Gesualdo

Recently, I was asked to write for our conservatorium's chamber orchestra. It was quite a daunting task because I only had around 3 weeks to finish writing it. My teacher told me I had to show them ideas and sketches by the next few days after I was asked.

The specification was to write a concerto grosso for a quartet of soloists and chamber strings. I had an interest in early music at that time, particularly Gesualdo's madrigals and within a few days I had ideas of what I wanted to pursue in the composition.

This piece is a rhapsody-like work of about 13 minutes in a few sections that flows continuously. It is based on the madrigal, Moro lasso, al mio duolo (I die, alas in my suffering) by the Italian composer Don Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1612). I was not interested in deconstructing the madrigal to the point where one can no longer recognise the original madrigal without extensive analysis. Instead, I used phrases and motifs from the madrigal in this piece. Some of the melodies were also xonstructed from the madrigal, which will be heard at the end in almost its original form.

The title, Gesualdo, does not reflect the "story" or intent of the piece but is mere a title that refers to the origin of most of the musical material. The development of this piece finds me eventually abandoning the idea of a concerto grosso, and I treated the solo strings as having different timbres than the tutti strings.

As some people have commented after the performance, it sounds programmatic. There might be some sort of programme to this music (it does sound like programme music), but I don't know what it is.

Score

MP3 of Live performance

Delightful! Original in language, Adamsian in sound... are you familiar with Stravinsky's ballets Orpheus and Apollo?

Didn't get to finish listening as I'm needed at a rehearsal at the moment, but great work!

Absolutely... STUNNING. I loved every single second of it. Your language is so unique here and very well refined. Your harmonic choices were wonderful, in moving from a soaring ultra-sonic tone to almost a ambient white noise feel to a quartal feel back to your starting point. Very well done. very rhapsodic. But, at the same time, i felt it was very well organized.

Beautiful again. :)

It's strange, the score looks Immensly boring, but the actual piece is only boring at certain parts. The majority I actually enjoyed. the harmonic language is comfortably modern.

Very good work.

Yes a very good work. It doesn't break any new ground but rather an interesting synthesis of early Schoenberg (Think Transfigured Night), late Bartok (Concerto For Orchestra the Sixth Quartet) and David Diamond/Copland from the 40's. I'd say stylistically though you most interesting stuff is from the Schoenberg/Bartok veins.

Good deployment of the string choirs and excellent contrast of textures.

Now the one thing you want to work on with your compositional technique - and this is one thing I am working on too - is to work harder to make your use of ostinati more conscious. Sometimes you fall briefly into the Phillip Glass track of just letting the ostinati chug along without it really contributing to the overall dramatic pulse of the work. This happens only for very short segments after the first third but something to guard against. I will say you use ostinati well - which heightens the tendency to get a little complacent.

The return to the recap is wonderful - the textures of fff and ppp to the recall of the Gesualdo vocal recall to an altered more bright sounding less tonally ambiguous statement of the opening material is excellent.

Did you study Transfigured Night? Your opening material and how you recap it is reminiscent of how Schoenberg did so in that piece.

Oddly enough, I don't know any of those pieces well. I mean, of course I know Verkl

I agree with all the good points made above. However I have some small concerns. In the first section of the piece you continually have the four solo strings imitating each other with the same material. This is obviously a reference to Gesualdo's use of polyphony, all well and good, but you would repeat this three or four times in a row with the four voices coming in in exactly the same order each time, which is rather unvaried. A similar point is that I think you overuse the three-quaver-anacrusis figure in this section too. In fact there are several points in this piece where I think you repeat a figure, or two alternating figures, too many times and the music feels for a moment as if it's circling round the same point without moving forward much. At letter K, whilst the new figure in the solo viola is a good contrast to the previous section, you then do a straight repeat of it at the fifth in the first violin. This sounds so much like a fugal exposition that the viola really wants to have some kind of counter-subject rather than stopping. In short; good base material, but in danger of being repeated too much with insufficient variation. However, fine and very playable string writing, good use of the string quartet and orchestra as two ensembles and a collection of individuals (in fact one of the few pieces written for this rich combination, the only others I can recall are Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and Martinu's Sinfonia Concertante).

The last hundred bars or so are very good indeed. And yet...it was only in this section that I got a sense of the original madrigal, the atmosphere and colour and meaning of it. The rest of the time it was just music based around motifs from it, but which didn't really relate to it. I think if one uses a pre-existing piece as the basis of a composition, one should treat it as if setting a text, and think about expressing the original's meaning, albeit in one's own musical language.

Oddly enough, I don't know any of those pieces well. I mean, of course I know Verkl

Hmm interesting, I do have the tendency to overuse/overdo something... To me though, I didn't even think it was the case. Although I do realise by J, I have used too much of the 4 semiquaver motif. But yeah, I think I've made that ornamental motif into a big motif in my piece... Ah well.

Hmm K does sound fugal in a sense, but it's not meant to be a fugue. Somebody told me that it sounded like Britten's Lachrymae, Variation 1... and it's quite surprising how similar it is >.> But anyway, I repeat it a 4th higher each time I think, instead of the usual fugal 5th. I agree that it seems like it needs to go somewhere. This section is the section I'm not quite happy with. I don't really know what to do with it I suppose.

I think I didn't really want to evoke the sense of the original madrigal when I wrote this. Yeah, I probably should have done so, but I didn't. Hmm, probably was way too busy to even care, haha. I was writing two pieces with a really close due date when I wrote this.

i really like this piece and i also like string quartet and the string orchestral . it is a good idea and the musical texture doubt extremely powerful

dark

WOW! Really, really beautiful! :happytears: I don't know what else to say. Just....stunning.

:happy:

Wait, I almost forgot: Why did it end so suddenly?

Yay thanks guys.

I don't think it ends suddenly though. What makes you feel like it ends suddenly? =S