Untitled Work for Orchestra

I'm new to this website, so I hope I'm doing this correctly. :blush:

I'm Patrick, and I've been taking private piano lessons for 9 years,

and I've been playing trumpet for 6 years.

My piano teacher encouraged me to compose often,

but as a kid, I never took it very seriously.

I started taking composition more seriously within the last few years.

This is my first piece for orchestra.

It's about 6 1/2 minutes.

This was intended to be a tone poem, of sorts.

The idea I had in my head while composing this

was a collection of episodic moments about

a rainstorm and the things occuring within it.

The first half is in Bb Major, and is meant to sound rather frantic,

starting with some pizzicato strings on a seventh chord.

It builds up to a quiet climax,

before fading into the second half in g minor.

The second half is meant to have a more solemn and contemplative tone,

building up to a thunderous climax, before ending abuptly

with a recapitulation of the beginning.

When I compose, I generally get the bulk of it written down in about a week,

and then spend months reworking sections and working on details.

I'm pretty happy with most of it,

but I think a few parts still have a rather amateur sound to them,

mainly in the major section.

Any thoughtful critique would be much appreciated!

Title ideas would also be appreciated!

[Note:

I notated the score in Finale Printmusic,

so the recording is nowhere near perfect.

The strings sound really synthesized, as does the bass drum.

There were some percussion sounds I could not achieve accurately,

so I left them out, but wrote them manually into the score.

It also chose to ignore a few of my dynamics in the percussion section,

especially on cymbal swells.

Take this into account when listening to it. :blush:]

[Note #2:

I could not get YC to upload my file,

so I posted it onto Webs.com.

I suppose that is rather sketchy.

Sorry!]

http://www.pbent101music.webs.com/rain,%20orch.mp3

I liked it, there was some parts where I lost interest, but overall it's really good, I would love to hear this live.

Score = my reason to listen to it.

Thus, PDF Score please!

pbent

Welcome to YC.

This music reminded me of a friend and I think it would help you to listen to a little of his music.

This is his site

The Music of David Sosnowski

Scroll down to you find his piece called Quarks. The opening of your piece, made me think of David. Of course his other pieces are great too.

You have a lot of nice ideas in this piece. It is still a little rough around the edges and of course better samples would help a lot.

If you want more people here to comment on your music, it always helps to comment on some of theirs. Some will return the favor, (as it should be) while others are either too busy or too lame to take the few seconds required to type in a response. In time you will learn who will return the favor and who will not.

Hope that helps

Ron

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Sounds pretty good! I'm sorry if my analysis and critiques here sound really amateurish and uneducated. I don't really have much solid musical training, so all I can really comment on is what I hear and not so much music theory.

What I like most about this piece is the way it bounces between different voices during the more quiet parts. The conversation held between the woodwinds and the brass is very effective. It's got a nice melodic feel to it as well.

This might just be my own personal tastes coming out, but I would have liked to have heard the strings take a bigger role over all. There are places (towards the middle I think, after the first climax with the brass) where I feel like a nice string melody would have made the piece a bit less repetitive in terms of tonal color. My ears get a little tired of hearing the trumpets play throughout most of the song. In general, I somehow don't really feel like the trumpet is well suited to describing rain, unless maybe you're going for something stormy.

Of course, these are all just my opinions and I certainly don't claim to be any sort of musical expert. I enjoyed listening to this. Keep it up!