Flute Quintet

My first music post at YC!

It's actually a piece for 4 flutes and piccolo.

There can never be enough flute repertoire!

Dirty score pdf: Ensemble.pdf - File Shared from Box.net - Free Online File Storage

midi: Ensemble.MID - File Shared from Box.net - Free Online File Storage

Enjoy! Any and all feedback appreciated. Title suggestions welcome too!

:D

Hey

I liked this piece, well done :) Have you ever played the N64 game Banjo-Kazooie? Some of the broken chords sound very similar (and also some of the harmony) - coupled with the midi sounds I couldn't help but notice :)

Might I suggest perhaps swapping the third and fourth flutes for an Alto Flute and a Bass Flute? I wrote a quintet similar to this for my GCSE music composition a few years ago and I found it useful to have some instruments with a lower range to contrast the flute and the piccolo in particular.

Good job :thumbsup:

Oscar

haha thanks :D

Please excuse that horrible MIDI...I couldn't get the Finale GPO playback to save as an mp3.

I kept it as four regular flutes because if this were to ever be performed, 4 flutes and a piccolo is just so much less of an 'ordeal.' I don't know anyone with an alto or bass flute.

I would absolutely love it with alto and bass, though!

I really liked this, it was different than what I'm used to hearing. Creative way of using flutes together, and bravo for the fun harmonies and quirky rhtyhms

I couldn't help but notice the huge lack of counterpoint though. Throughout most of the piece you have everything playing together. Vary it up! I think it would make it much more exciting!

Great job though, it's one of the few pieces that I give more than a few listens to. :)

Vince

Going on what thatguy said, I found two places that'd be really good to create some light sense of counterpoint that stuck out to me. At measure 11, you have a beat of notes, and rests, notes, rests, notes, rests. I'd suggest have for instance on the strong beats have your picc. and flute 1 (+maybe flute 2) do what they are doing. Then on the weak beats, where you have all rests now, take that phrase that the upper flutes played on the first beat, and put it in the lower flutes in an inverted form. Know what I mean? I think it'd make a nice change from what you have.

45, exact same thing.

56, that's the same thing, but I'd leave that one as is, actually.

Obviously you didn't mean this as a serious piece, which is all well and good. Serious music often bores me. :P I loved it! It was sufficiently quirky and your score was actually very neat I thought. I liked the main material you used, it was very simple and effective - alternating between chords in the middle of arpeggio, which is something I've played around with on the piano but never actually wrote into anything. It can be rather impressive if you do it quite fast with the pedal down - people don't realise it's not actually that hard to execute. Good job with breaking up the notes between the flutes. I'd be concerned that the flutes and picc. when sharing the arpeggio might be a little bit too different in tone colour, that the picc. would stand out. I also thought the picc part was rather static, it played the same role throughout, which is okay, but maybe you hadn't thought about that. Also, I'd be wary about having the picc. and flute doubling those occasional sustained notes here and there. My concern is of intonation. I've heard picc.-flute unison lines go both excellent and horrible. That is... excellent in professional recordings and horrible in real life! :laugh:

Very nice writing, can't wait to hear some more of your stuff, you seem very competent at chamber writing, I'd like to see what else you can do. :happy:

Sounds interesting. :)

Very enjoyable. It reminded to me Gustav Holst's compositions :D Good job!

Thanks for listening everyone :D

@ thatguy and Jamesy...I know there's already kind of a lot going on in this piece. I'm scared if I add counterpoint, it'll become busy in a negative way.

But I'll work on it!! :D

It reminds me of something from Star Wars. I like it.

Hello :)

This sounds very 1930's ... and very original in that sense!

I loved the antiphonalism that you employed by trading the arpeggiated line through all flute parts and the piccolo. The harmony was very interesting, and fresh to my ears. However, you pretty much used the same chord movement in the same key through the whole piece, so it got boring near the end. Luckily, the piece ended just as I was about to lose interest.

Another thing with the harmony is that in parts it was very thick and clear, but in other parts, the voicing was very sparse and it was hard to distinguish what the harmony actually was. When this technique of textural manipulation is used correctly, it can be to great effect. However, I felt like you used it a little too much. That in conjunction with the same chord progression kind of made the harmony a little less effective than it should have been, I feel. Especially since music written in this tradition traditionally tends to have less counterpoint but richer harmony.

So yes, for the length, it was a fun little piece to listen to :)

EDIT: James pointed out some good stuff about timbre... the flute to piccolo transition might be a little rough because of the timbre differences in that range. Intonation shouldn't be an issue, I believe, given at least high school level players.

Thanks Bretterfly and Ananth :D

I think the flute and picc timbre or texture difference can be easily fixed. It's easy to make the flute sound a lot thinner at the top of it's range, and it's not quite as easy but still not hard to make the picc sound more full at the bottom of its range, so when the melody goes back and forth between them, there shouldn't be a huge difference.

And I'll definitely be working on those harmonies!

I'm about to start working this into a 3 or 4 movement little suite, so that will be my next few projects. :D

Obviously you didn't mean this as a serious piece, (...)

huh? Like serious music cant be funny or sound like gameboys; like a scherzo can't be serieous?