Baroque style piece for orchestra and synth

Hi all.

This piece was developed as an extension to the baroque section of my work "The Sun Dappled Forest" (posted previously).

It was supposed to form part of the original movement; but I couldn't make it work, due to the differing tempos.

May incorporate it as a second movement to that work; or make it a standalone piece.

Any comments greatly appreciated.

Haven't yet developed a score.

Hey man, cool piece. I'd love to see a score whenever you get a chance to make one. 

I get kind of like a gothic/film score type of vibe with this. Right around 1:30 was my favorite part, just because you gave us some counterpoint. I think this piece could have benefitted with more of that.

What's the overall goal? I'll have to check out The Sun Dappled Forest for more reference I suppose, but 2:45 seems awfully short for an orchestral multimovement work. Keep us updated on the grand scheme you have planned, I dig what you have so far!

I noticed that this piece keeps having rhythmic hiccups in it for no reason.  If you had a score then I would be able to look and understand exactly what kind of meter changes you use in this piece or if your changing to the offbeat all of a sudden was intentional or accidental.  If you wrote this in a DAW rather than a notation program then I'm betting that it's an accident.  You might be attached to it by now and wouldn't want to change it which is fine, but it might make your music sound more rhythmically "correct" if there is such a thing.  When I try to count beats to your piece I eventually end up on the off-beat for no good musically inspired reason that I can hear.  Baroque music does not usually play with the beats in this way.  If you had a score to this and it were, say, in 4/4 or 2/4, then the hiccups would be noticeable because of the presence of 7/8 or 3/8 bars which allow you to add/remove one 8th note from the pulse thereby causing the listener to have to readjust their sense of the rhythm.  A lot of Baroque music was dance music and for that reason those kind of rhythmic hiccups were avoided because they would make the music impossible to dance to.  Thanks for sharing!

Thanks so much for listening!

My original goal with this piece was to amend "The Sun Dappled Forest", along the lines suggested by Morgan Allan.

It has an ABCA structure, but nobody seemed to like the recapitulation: so I intended to remove that part, and replace it with an expanded C section.

Morgan wrote that he wished I'd done more development of the Baroque style C theme: so I decided to try that.

Unfortunately I then found I couldn't fit the new material into the piece, because it's natural tempo was too fast (140 bpm vs 120 bpm). I tried to write a linking passage to change tempo; but couldn't make it work.

So I've now written a new ending for the first movement, and included the above posted work as a second movement.

Have attached the new version of the first movement below (which I just finished last night).

Thanks Peter for pointing out the meter changes. 

Did you find they spoilt your enjoyment of the piece?

I wrote it in Music Studio for iPad as usual, and I have the whole piece in 4/4, because that app doesn't allow any meter or tempo changes within a project.

The first and last notes of the 1st violin part line up perfectly against the grid, as the first notes of the first and last bars.

However some of the phrases end on an off-beat, and this is especially obvious in the contrapuntal section.

For the most part, the music then comes back into alignment with the grid in the next bar. Though the contrapuntal section is more complex, and remains out of alignment for several bars.

This was intentional, because it makes the piece less predictable, and mixes things up a bit.

For me it also gives the music a bit more energy and impetus.

I suppose it's a modern take on the Baroque, since I've also used an electronic keyboard sound.

Have made a score for this now, with both movements.

Haven't added expression marks yet, and have left the second movement in common time for the moment.

Please let me know if you spot any mistakes!