The Celestial Dance

Hi everyone!

Here's my latest piece, which was inspired by the theme tune from "Star Trek: Discovery".

Wanted to experiment with pedal notes, and percussion, as well as trying to limit my running length to around one minute.

A provisional score will follow soon, when I get round to producing it.

Interested to know what you think of my orchestration, the balance between instruments, and the general flow of the melody line?

Think some of the percussion may be too dominant in the first half of the piece?

Here's the provisional score.

It's just a straight transfer from the midi data: so I haven't done any annotation at all.

I used a cymbal crash to cover an abrupt change in the melody line at one point, which I think works quite well; but am interested to know what you guys think?

Sounds epic, but I feel a bit of "disconnection" around 0:25 and also ten seconds later (but less). Is this a work in progress? Why did you limit yourself to one minute, just out of curiosity? In my humble opinion there's not much you can satisfyingly develop in a single minute for orchestra, and with such instrument power why would you do that? 

Regarding of how the orchestration was itself I am no expert nor really experienced enough to give you advice. I am reading "The study of Orchestration" by S. Adler so perhaps I'll have more constructive feedback in a year or so, lol.

The melody flows perhaps good enough, but I don't see where does it want to go, it seems to be going but without knowing where. which is not necessarily a bad thing, just pointing out my feel.

Kind regards!

Hi Daniel, 

Many thanks for your thoughts as always.

I've been having occasional lessons with a composer/sound designer who works in theatre.

He thinks my previous works have been too long and sprawling: so he asked me to compose some short pieces with a time limit around one minute.

I thought of it like a TV theme tune: so hopefully it could work in that context?

Another friend suggested I could monetise my work by writing theme tunes for You Tube channels. So maybe that's another use for it?

Need to do a bit of work separating out all the percussion parts in the score, since MuseScore doesn't translate these correctly from the midi data.

Seems like that might be a laborious task, since I have no experience writing for percussion!

Well if your teacher says so I guess he'll have his reasons. I suppose it is a good exercise for developing catchy motives or a good exercise overall. I wonder what would he say of my 31 min long third sonata for piano solo though, lmao.

Your friend suggestion seems cool. I myself am trying to upload videos of my piano pieces and I do think the approach your friend suggested is way better for your pocket and time. Just out of curiosity, do you use a DAW or some other software to compose? 

Kind regards ^^.

Haven't listened to your 3rd piano sonata; but I'll be sure to check it out!

The longest piece I've written is my 10-minute "Peripheral Moods" in five movements.

All my compositions so far have been created with Music Studio for iPad.

It's not a full featured DAW; but I think it's the best one for tablet.

I also have Reaper on my laptop; but haven't used it much, as I find the iPad's touch-screen very useful for composition work.

10 hours ago, Alex Weidmann said:

Haven't listened to your 3rd piano sonata; but I'll be sure to check it out!

Well thanks man ^^, but I haven't published it here nor in free-scores. Actually I don't tend to publish my pieces instantly for some reason and before this year I didn't publish them at all save counted exceptions. But again, thank you for the interest!

10 hours ago, Alex Weidmann said:

All my compositions so far have been created with Music Studio for iPad.

Didn't know that software but it definitely produces good audio outputs! I also tried reaper and some others, but I guess I cannot abandon musescore, heh.

Kind regards!