My Symphony Attempt

I tried to compose a symphony but I have this modern reflex so it came out pretty 21th Centrury.

Listen to this!

The_Lost_Temple.mid

The_Lost_Temple__adagio_.mid

The_Lost_Temple__Menuetto_.mid

So far I only heard the first movement. Nice harmonies and orchestration all along,and I think this is better as a tone poem than a symphony. But careful, you have some range problems. The timpani is almost always too low (use a bass drum instead), the clarinets go too low (use bass clarinets) and the horns also go up to B5: this is not good.

Also, you could try making it a little more varied. It gets slightly boring because the sections aren't very contrasting.

I could imagine this as film music.

Well, I can't really give a really good review becasue I was busy as I listened to this. But I really liked what I heard.

First of all, I think the channels got mixed up on the percussion or something becasue there were a lot of bird chirps, helicopter noises and random applause from an audience lol. How did that happen?

I only really got to semi listen to the first movement

1st movement

I like the first faster section. Some fregish stuff going on there, and at the end, around eleven, it is a very beautiful sort of recap, but everything after that was kind of dragging, like, common lets get to the ending, interesting with the Picardy third at the end, can't say I like it, can't say I dislike it but it definately threw me off in this style of music

The third movement was a lot different fromt he rest of the piece in style, I really like the orchestration of this one. Vey nice.

As a whole, very good job, Im sorry I couldnt comment on the second movement I jsut didn't feel like listening to a slow movement at the time. I agree with M is D that this might work better as a tone poem. One, the movements are nowhere similar in terms of length, usually in a symphony the movemnts balance and they are all generally the same length.

Good job, the first movement I like the best, the others weren't quite as good IMO.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "21st century".

in what sense... as in "popular"?

or as in harmonically and melodically avant-garde?

I'd like to add that apart from the range issue with timpani and clarinet, there's also your flute which is basically a "flute mime". In the range you've written it, it will never be heard above the rest of the orchestra.

As well, generally speaking, it's best to keep low C (middle C) as the bottom-most limit for the flute. Despite there being extensions for the B below that, these are far from standard still. Besides, anything below the G in the middle of the treble clef will never be heard above more than a few other instruments.