Symphonic Fugue in B minor - Episode 4 (Orchestration)

My dear fellow composers, after some weeks of quiescence, I’m presenting to you today my first attempt at orchestrating an existing composition for a full symphony orchestra.

The „sketch“ I have chosen is a composition of my own, a huge six-part quadruple fugue for piano in B minor, from which I picked the fourth episode being a transitional section between the development sections.

I especially love that section for its modulations, its slow arpeggios and the interwoven voice leading, which finally leads to a calming point on a diminished seventh chord before starting the next fast development section.

As I have no experience in orchestration for an entire ensemble, all kinds of feedback are appreciated. During the last few months, I thoroughly followed the excellent reviews of @MK_Piano on orchestrated scores, so that I hopefully got around with the most obvious pitfalls due to its help. However, there are a number of open questions remaining.

I hope, you’ll enjoy the piece.

Wieland

Episode4-Symphonic-Fugue-B-minor.pdf

To give some background to the work, here my immediate repost, where I share the piano score and the piano rendition of the excerpted fourth episode from the original fugue.

Comments and questions about the piece are welcome.

Episode4-Fugue-B-minor.pdf

Ollo! I will be looking at this score soon and giving some feedback. To preface some the explicit comments I will make, there are still a lot of engraving errors within the score.

1. Page Margins. I tried printing the score from my Google Browser and it increased the page margins of your document/ made the score smaller to fit the page. I would increase the margins by default.
2. Having multiple colors within the engraving. I can understand doing this for pedagogy or analysis, however, for publishing and performance, do not add multiple colors UNLESS it is for specific reason (i.e. Contemporary/ experimental music).
3. Clefs. Glockenspiel does not read a 15ma Treble Clef. Tuba does not read in 8vb Bass Clef. Piccolo does not read 8va Treble Clef. They all read the normal versions of the clefs, however, the concert/ sounding pitch may be in those ranges.
4. Rests. Even in 6/4, 3/2, or 5/4, an empty measure is represented by a singular whole rest, not the dotted whole rest. To add, in the current version of the score, they are all offset. An empty measure needs to have its rest centered on the bar.
5. Rests again. I will make specific annotations of this comment.
6. THE HARP. The harp is not a piano, and comparing to your Piano score, it feels like you dragged piano elements to the harp. To emphasize some of their differences, harpists DO NOT use their pinkies when playing. So, some intervals or passages/ groupings of notes, can become impractical if you just copied it from a piano part.
7. Harp Pedals. They do not need a pedal diagram for every change. A simple, and clearly placed letter will be enough to show which pedal to change. To add, most harpists will just write one in if you only pedal charts. It's visually redundant for performance (in my experience)
8. The Key. Your Title says B-minor, then you open the piece in Eb-minor and end it on a C# half-diminished chord. So... which is it? Are we really in B-minor? I didn't see the key signature for this mode at all. (I have not done any harmonic analysis at the time of this comment)

I will highlight some of these comments over the next day or two, however, let these serve as some food for thought. Good work!