Floating on the Breath of Time

This is a short orchestral work based on the second movement of a piece for guitar and shakuhachi, which can be found here:

http://forum.youngcomposers.com/t25430/haiku/page__pid__343449__st__0entry343449

The recording is a reading session, so it's the first time the orchestra saw the music. The audio quality isn't great (sorry about the clipping) because I only had a cheap .mp3 player to record with, but it's something. Presented in glorious mono.

Floating on the Breath of Time

Wow, this is amazing! I wish I had an orchestra available to read my works - imagine all that one can learn from that experience. Beautiful work here!

Thanks! The experience was amazing because not only did I get a reading of the piece, but I was also conducting. It was my first time conducting a large ensemble so it was a little nerve-wrecking, but luckily the players were very kind and encouraging. It's amazing how a decent orchestra responds to the size of your gestures; I certainly have a new-found respect for conductors!

Wow, this is great! Even through a mediocre mp3 recorder, it sounds beautiful.

To match ParanoidFreak's sentiment, Wow! That's about all I can say. I especially liked the crescendo into the trumpets at about 1:38. I'm kinda jealous now. I wish I had an awesome orchestra like that to work with. Do you think you could post the score, as well? I would love to review it when I get the time.

Thanks for the comments! The score needs to be cleaned up a little and I'm going away for two weeks, but maybe I'll post it after I get back.

This is great! Post the score already, haha! :D

Right, forgot about that... Just uploaded my old score! It should reflect what was played by the orchestra. I've made some tweaks since then.

Very nice, many good things here. Two things in particular stand out - first, you clearly understand how to make a piece of music move forward. There were no superfluous repetitions or awkward filling-in passages, and always forward momentum in the harmony. The climaxes and relaxations are all nicely controlled. Secondly, counterpoint! I don't mean the sort of counterpoint in Bach or even Beethoven, but the fact that at any given time there was an identifiable hierarchy of layers within the texture. As an example, the passage a few bars after A has at least four different levels: the celli and bass providing one rhythm and the root of the harmony; then the harp, seconds and violas with an different figure in antiphony; then the flute and clarinet with a counter-melodic accompaniment; and finally the oboe with the melody. A lesser composer would simply have accompanied the oboe with chords - although its line is still very clear in what actually happens thanks to your excellent orchestration. Indeed, your parts are thoughtful, effective and very playable without ever resorting to unneccesarily complicated writing. Probably the reason why even this read-though sounds good.

Two suggestions for improvement. First, I felt bars 33-34 to be out of place. They are too different to what has been going on before and feel as if the music has abruptly skipped ahead. The fact that there is a pause (a rest) after the climax heightens this as it is suggestive of there having been a long build-up to it, which there isn't. So I would suggest writing another 10-20 seconds linking it to the previous passage, all the while introducing the triplet motif in the horns and trumpets. Second, the piece would not suffer at all from being much longer as a whole. What you have here represents probably about the right amount of exposition for the principal theme, but you could certainly add a contrasting theme and then maybe some kind of recapitulation to make this a 5-6 minute work. The quality of material deserves it.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, siwi! I'm really glad you enjoyed the counterpoint. Your comment about lengthening 33-34 is a good one - the timbres are kind of abrupt and a longer build up might give more weight to the pause. The piece certainly has room to grow.

A couple of comments:

1. It's always fascinating to get a live performance of your work: So WELL DONE!

2. Well done on the conducting as well! Lovely stuff.

3. The clipping can easily be removed with a number of different plug ins, it's always the same, and because of that you can spot where it sounds and use a de-noiser to do it.

That said I liked the music very much, but as a general comment I'd say it's a bit less 'adventurous' than I'd personally like. It's too tonal, for my personal taste, but other than that no harm done, nothing wrong and this is just a personal comment nothing more. The timbres work well, and so does the orchestration.

So , again, well done and thanks for posting it!

Very nice indeed, no matter how bad the recording may be, a real orchestra always sounds very nice.

This sounds to me like a John Barry soundtrack of an oriental subject movie.

I only think this is very short, do we have to compose this short in order to expect a performance with a real orchestra ?

(If that's so, I'm completely hopeless :facepalm: )

Thanks, Nikolas. I'll have to look into something to remove the clipping.

I only think this is very short, do we have to compose this short in order to expect a performance with a real orchestra ?

(If that's so, I'm completely hopeless :facepalm: )

SYS, yes, for my two orchestral readings we were told not to write any more than 5 minutes of music for either occasion. There were only a few of us getting readings, but conductors tend to be extremely... careful with their time in front of an orchestra (it comes from financial reasons of course when working with a professional orchestra), and the conductor wouldn't even consider giving the composers a full rehearsal time for the readings. Your best chance to get an orchestra performance is probably to win some kind of competition (and many competitions ask for more than 5 minutes of music), or really impress a conductor that you know.

Hello!

I like this... the melody flows nicely throughout the piece. I do think that the length is just right.... any longer and it would need a drastic change. If you do anything else with this, I'd suggest a very long viola solo after this. :D Just kidding! I don't think that it really needs anything else, though, so stick with this.

Great work here! Keep composing!

Heckel

I do love the way you've emulated the shakuhachi, particularly with the glissandi in the strings.

I also agree with the comment about bars 33-34 - I think this, while it does sound out of place, is also quite... I don't know, exciting. I think you can make a lot more out of that than you did. Of course, the five minute time constraint wouldn't have helped, with the recording, but yeah, anyway, that's my two cents worth.

Veryyy nice :)