Above the Tempest

Okay, so some of you may remember this piece from a year or so ago when I was trying to write something in Sonata-Allegro form. That project, died. A month ago I revisited this piece and decided to finish it. The first two minutes, roughly, are the old piece; the latter half is new. When I first started writing this, my goal was to take one idea and just expound on that without inserting too many new ideas. I did my best to keep with that goal. Thanks for any comments. I regret not being more involved with the forum, been kind of busy. Thanks in advance.

Above the Tempest

Nice job, this works well for the orchestra and I love the opening horn lines. However, the counterpoint left me wanting. Middle section aside, it doesn't always feel consistent. Why did you use harmonics in the double bass on pages 5-6? If you bring in an idea or timbre like that, it might be nice to have it show up somewhere else too.

The harmonics were more for timbre I suppose; I wanted a little more support on that line, and harmonics, I feel, can provide that without being to intrusive. I started this before I had any knowledge of counterpoint, and didn't think about it at all :D when revisiting this piece, so it being lacking is completely well grounded. I appreciate you thinking it worked with the orchestra because this is really one of my first real tries at a larger ensemble.

Thanks for listening and commenting!

Hello!

I like this piece a lot. A really beautiful work.

I also like how in some spots you throw something a bit more dissonant and completely unexpected out there. Nice job on that ;)

I agree that the harmonics in the bass should come back.

Heckel

I also like how in some spots you throw something a bit more dissonant and completely unexpected out there. Nice job on that ;)

To me, the relatively rare dissonances in this piece were a bit too unexpected. Just when I was getting into the modal, contrapuntal atmosphere of the piece, something threw me out again. If you de want this effect, try to be a bit more subtle, it now sounded rather like I was too lazy to fix a mistake in my own counterpoint. Don't get me wrong here, I do like to be reminded that I'm in the 21st century. Take, for instance,

by Messiaen. It sounds very archaic, but underneath that, you can hear that it could only have been written after the onset of musical modernism.

Thanks a bunch, both of you.

Some of the dissonance was intentional, and some of it could have began as errors on my part; I would agree that subtlty could be improved. I think part of what happened was that I have been working around this piece for some time, so nothing in it suprises me. I know what to expect. Everything, to my ear, fits what I was trying to do, so, again, I think it might come back to it being an issue of being more subtle. And there could very well just be blatant errors in counterpoint.

I thank you both for listening and commenting. I have plenty of things to learn from this piece.

By the way, the Messiaen is in my top 3 favorite Choir pieces