Seven Brothers for cello solo

Hi,

I would like to show you my piece for solo cello. It was specialy composed and performed in James McMillan festival.

Link to youtube :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy52MjHxvRg

Tell me what do you think

Regards

Mantas

Wow, so many interesting techniques in this piece! How did you figure out the double stops with the slides - are they all with open strings or was there another method you used? I would love to hear more about what conceptually drives each of these movements, how they're in contrast with each other and interact with each other. I got the impression that each of them were saying things that were around a similar thematic idea but in different ways, but I couldn't really figure out the form and dialectic behind it (other than intuitively).

It seems clear to me from the title what you are trying to achieve in this piece - seven movements linked by common material. But I don't think that it is entirely successful. For a start, you have too many short phrases in the music which end in a pause or just use the glissando motif, and these phrases are all the same kind of gesture. It's like you are just repeating the same kind of statement throughout the piece, stopping and starting and continually asking the same question. This has the effect of making the music appear to not really move anywhere, to not develop. I think your base material is strong enough to build the piece on but not enough to simply repeat in the way it appears here. In addition, I didn't feel that there was sufficient variation in tempo in the piece, and that as well as being very similar material, all the movements were very free, so there was no contrast provided by having passages in a more strict meter. There were some faster passages in the third movement, but these came too late and were not allowed to develop so their effect was diminished. It's a bit of a shame because the music is very well written for the instrument and you clearly are familiar with the timbral possibilities of the cello, but the piece suffers from a lack of sufficient contrast. It feels more like a collection of over-coherent gestures which are repeated too much than a whole which moves somewhere.