O Espelho

"O Espelho" was composed in October 2009. In this piece I used only four pitch classes: C, Eb, F, Bb (035A). Also I used a technique called palindrome, where the second half of the song is the first played retrogradely. In instrumentation, instead of two violins, a viola and a cello, I made a quartet with two violins and two cellos, to further emphasize the symmetry. The choice of which pitch classes to use was also based on symmetry.

O Espelho

Nice job, daniluna :)

--Interesting how you used the limited pitches to create such variety in the piece: good articulation and techniques help with this, and you performed very well with what you had to bring the piece to life ;)

--I'm not crazy about the symmetry of the piece, frankly: you already have an "interesting" concept, why water/limit it down with yet another prerequisite? The symmetry of the piece doesn't give that "passing through the looking glass" feeling that it'd be good for, because of the harsh, literal sound of the piece.

Thanks for sharing, I really enjoyed this! The meticulous attention to detail with limited pitches, coupled with my not-so-much fondness for the symmetry part, makes me give this an 7.5/10...but I'll round up :thumbsup:

Welcome to Young Composers, I hope you enjoy the site! Feel free to participate in the other forums and offer your thoughts and/or criticisms on others' pieces :D

daniluna,

I like your idea and feel that you really could've took this an entirely different means than what you did here in this work. The idea of symmetry in music is nothing new. In fact, there have been many independent and widely used forms that owe their creation on the idea that you attempted to do in this work. My one complaint on this however, is that there really isn't much here besides that. Your material is very sparse - and I feel that that largely is detrimental to what you were attempting to achieve with this. I noticed that you utilized various string techniques to achieve interest here (pizz, gliss. etc.). While these do provide more interest - they don't provide enough. That's my opinion though. I think for a minimalistic piece, though, it does well.

Hi, indeed a welcome here :)

I liked the idea of your PCset, the quartal harmony behind it is appealing. But then, in the presentation of the set I do not understand why the Eb seems missing in the chord in ms3. The 2nd cello could have easily taken that (moving from C to Bb in ms 2, makes the step from F to Eb almost logic?)

But then, and I hope this is the reason, the music would have become a bit more rational, maybe too logic, and this is the subjective choice of the composer ;)

Have a good time here!

Thanks for the tips. I confess that I do not like this kind of symmetry. This piece was just an exercise in composition and these were the rules imposed by my teacher.

It really was very difficult to make using just four notes, and as jawoodruff noted, one of the solutions I found were the different techniques like pizzicati and glissandi.

Jrcramer, why Eb needs to appear in bar 3? The second is that the cello is just a "scale" upward (within the notes I'm using: C, Eb, F, Bb.

Thanks very mutch. I'll think what you said.