December 12, 201015 yr Scored for violin, clarinet, horn, harp, vibraphone and contrabass. This was my final composition for my postgrad course - the instrumentation was set apart from the use of percussion but I chose to use just vibes. The piece is roughly in Intro-A-B-A1-coda form and ends with a dissonant chorale. It's modernist but in quite a Romantic way and I was influenced by Berg, Szymanowski and K.A. Hartmann whilst writing it. I'm sorry the recording isn't better; the players were professionals but hadn't been sent the parts in enough time and so were practically sight-reading in a workshop. The piece was performed (rather better) at a concert in the evening. Duration approx. 10 mins.Sextet(It feels like I haven't posted a new composition here for ages!)[/url] Sextet
December 13, 201015 yr I just want to congratulate you with this very interesting piece! It was really enjoyable to listen to. The performance deserves separate applause!
December 15, 201015 yr Ah, this was interesting. I do not get half of it, so as an educational project I would love some insights I think I did hear quite some Berg Violin concerto references. BTW SWW30 is your own work numbering? haha, nice!
December 15, 201015 yr Author Glad you spotted the Berg concerto reference - although ending with a chorale is an obvious giveaway! The chorale melody is not by Bach, but actually a symetrical pitch sequence if you ignore the second C natural in the first phrase so I gave the sextet an arch form. Basically I tried to use the pitches of the chorale melody as a rather subtle cantus firmus - if you look at the most frequent pitches the contrabass is playing in each sub-section they are a particular pitch of the chorale. I imagined the piece split into ten sub-sections based on this division, and then these grouped into three sections based on tempi (so there is a 'slow movement' in the middle). In fact I thought about calling it a symphony because of this form. On top of this structure I came up with several motifs that become more or less important in the different sections, some of which are based on the chorale harmonisation. The centre of the piece is at bars 98-103 (based on the chorale pitch F#), after which I work backwards through the material of each section and lead to the coda. This mirrors the structure of the chorale melody. The violin solo at the beginning I felt was necessary to balance the slow chorale-based ending. It's interesting you should ask me to explain this because I gave a presentation on this piece at a Postgrad day not long after it was written. I am happy to say that there was a lot of interest and questions from my fellow students. I like to think of this as my farewell after years of study just as the Berg concerto was a peaceful farewell to his life as a composer. I found out that this piece got a mark of 72/100, which is a Distinction in my uni's marking scheme. Also I think everyone should have a personal numbering scheme so that even if somethign doesn't get published and get an opus number, you can still see in what order it was written.
December 15, 201015 yr Great work here! I like the harmonies you used. They weren't sot atonal that old people would cover their ears, but just enough to make it interesting. For a few critiques: I couldn't hear the contrabass at all. It looked like it would have added to the piece. Wish I could hear that. This is a live performance, right? Also, I felt sometimes it went on just a tiny bit to long. Never so much that I found myself loosing interest, but just a bit of "are we there yet?". Good work overall! I hope you post some more of your music! Heckel
