Prelude for Chamber Orchestra

Hello everyone,

This the first time that I am posting one of my compositions up on this website. I hope that you all enjoy my work and I plan to be posting more of it in the near future.

For this particular piece, Prelude, I used a bit of set theory. I started with the hexachord, E, F, G, A#, B, C# (0,1,3,6,7,9) and it’s complement and transposed inversion, A, C, D, Eb, F#, G# (5, 8, t, e, 2, 4), being used in imitative counterpoint. This can be heard between the viola and cello near the middle of the piece.

Next, I used the viola melody as the main theme of the piece which is later transposed up a tritone and other intervals. There’s a bridge between these parts which is ACTUALLY DIATONIC, but has no motivic material and a rather different mood than the rest of the piece.

Ok so that was my rant for those who might be interested… All comments are appreciated.

John Misciagno ? Prelude for Chamber Orchestra ? Free listening at Last.fm

Prelude PDF.pdf

I'm probably posting too much tonight but listened to a few pieces.

Yours was fantastic. It gives me something to measure up to.

How do you compose?

Wow thank you. That means a lot.

I'm actually a rather confused composer and everything that I write seems to be a different style with a different technique. I'm always saying, "Oh I'm never gonna write like that again". haha

For this piece, I made it a point to focus on rhythm more than I usually do, so I used 3-2polyrhythms throughout the piece. The middle section is in 7/8 time because I wanted it to be more loosely-knit than the rest of the piece. As for the melody and harmony, I haven't been writing diatonically lately; either I use a synthetic scale (as I did in this piece) or write atonally, but not 12-tone. I always write the melody first because I feel that too much contemporary music ignores that particular aspect of music. Then those little diatonic parts where the chords sort of "morph" into each other were written after I heard it in my head, and then typed it into Finale with trial and error. That happens enough in my music, but I could never write a whole piece like that.

So basically, I use different techniques depending on what kind of genre or emotion that I'm going for.

I loved the introduction, and i thought u lead it perfectly into bar 9 where the pizz bass comes in. The bass rhythm was interesting and went perfectly with the melody moving above it.

Bar 28 into the main theme of the piece was great, and again you use interesting rhythms in the 2nd violins, instead of just a boring "same old, same old" accompaniment. Well done!

Overall i loved the piece, the intensity of the section that keeps occuring throughout never stops getting old. The only thing i would say is that the adagio section did seem a bit sluggish for me, but that might just be my opinion!

Good work, throughly enjoyed it!