Athenian Pastorale (more from MSND)

This is a followup to my previous post in this thread where I posted the Lullaby from midsummer night's dream. As I explained last time- I'm providing some tracks for the production which is set in ancient Greece (as the text describes). Anyway, this will likely be scenechange music.

AthenianPastorale - Putfile.com

Please, critisize.

I like it a lot! It is a pretty little thing to listen to, but you have so many ideas in one little thing, and it seems like to many things to put into just scene change music.

Some things to say against it- It seems to wander and make sudden changes. It makes me want to tune it out after a little while. I suppose for a scene change that isn't necessarily a bad thing...

ah, well the choice to use it for scene changes was the director's- I'm just giving them music and it's up to them what they do with it.

I'm suprized you say that a lot is happening. It's really just ABA in my mind- and barely a B at all since it's the same material. If anything I felt like I needed a different idea than the first one. Any other opinions?

I really like the mood of that piece, however there are a few issues you should consider:

- writing for harp: I dunno, whether you are familiar with how a harp works but some of the things you have written there aren't really idiomatic for harp. Any chromatic melody movement on a harp should be done very carefully as it probably involves a harp pedal needing to be moved which takes some time, you should check your harp part if the harp pedaling can be done as you have written it. Also note repetition is not such a good idea on harp unless you can make sure the note is being repeated on different strings. If the repetition will be played on the same string, the player will have to stop the swinging string for a fraction of a second in order to play it again which will give you not a very nice sound and gap in your melody flow

- thematic material: a) rhythmical: almost exact repetition of a phrase two times (in your A part) is generally not a good idea, one repetition is ok, a second repetition will quickly feel like "yeah, i've heard it now, move on!" maybe you can vary the rhythm a bit on the second repeat. b) melodic direction: I think that's one of the weakest point here: I often have the feeling that your melody doesn't neccessarily have to go the way it does, especially in part B, there's rarely a point where it feels like "yeah, it has to go exactly that way now to sound logical!" for me. The main problem is that you throw in a lot of melody notes there that don't indicate a melodic direction, you jump around alot which is generally hard to identify as a plausible melody. There's a rule from old counterpoint times which says to compensate a jump in melody by a step in the opposite direction afterwards. As there are several examples that work well and don't follow that rule, it's generally not too bad to have that rule in the back of your mind when working.

- rhythmical dramaturgy: I have the feeling that you want to create a kinda soaring feel with that tune. I think it's rhythmically too static for that. Your melody keeps on emphasizing the rhythmically heavy counts in the bars, you hit almost every 1 which produces a very static feel. Maybe think of leaving some out, moving the melody to some "off-beat-moments" from time to time. A good way of not making a melody too static is to tie notes over a barline. Maybe you want to try fiddling around a bit there.

- mix: the harp in your mix is waaaaaaay too loud. In a real orchestral situation you would never be able to reproduce a balancing like that. If you have the feeling the harp is too soft compared to the rest, you should rather try to fix it by changing the orchestration rather than mixing it unrealistically.

Hope that helps a bit

All the best

Robin

Hey, thanks for the pointers. I wont try to defend my harp part- I'm not suprized to hear that it's not practicle and it's to loud. I would have liked to spend more time on it- learning how the instrument really works but alas I needed to get the peice done. I will keep the things you said in mind for next time though.

Thanks for the melodic pointers too- listening to the peice again with those things in mind I can see what you mean.