might lost part of them when printing. And I have NO CLUE about harp - something I've been meaning to explore.

The score actually printes out ok, it is a bit of a large gap but I spent an hour just to get it looking like that (illness made my brain melt) so I didn't want to spend more time on its layout when it looked fine for submission purposes.

I just received my composition back. I received a B2 which translated means a mid-B at 65%. 5% away from an A.

I am a little disappointed to be honest as I would have liked a 70+ to kick start the term and to make up for the terrible mark which the one I have just handed in is going to be (it will be a catastrophe!)

He praised the flute part, said I made effective use of unisons to tie the melody to the underlying harmony. However he felt I could have gone further to using the melody to create my harmony including an example of how I could do. He also stated that Cb is a theoretical key and not one to write real music in and that the harp is only tuned in such a way as to make it more tuneable into other keys.

So it has its good parts and bad. I am sort of glad that he liked the flute melody because for once this actually showed an aspect of my preferred compositional style. I like working with melodies like this. I don't always have a melody formed like this but its something I was introduced to by a former lecturer and it sort of stuck with me.

raining_hail, hi.

I liked a lot what you did here! The flutework was beautiful and haunting.

And this shouts for expanding it. With some more harmony in the other instruments. (by the way, as is the piece, both a vibraphone and a harp are a bit too much, I think).

Originally Posted by manossg

raining_hail, hi.

I liked a lot what you did here! The flutework was beautiful and haunting.

And this shouts for expanding it. With some more harmony in the other instruments. (by the way, as is the piece, both a vibraphone and a harp are a bit too much, I think).

Thanks for your comments.

I didn't have a choice about the instrumentation .. that was set down by the lecturer.

I agree it could possibly be expanded and I have several ideas in which I possibly could. However, my workload at present is so piled up I am not going to get to work on any of my own projects for a month or so that by the time I do get to do some work on them. By which time I'll have forgotten or be inspired to write something else.