September 18, 200718 yr Hi all, It's been quite a while since I've posted here, especially now that I've started busy college life! Through the late summer I wrote an Ave Maria, and have just recently finished all of the notation in Finale. I'm hoping to perform the piece at the semi-annual Composers Forum concert that we have at my school. I would love any feedback on the piece, especially before I start putting an ensemble together to learn it. You can view the sheet music at http://www.jsaund.net/rt/music/ave_maria.pdf and listen to a MIDI recording at http://www.jsaund.net/rt/music/ave_maria.mp3 Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! ~Jason
September 19, 200718 yr impressive score. beautiful and inspiring! great handling of masses of sound and textures, delicate atmospheric effects, and very effective management of the flow for climaxes in good places. a piece of high level, of course, to be heard many times. my regards!:laugh:
September 20, 200718 yr Very, very beautiful. The only thing that might pose problems with this piece is the very slow tempo - you'd have to find a really good choir with trained voices to keep it from losing its brillance after the first few measures. It's quite difficult to sing sustained notes over such a long period of time without exhausting one's voice, and if this happens, you'll hear the results in the quality of the sound (which would be a great pity especially for this piece which makes use of sound textures so heavily). My suggestion would be to let the choirmaster pick the slowest tempo his choir still feels comfortable with for the performance. This is a performance issue, but setting that aside: Well done. :)
September 20, 200718 yr Beautiful! Ahh great interpretation of the Mass texts, I loved it. You used some great harmonies and used the chior very well. Impressive, and really enjoyable. :)
September 21, 200718 yr Author Thanks everyone for the comments! Lizard, you're right that the tempo might be a bit slow, but I'll move it in some places during a live performance. As of right now, I'm putting together an ensemble at my college to sing the piece at a composers' concert on December 8th, so hopefully I will have a live recording to upload shortly after!
September 22, 200718 yr This is definitely one of the most beautiful settings of the Ave Maria text that I've heard, and I'd be very excited to hear a live performance when you have it! I love the slightly misleading chord progressions that make this piece so beautiful and mysterious.
September 26, 200718 yr Beautiful stuff, very nice, I enjoyed it very much, thanks for sharing. :D 2 questions: 1. Are you majored in composition? 2. Did you compose this in finale? Cheers, James
September 26, 200718 yr Author Thanks tenor10 and deathraider! James, I'm not a composition major (rather Choral music ed), but I will be taking composition courses this year. The music was not originally composed in Finale, but that's what I used to produce the sheet music. The original instrumental recording was done in Apple Garageband.
September 27, 200718 yr Lovely piece, as stated from everybody above. You did this on Garageband :horrified: I used Pro Logic before, but I never seemed to get such a nice sound quality before :sweat:
