Thread: TC Composers' Competition: Round 2 discussion thread

Here is the discussion thread for Round 2 of our composers competition - here hopefully the composers will give explanations and notes regarding their pieces - sharing some thoughts about them - and everyone else can comment on them/talk about them in general.

This round was a piece for a solo instrument with accompaniment of five other instruments (all free) and a guideline limit of between about 3 and 10 minutes.

Not having written a piece this time , I cannot make the first step, but hopefully our composers will step forth and say something about their pieces

Well done everyone, and especially well done to Mephistopheles, whose Violin Sextet was my top pick for this round. I liked the continuity that ran throughout the piece and how the contrasting section came in without announcing "this is the contrasting section!" It really felt to me like the most complete work there.

My second pick was Gloomy Greenwich, which, as I think I said in the other thread, reminded me of old Lucas Arts/Tim Schafer adventure games like Day of the Tentacle. It's partly the sound of the instruments, but the writing style is wholly in that vein no matter the sounds used.

Well done Crudblud!

Do you have anything to say about your piece? What made you choose that instrumentation? Come to think of it, what exactly was the instrumentation?

Thanks, I didn't expect Call and Entry to win.

The backing group is a slightly detuned five piece chromatic* gamelan ensemble using various mutes, and the solo instrument is a viola. It was originally gamelan + accordion (the piece I wrote for this still exists and will probably appear somewhere else in future) but there were far too many issues in terms of balance to work out in time for the deadline, no matter how I configured it the accordion would either be way too loud or too quiet. I had wanted to compose for gamelan type instruments for some time, and when the second round's instrumentation was chosen I thought it would be a nice way to test that out. I settled on the viola because I wanted something with a fairly expansive range (and I'm pretty sure I cover all of it) that could produce clean lines over the gamelan, that and I didn't want to go with the obvious choice of the violin.

Earlier I mentioned that it was a chromatic gamelan, this is worth noting because traditional gamelan is designed in accordance with very specific tuning systems in mind, usually the heptatonic Pelog or the pentatonic Slendro, which do not fit precisely in to 12 tone equal temperament. I went with the 12 tone tuning because I wanted more notes, basically. I do actually use an approximation of Pelog as the basis for one of the lines in the 7/8 "dance" section in the middle of the piece, the line in question is playing 4/4 so it takes a while to resolve.

My piece;
Somewhere around September i got the idea that i wanted to do a composition which would tell describe a...
First movement: Celebration on a countryside , two persons start running towards a forest and it gets dark.
(based on a simple one theme )
Second movement: They are lost in a dark forest and are scared, ( It has a ABA structure) A = the main theme
B section is the contrasting part ( the noises like birds and what they would imagine).
A part again, something is different, the mood is more tense soon they think that something is following them and at the end it catches them.
Third movement: Its supposed to be a Chase were they run away from the monster etc...
( Sonata form)

Also i am glad that Jurgen was able to see trough the bad sound quality etc... I don't have any samples etc...

Also i thought that BD wrote Bitter sweet.

Special request; Tell did i succeed about creating that atmosphere&images?
If not what it brought to your mind?

@Jani: Yeah, your piece needed some imagination of the listener to realize how it would sound with real instruments. But I liked the composition.

Some information about my piece, 'Bittersweet Tears':

This piece is, believe it or not, an experimental piece. What I have tried to do was to create a piece of chamber music (what actually is a genre that only a tiny minority of people likes to listen these days) combined with elements of that kind of music that listens the majority of people. So, the idea behind this was simply to compose a piece of chamber music which eventually also ordinary listeners might like (although I appreciate of course that it has also received some points of this critical expert jury).

So, what is the kind of music that the majority of people like to hear today? Just turn your radio on. You will probably not hear Mozart or Beethoven or Ligeti or Glass or Adams or someone else of all these composers which are discussed here in this forum. You will probably hear a pop or a rock song.

So what I have done is this: I picked a typical pop song as a source of inspiration, analyzed it and tried to transfer some of its basic elements (harmonic structure, mood, emotions) into my piece (without copying anything directly; of course I did not intend to compose only a simple rearrangement). Actually this was a quite difficult matter because it turned out that the harmonic structure of my 'source of inspiration' was way too simple to create a piece of chamber music of a decent duration. I needed to introduce some harmonic variations and modulations and of course also the original melody needed to be replaced by something different. Finally only a few fragments of the original harmonies have been retained. But I hope that I could demonstrate that this compositional method, at least in principle, can work.

BTW, the pop song that served as my source of inspiration was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw1zXW8qYCI

I didn't have time to write anything for this competition Jani, I was busy composing a couple preludes for piano. I would really like to participate in the next one though.

The main themes of my piece were written in 2005, I think. Got abandoned for all these years so glad I had an excuse to complete it. Originally it was for Violin and Orchestra but I don't like MIDI strings so changed it to Clarinet.

Originally Posted by Crudblud

Thanks, I didn't expect Call and Entry to win.

The backing group is a slightly detuned five piece chromatic* gamelan ensemble using various mutes, and the solo instrument is a viola. It was originally gamelan + accordion (the piece I wrote for this still exists and will probably appear somewhere else in future) but there were far too many issues in terms of balance to work out in time for the deadline, no matter how I configured it the accordion would either be way too loud or too quiet. I had wanted to compose for gamelan type instruments for some time, and when the second round's instrumentation was chosen I thought it would be a nice way to test that out. I settled on the viola because I wanted something with a fairly expansive range (and I'm pretty sure I cover all of it) that could produce clean lines over the gamelan, that and I didn't want to go with the obvious choice of the violin.

Earlier I mentioned that it was a chromatic gamelan, this is worth noting because traditional gamelan is designed in accordance with very specific tuning systems in mind, usually the heptatonic Pelog or the pentatonic Slendro, which do not fit precisely in to 12 tone equal temperament. I went with the 12 tone tuning because I wanted more notes, basically. I do actually use an approximation of Pelog as the basis for one of the lines in the 7/8 "dance" section in the middle of the piece, the line in question is playing 4/4 so it takes a while to resolve.

I'm curious what about the title. Who is Méaoire Seatain?

@jani - yes, juergen was right that your sound system was problematic and I do think that was a real problem

@jergen - very interesting idea, and one with pedigree - ironically. I think your piece is much better than the pop song though

Originally Posted by Klavierspieler

I'm curious what about the title. Who is Méaoire Seatain?

Not a person, just something I made up. Doesn't really mean anything.

So I'm a dirty rotten liar, doncha know, and I reckon I'll spend a little time discussing the construction of my piece here and now. Yes indeed, time to demystify it and make it boring. *sigh*

The basic extramusical premise is that this is the beginning of a religious service, let's not worry about who and what the service is for, but we shall say that it marks the beginning of a festival that lasts for two weeks. It is a fictitious festival, and the deities concerned are much the same, I only mention this so that we can hopefully avoid the My Beliefs vs. Your Beliefs 99999999999999th episode extravaganza. In this instance the viola represents the guy who talks really loud so everyone can hear him, but here he is obviously wordless, which is just as well because that stuff gets on my nerves pretty fast. I specifically opted for the glissando and portamento playing for the bulk of the piece because I wanted to evoke the sounds of folk singing, there are little bits of various cultural styles in there, but far too chopped up to pick out individual examples and have them mean much of anything. I already talked about why I chose the gamelan instruments, but from an extramusical perspective these are basically a real-world approximation of what they would sound like. There is historical precedent as well; gamelan was and still is traditionally used exclusively for ritual, ceremony and celebration, the concert hall is a relatively new venue for such performances.

The Call

The shortest of the two parts, only lasting approximately 1:20 out of 6:40. We begin with a thorough exploration of Nicolas Slonimsky's Grandmother Chord. I chose to split the chord in to tetrads, this makes practical sense for the instruments to some extent, but I also think the way it sounds is more organic - slowly climbing to the top before falling back down again in a mere instant. The instruments are staggered in their starting positions by a beat, and also rhythmically by a gap of two beats or more, this way each instrument plays the lead cyclically, and we are introduced to their respective voices. Soon after this the viola begins to "speak", mimicking the previous ascent in a staggered and stuttering glissando. If you're in an especially Biblical mood you might imagine this is symbolic of resurrection, or you might just sigh and say "oh get on with it Crudblud, you gasbag." So, we've climbed the octaves in a highly ordered manner, it seemed only fitting to do it again but in a different way; the transition from the Call to the Entry is signified by the sounding of the harmonic series, split between one of the sarons and the viola. It's significant or something, probably.

The Entry

A bit of a misleading title, as by this point the "congregation" should have entered already, but in fact "entry" simply refers to something which I forgot. Let's just say it means the entry of the guy, even though he was clearly already there. There are ostensibly four sections to the Entry; a greeting (1:20-2:20), a dance (2:20-3:40), a sermon or speech or something (3:40-5:40) and finally the transition to whatever the next part is. The greeting contains a number of allusions to folk fiddle playing in Europe and elsewhere, as well as a very small glissando bit which always makes me think of Stéphane Grappelli, in addition to these, there is brief use of a pentatonic "Japanese scale" which to me sounds like the sort of thing used for Gagaku court music. The dance, which I talked about in the previous post, uses 7/8 as a base, but only one of the instruments actually plays 7/8, and a couple could be considered to be playing free meter entirely. This section is the most "gamelan" in the entire piece, and makes use of equal temperament scales derived from Pelog and Slendro and abstractions thereof, I also further cheated the stipulations by making use of mutes, which introduce some more new sounds to the piece. Slowly the rhythm becomes more uniform and hits a decelerando leading us in to the sermon. Right in the middle there is almost a silence, I suppose we could think of the chord slowly ringing out to be something of a "hallelujah" moment, though not exactly. Around this time the Grandmother Chord begins creeping in to the gamelan again, although it is altered through some mechanism that I don't actually remember, but it is significantly extramusically in suggesting a change, perhaps in the place, the audience, the speaker, or all of these. The final section resembles the beginning, and although it is much slower at first, a subtle accelerando brings us roughly back to the same speed we started at.

Well, hopefully that explains just about everything that's going on there. I hope it doesn't make the piece boring for you, but I felt like it was worth explaining as it was an unusually technically conscious piece for me.

^^ Great, I imagined all that (seriously). I think you have developed the ideas in a very thorough and effective way. Have you heard the piece "Rituel" by Pierre Boulez?.

Originally Posted by aleazk

^^ Great, I imagined all that (seriously). I think you have developed the ideas in a very thorough and effective way. Have you heard the piece "Rituel" by Pierre Boulez?.

Well I'm glad it succeeded in evoking those ideas for you. And thank you for your kind, albeit brief, assessment.

As regards Boulez; no. I did have Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna on CD as part of Michael Gielen's Mahler recordings, in which he includes modern orchestral works by Webern, Schoenberg, Boulez etc., but while I was streamlining my Mahler collection I casually let that one go without listening to the extra content, so I don't actually have access to a recording at the moment.