Kojo no tsuki

A primarily serial treatment of the tune "Kojo no tsuki" or Moon Over the Ruined Castle. All pitch material is derived from the folk song.

Kojo no tsuki

My normal channels of feedback are currently out of commission and I'm brave so I thought I'd turn to the internet and see what happened. :) I CANNOT SAY how much I would LOVE any feedback anyone could offer on this most recent composition of mine.

Edit: I think I missed my chance to upload the score as a PDF so you can just download it off my website here if you want to see it as a PDF instead of a .mus: Kojo no tsuki

Edit2: As mentioned below, here's a rough realization in mp3 format: kojo no tsuki

I'd very much like to hear some audio to this. I viewed the score - it needs serious cleaning up! One comment off the bat, however, is the instruction to play with the wood of the bow (col legno).. you misspelled it. Upload audio, and I'll give this a run through.

I'd very much like to hear some audio to this. I viewed the score - it needs serious cleaning up! One comment off the bat, however, is the instruction to play with the wood of the bow (col legno).. you misspelled it. Upload audio, and I'll give this a run through.

How embarrasing for me to have misspelled col legno! I will try to create some acceptable audio (but it's never easy on finale. Perhaps I will do a realization in Cubase.)

Edit: I did just now do some small amount of score cleanup.

Ok, here's a rough realization in mp3 format: kojo no tsuki

Ok, on listening with the score I've noticed one thing off hand. While you say this is serial - I don't quite see it in the score nor do I hear it in the audio rendering. This seems to be loosely serial but not quite. There's a lot of notes that have predominance. I'm not to familiar with the theme that you based this off of - but I think your variations are quite nice. A little more spacing of your ideas would be good - but I think you have a nice piece here so far. Thanks for sharing

Ok, on listening with the score I've noticed one thing off hand. While you say this is serial - I don't quite see it in the score nor do I hear it in the audio rendering. This seems to be loosely serial but not quite. There's a lot of notes that have predominance. I'm not to familiar with the theme that you based this off of - but I think your variations are quite nice. A little more spacing of your ideas would be good - but I think you have a nice piece here so far. Thanks for sharing

Thanks so much for your comments. I'm guessing you're not confusing serial with 12-tone but just in case there is that confusion, this piece is not 12-tone at all (except coincidentally). The most common serialized pitch group is [0, 1, 3, 8] although I serialize (as in, order and use the inversions, retrogrades, etc. of) many different parts of the melody or, of course, the melody as a whole. Verrry good suggestion on spacing of my ideas. That is something I am working on although it is not the easiest thing for me to accomplish. The folk melody that it is based on is from Japan and I know it from my participation in the Suzuki method as a kid. :)

Woah, this is cool. I think using the word serial, might be a bit inaccurate. What you're using is an ordered set. You can read about this on Wikipedia (which I link to every chance I get...).

Jawoodruff's right about the score, it's missing technique markings and other things, as well as over-laps etc. The pitches are generally readable.

I really liked this. I don't think it works as a stand-alone piece though, maybe as part of a set (ki!) of pieces, it would be nice. Perhaps a collection of folk settings (ki!).

A few of the ideas seemed a little unclear. I don't think specifically going through and pointing things out to be that useful, it's much more useful for you decide for yourself what the best thing is. Take into consideration whether an idea is effective with the instrument you have playing it.

This post was mostly criticism, but I liked your piece a lot, really.

Thanks so much for your comments. I'm working on cleaning up the score and a bunch of other things. In case anyone is interested, I've been editting the piece with the comments in this thread in mind and this is what I have so far: http://www.henrysolberg.com/kojo_no_tsuki.pdf . No updated realization yet.

I think you're right to say that serial might not be the best term to be using. The way I understand it, serial is a broad term for anything that uses ordered series and rearranges them (this can be pitch, rhythm, dynamics, etc.). So serial is pretty broad and as you say "ordered set treatment" would be more accurate.