Sacrificed to the wilderness

Written for the 2026 spring Young composer competition this work for percussion quintet features a wide range of natural and man-made percussion instruments to represent the integration of man and nature. Few years back me, and a few of my friends decided that it would be a good idea to cure our boredom by bringing a already busted up child size guitar meant for learning and to "" sacrifice it into the woods.'' the reservoir is a large body of water near where I live so it was a short distance, which then led to an easy walk into a bunch of colonial ruins where we laid the guitar and watch it rot away. Far deep in the reservoir lays a broken destroyed child size guitar that my sister got for her birthday as a child or something like that it’s been ever since sitting around around in the house and had transfer locations from her room to the living room room to the my room to the wilderness it’s final resting place. My sister never had been fond of performing music in her life. In fact she is quite horrible at it so my parents smartly in intelligently got her a low quality guitar anyways fast-forward a few years later, and I am now experimenting with multi instrumelity. However, though I got fond of extended techniques, playing it like a hammered dulcimer and even bowing the thing after me becoming friends with the lead guitarist to my modern day chamber band sort of situation, he starts to play it and at that point it only had two remaining strings. We all anonymously decided that we should bring it to the reservoir maybe hide a secret note in it after all the band was just a bunch of board teens, wanting something interesting to do with our lives, so what ended up happening was we snuck into the Reservoir found a foundation of an old colonial house and threw the guitar in it other than impact damage ever since the guitar has been rotting away however, though quite often me and my friends still visit it’s resting place only to see it in more final pieces I’m pretty sure I got rid of the note since it had some secrets that I do not want people finding and still to this day. It’s been resting there ever since.

Percussion five has a lot of handmade instrument specifically for this work

. The alcoholics shekere; is just a bucket with crushed up beer, cans, or soda cans is meant to be played in a similar style to a traditional shekere

. the facidrum; faci- Latin for bundle, a bundle of resident sticks attached and tied up to a frame

. Chopping block; a semi resonant piece of wood meant to be played like a table and a practice pad

All of the other instruments should be self-explanatory

Keep note that since because this was written in musescore bunch of playback loopholes has been exploited, although that there are more than five staves these are to represent each instrument in the set up rather than the actual part parts of represented by the groups that are bracketed. This is to create custom percussion set ups, and to satisfy an easier workflow with sound fonts.

'

Sacrificed to the wilderness.pdf

Edited April 19Apr 19 by Fruit hunter

So looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong! You should get upside collosus of prora badge, like extraordinarily existential and huge orchestra. This is funnily fun to listen to.

Average Score: 8. 4375

On 4/19/2026 at 7:15 PM, Fruit hunter said:

Keep note that since because this was written in musescore bunch of playback loopholes has been exploited, although that there are more than five staves these are to represent each instrument in the set up rather than the actual part parts of represented by the groups that are bracketed. This is to create custom percussion set ups, and to satisfy an easier workflow with sound fonts.

This is actually written as a quintet. The reason why there are so many staffs there are to accommodate the different percussion sound fonts for each set up only five players needed.

Average Score: 5.75

I'm not one to enjoy being critical, too harshly of anyone's original music, as most of the time, music is subjective and taken in based on individual opinion and preference, but from a professional stand point, this score is quite difficult to follow.
I'd also note that the terms of the competition stated; "3 - 5 monophonic or polyphonic instruments/voices."
{most of the Instrumentation choices here are neither mono / polyphonic in nature, and there are far too many of them.. lol}

While I understand your intent, in your use of braces (which you used grand staff brackets rather than part brackets, but I understand, nonetheless lol), for a section representing 1 performer, it's simply not within the constraints of the rules of the competition.

I went ahead and graded it as I would any other score, however, to provide you with some level of feedback on the writing done here. I did not want to neglect it, artistically. As you can see, I highly favor the Originality, the Textures, and your taste within the given score, however, the piece itself is very "through-composed" without much rhyme or reason that's easily discernible... Meaning, I don't hear a motif that catches my attention; a home for me to reference back to again, to keep my ear on-track with the music. For that reason, I felt a 2 was appropriate for the form/development section, as well as the 4 in the Melodies, Themes, and Motives. (Slightly higher because of the intricacies in melodic components with the few polyphonic instruments you do have in use for this score.)

Ultimately, I feel that this score should not be considered as a valid entry, simply based on the number of staves you've used here, despite the constraints, but I will always have respect for anything that anyone has taken their time and effort to work on, and this piece, in and of itself, has the potential to be much greater than it is, currently, I think.

- Uncle Red