Trance Macabre

The first piece from my set of Grand Dances. written for two pianos. sorry for the sloppiness of the score. i dont own any fancy notation programs and because of the complexity of the writing, I had to settle with my hands

Trance Macabre

This is awesome!

Quite savage yet very well put together and with some tremendous climaxes. Trance Macabre is definitely the perfect name.

I can sample it decently for you if you want, but it depends on what software you used to make the MIDI file. Any .mus or .xml files?

thanks berlioz I actually had a lot of trouble figuring out a title haha. and i'm all ghetto and used anvil studio to make the midi. if i had an .mus file i wouldn't have bothered notating this by hand lol plus i just noticed i left out 2 pages while scanning

Holy crap! :horrified:

This is amazing -- it's over-the-top insane, but it still has a strong structure that holds everything together. And there's personality to boot in this piece -- I laughed at the "sarcastic", fleeting notes on page 8, and the sudden panic nearly made my skeletal structure jump out of my epidermal fascia :lol: Heh heh. This is an awesomely suspenseful ride, I loved every minute, personally.

Here's an mp3 link of a better piano:

http://www.box.net/shared/klgmiv4skd

Thanks for sharing! :nod:

"Tempo Obsessivo"

Freakin' brilliant, man. I get the image of some dark factory making evil zombified bloodthirsty voodoo dolls or something. This is great. When it goes from the dark, pounding parts, to the lighter, dancing parts, it's almost as if someone's laughing haughtily at you because they know you're going to be crushed into an unrecognizable bloody pulp that's going to be devoured by giant hell spawn or something.

Also, don't worry about not owning a "fancy notation program." If you can write this well without one, you obviously don't need one.

It would be a shame to keep us from seeing more of your work.

-MF

Ok, the link I gave above has an even further advanced piano VST now. Since your midi was set at a constant 180 BPM, I was able to use it (I can't figure out how to make my DAW move the tempo along with the midi's original format :( But you're in luck! :D)

Here's some further thoughts from me now that I've become more familiar with the work (I must have listened to it about 10 times now :musicwhistle:)

-- The idea at page 5 with the descending 16th notes (with the "poco dim" symbol) was a good choice there.

-- The build-up to 1:30 (The "gloriously" section) was fantastic, to me. My favorite part of the whole piece, in fact. The furious dissonance just before really leads in well to this section, (it's not just a noisy section and a suddenly tonal section afterwards) which I find rather beautiful and haunting. A little after this section comes a really spicy, dance-like melody -- I think it begins here at page 17. A criticism I have here is that this is a simply wonderful motif which is brought back immediately after and referenced in an all treble section a few minutes later ... but never again. I think it's a really beautiful theme that could be used a lot more before the piece's end. And you may even want to make this theme the actual ending to either this piece or your next piece in this set of grand dances for two pianos.

Maybe you just don't want your audience to get too comfortable. But I doubt that your audience will be getting comfortable with this piece as a whole :thumbsup: :lol:

--On page 32, you have a chromatic glissando with the palms of the hand in both pianos. Now, on midi, this creates a really powerful effect that almost tears my brain in two :mellow: It's the musical equivalent of that trick where someone puts both their fingers in front of your eyes, close together, and tells you to follow them both wherever they go. And then BAM! They separate suddenly and without warning, and your eyes/brain go into shock a little bit.

However, I'm skeptical that the effect would be as powerful in a live playback. Pianos are rather difficult to work with chromatically, unfortunately. Even white key glissandos tend to be very quiet. Check out renowned virtuosa Valentina Lisitsa's playing of Liszt's Totentanz sometime (if you haven't already). Her fingers are supernaturally strong, yet her gliss in the right hand are only just powerful enough to be heard.

Maybe it's possible (Marc Andre Hamelin sure could rock even octave glissandos!!!) though, but I just have to express some doubt here.

In conclusion, you have a really meaty, powerful, and evocative piece here. It's really quite fascinating to me :phones:

Thanks for sharing!

This is a fantastic piece. Thanks for sharing it!

Absolutely brilliant piece. Thanks for sharing. Would be really fun to see it played in live.

thanks for the in depth analysis serge! in response to your comment about the chromatic glissando and how it sounds on the midi, i really didn't intend it to sound this way in the first place since i composed this acoustically. as for the overall difficulty of the piece, i tried this all out myself and i admit, it's a bit draining.

**pretend this site has a "jawdrop" smiley**

This is freaking brilliant. Really, truly, utterly amazing. If you don't mind, I'd like to put this on my iPod, because it's that amazing.

This was some really pure bullshit, stuff that i can make just by placing random notes in the musicprogram....Some really ugly scraggy you made here. Really dont know why you are choosen as one of the recommended pieces to listen to....

umm.... do it? then you can get selected too

This was some really pure bullshit, stuff that i can make just by placing random notes in the musicprogram....Some really ugly scraggy you made here. Really dont know why you are choosen as one of the recommended pieces to listen to....

umm.... do it? then you can get selected too

I agree with Turpentine -- I think you will find it's harder to create a piece like this than you may believe :nod: There is plenty of material in this piece that could not possibly be said to be simply mindless random note-throwing :musicwhistle: (The "Tango" section, for instance.)

True, a lot of it is dissonant, but that's clearly the intention. Sometimes things have to get ugly in music -- the trick is to make the ugliness compelling in some way, shape, or form (because if it's not, then it is just bull crap. Some would probably argue with me on that statement, saying that even that sort of ugliness is ok, but I would disagree). Music can be story-telling -- and the story isn't always happy or beautiful or even pleasant. I personally found the dark, atmospheric story being told here very fascinating!

Don't get me wrong, though -- if you just plain don't like the piece, then that's your opinion, and it's fine to have that opinion. But before you decide to set that opinion in stone, perhaps think it over some?

I haven't seen such a delicious score in a long time!

Wow!! This is ABSOLUTELY impressive!!! Thank you so much for sharing!! The music is NOT at all sloppy!!!! Not only are you an awesome composer, you are also a brilliant pianist!!! Your music paints vivid images in my mind. Very sinister and dark!! Check out mine too!!

Very nice piano work, and a great insane piece; I love it!

Not really much more to say than that.

Превод (српски > енглески)

The composition is very interestingly, unusual, energetic. I think it's for your years very well. What I recommend you to write notes using Sibelius 6, if nothing else you save a lot of time, and it will be much nicer. Also in creating an audio clip I recommend you to use Studio - Cubase 5 and a good piano VST. You'll get that much better sound, of the midi track, and the dynamics will be much better to come to the fore than in the midi track, where the piano sound bad. But most importantly this is a good composition.

Best regards, father Veljko Nenadic