Trio : Crash : Dream

Trio : Crash : Dream

A class assignment, for horn, violin, and bass clarinet.

In this piece, I play with narrative time. The end of the piece arrives first, followed by a period of silence, which in effect rewinds time. Then the ending is explained by the development section, before it is repeated in variation at the actual end.

Any of you people who think serialism is necessarily dissonant? Think again! This piece operates off of a twelve-tone row. In the first development section, each instrument takes one note of the row at a time in a set order. In the second, they each take two, and the order reverses each time they go through. In the third, they take three, and the order is free. Then the fast section is "micropolyphony." Each instrument plays the row starting at a different point in different tempos (numerated by different tuplet values.) Then I go into a brief aleatoric segment before the end comes back.

I can't say how successful you were with the technicalities of the thing, but I can say that I enjoyed listening to this; it was really interesting!

You really have a good grasp of harmonics and such so it makes for fascinating listening; the lingering sounds and the interactions between the pitches are very cool indeed. The silence at the beginning seemed a bit too long for my tastes. I understand the building of tension, but that makes me think that there's something wrong with the performance; maybe it's just me though.

Overall though, I thought the piece was excellent and the ensemble makes for some great harmonic interactions, I hope the piece is successful!

Since composing with a tone-row is a rather harmonically constrained technique, I generally look for rhythmic interest when listening to such pieces. Thus I felt the most interesting parts were around 2:40, and 3:17. The other parts of the piece were perhaps the modernist equivalent of playing the individual notes of a diatonic chord or scale and allowing them to linger. Pleasant, but perhaps not all that interesting. When I listen to music I need something for my ear to grab onto. A tone row, on its own, is a difficult thing to grab onto because nothing appears to the ear to be "anchored" in anything. A tone row combined with interesting rhythms however makes it much easier for the ear to comprehend.

Still, I find the technique of serialism far too constrained to produce truly interesting music. Perhaps try writing a freer atonal (I've always liked the term: pantonal, better ) work and put an emphasis on rhythm.

Take everything I say with a grain of salt however, I only feel somewhat qualified to comment on actual written out compositions. I rarely toil over notating my own work, it is all improvised, though often it sounds composed (recurring material, form, etc all appear spontaneously within my improvisations). Furthermore my only training by a classical professional is in piano playing, so I'm not really qualified to make comments about music beyond that which I know intuitively or from what little I've read. Still, I hope perhaps you found my comments useful!

Hey, could I get some COMMENTS on this piece please?

I

I really didn't get any sense of form, or structure. The piece was ok, and I really liked some of the harmonies created by use of the 12-tone system that you had. But the flow of the piece seemed rather random. If I were to suggest anything to add to the piece, it would be some sort of 'bridge', or 'chorus', some repeating motif, something to tie the piece together. As it is now, it isn't really cohesive, to my ears.

Good work, though! It's good to have real live performers, right?

Any chance of hearing it without signing up to something?

Any chance of hearing it without signing up to something?

Also posted this response in the other topic:

You can stream it without signing up. If you try downloading it, you have to sign up.

Interesting piece. I like your toying with narrative time, its like the musical form of Finnegans Wake. Your harmonies are nice too. This is certainly a counterexample to the silly claim that all serial music is bad. However, I think this pieces seems a bit dry and empty at times. Playing with silence is a perfectly good idea, but I feel like this piece suffers a little bit from being static. You have many beutiful sonorites throughout, but the disconnect between them really breaks any kind of tension and release they could create. Perhaps through usage of more extremes of register (low bass clarinet drones are a personal favorite), dynamics, and tempo you could add some drama to this.