Discussions in Secret

Hello all! I'm back with another piece. I began working on this last week and have titled it "Discussions in Secret". As I wrote this piece, I was scoring (in my mind) a scene of two individuals discussing important or confidential information, tucked away from a crowd in a darkened corner...doing their best to stay out of the light and keep their information and identities secret to those around them.

For this I challenged myself to keep the strip the instruments back to only the necessities. Almost entirely strings with some underlying synth elements (for atmosphere), as well a cimbalom, celeste, and tubular bells towards the end of the piece.

I wanted the piece to keep an uneasy and mysterious feeling throughout without delving into dark, villain-esque territory. More desperation and secrets, less action.

Hope you enjoy the listen and am looking forward to the feedback!

Hey @Layne!

Very tense track/cue you've concocted!  I noticed that you're using col legno/with the wood of the bow in the melody of the strings.  I could be wrong, but it doesn't sound practical/idiomatic for the strings to bounce the wood of their bows off their strings as quickly as you require them to in the melody here.  The col legno technique, if I understand correctly, is quite an unwieldy technique on the Violin and is difficult to execute with metronomic precision which is why you'll often hear orchestras struggle with staying together when playing col legno rhythms.  But other than that I like the mood/vibe of this piece!  Great job and thanks for sharing!

On 5/27/2025 at 8:40 PM, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

Hey @Layne!

Very tense track/cue you've concocted!  I noticed that you're using col legno/with the wood of the bow in the melody of the strings.  I could be wrong, but it doesn't sound practical/idiomatic for the strings to bounce the wood of their bows off their strings as quickly as you require them to in the melody here.  The col legno technique, if I understand correctly, is quite an unwieldy technique on the Violin and is difficult to execute with metronomic precision which is why you'll often hear orchestras struggle with staying together when playing col legno rhythms.  But other than that I like the mood/vibe of this piece!  Great job and thanks for sharing!

 

Thank you so much, Peter! Always appreciate your insights. I had purely chosen that articulation of strings from a sound standpoint and had not considered the difficulty of play (should this be turned into sheet music). What better articulation or instrumentation do you think would be best to convey a similar feeling?

2 minutes ago, Layne said:

What better articulation or instrumentation do you think would be best to convey a similar feeling?

You could keep the main line col legno, but switch it to arco sul ponticello or sul tasto (staccato) for the latter part of the melody where the most rapid notes happen.  And I don't know if your libraries have these options recorded but there are also different varieties of pizzicato that might also be useful in this situation.  @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu would know about that given that he's recently explored Elliot Carter's music which uses different articulations on pizzicato strings to yield different effects.  There's also the Bartok pizzicato which is a really strong pizzicato so much so that the string strikes the bridge of the instrument, but that's usually only used in a ff dynamic.