Copacabana e Ipanema for Saxophone Quartet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUPc-VbKrxQ

Hello everyone! Here I am again with a new chamber piece. This is the last part of a 5 movements work called "Cancoes Brasileiras" for Saxophone Quartet. I composed this piece after a trip I had to the beautiful Brazil and it's a sort of tribute to Villa-Lobos and Tom Jobim. Each movement has a really simple structure, hence the term "cancoes" (songs). This one in particular is a deconstruction of "Garota de Ipanema". I hope you enjoy it!

Edited September 1, 20205 yr by fililando

A very lively piece!  It seemed like you could have milked the E section for all it's worth to extend the length of the piece and give it a bit more development.  You rarely build longer melodies in this - it is mostly motivic - a feature that I enjoy about as it gives it a sort of brevity and conciseness - but it is hard to build a longer piece out of these kinds of short motifs.  When you do establish a longer melody it is quickly interrupted by the motifs instead of letting it develop into a longer phrase structure - maybe you intended to do that kind of juxtaposition (it is a cool idea) but at E especially it seemed like you could have taken the opportunity to develop the piece further.  Thanks for the great music!

As a Brazilian composer, I must say this is quite evocative. I can definitely hear reflections of Brazilian music in this.

Besides the "Brazilianess", I like the devices you use in this. The effect juxtaposition of small ideas create is something I like to explore myself, and I think you did a great job here. I do think it could be explored a bit further.

The fact that you have alternating time signatures brings some nice rhythmic diversity, but I would have enjoyed it if you also brought this diversity by not accenting the important beats of the measure, or if your wrote ideas that simply do not fit on the measure at all. As you use short ideas, you can always alter them as you go, making so that they fall in and out of the beat in different sections, instead of simple changing the time signatures altogether. 

That beign said, the piece flows really well. This is always hard to achieve, so kudos on that!