Fanfare for Strings and Percussion

A Fanfare I Wrote for Strings and Percussion you can hear a bad live recording at http://www.bradenunruh.net/blog/2010/05/19/fanfare-for-strings-and-percussion-performed/

Fanfare for Strings and Percussion

Great piece! although I didn't like the live recording. Pretty much all the (string) notes were off. Terruble :S Good thing you added the gpo version as well, which was waaaay better. And the song itself is pretty haunting, among others due to the long held notes; which makes it all the more mandatory for the strings to play pitch perfect Was it required to add the up and downstrokes markings for the strings in the sheets? I don't know who gave you that 1/10 but that certainly wasn't something you deserved. First time I heard this (live recording) I was like what .... But the gpo and score made up for that. Maybe you could put that in your description, something in bold like: Please listen to the gpo rendition first :happy: I give it 8/10

I suppose a lot of the bowings are redundant.

Get rid of the all the bow markings, and only put them when you want the player to do something out of the ordinary alternation. For the "Flowingly" you might want to slur some of those melodies (each bar could probably have a slur over it), having them play it almost entirely détaché is not going to sound flowing. Also is there a reason you have the basses playing so high (for the end bit)? That's part of the reason the players are so out of tune. Also, it usually not a good idea to have the basses ever on a voice by themselves, almost always double with cellos or another low instrument . If you want it to be full sounding, use divisi to thicken up the chord.

Also, page 6 is sort of unusual and unexciting--nothing is happening. This is ok, but it seems out of the style of this piece to have such weirdly pointless little section.

The opening is really nice, it has a kind of Celtic sound. The whole piece has this kinda feeling probably because the modal minor, but the bass drum really complements it. In the recording, the violins sorta slide into and out of pitches, and it sounds like there are grace notes are something. I actually think that you should put this in the score, because it sounds cool and adds to the Celtic-ness of it. In the recording it kinda sounds like bagpipes actually (the rubbing of the out of tune notes kinda adds a harshness which also calls to mind bagpipes).