I settled on a sixteen-instrument ensemble, where two coincidences neatly dovetailed: MIDI handles channels in groups of 16, and the staves for those instruments also pretty nicely filled exactly one page vertically. It's scored, somewhat arbitrarily, for first and second violins, viola, cello, bass, harp, flute, oboe, English horn, bassoon, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, French horn, and xylophone. I started sometime in mid-March or so, and worked on it off and on for the next month and a half. In early May I gave a short talk at our astronomy department's weekly Monday lunch (which often features people talking about hobbies or interests) and gave the first public premiere of the (mostly) finished work by playing the synthesized MIDI audio. Since then I've tweaked a few little things (such as changing instrument parts to the correct keys for transposing instruments), and this weekend I finally worked out an easy way to render MIDI to audio. (Turns out there's a convenient Python package, midi2audio, which makes it a snap.)
Anyway, here's a video I made so I could display the sheet music along with the audio:
This was, obviously, my first such attempt at orchestration and I have to say, I really enjoyed it. I'm sure if I actually knew music theory I'd be able to weave even more beautiful passages, but even so I stumbled upon quite a few bits that still give me goosebumps, or which just sound lovely: the gentle introduction of the harp in the first variation, the punctuating xylophone taps on pages 8–10 (but especially on page 9) like little blacksmith's hammers, the interplay between trumpet and oboe (page 11), the pastoral, sublime repetition of the second variation (page 14) right after the bombastic introduction a page before, the staccato viola (page 17) interspersing with the flute*, the introduction of the third variation with its gentle, lilting interplay between the woodwinds and harp, the xylophone intermittently shadowing the oboe (page 23), the growing crescendo involving nearly all the instruments which ends that variation (page 24), those two insistent growling low notes from the bassoon in the fourth variation (page 27), the trumpet making a surprise appearance in the fifth variation (page 34), the four-part instrument unison between the violins, viola, and trumpet on page 38 (never fails to bring out the goosebumps), and the entirety of the last two pages as everything slows, and builds, and crescendos before the final cascading descent to the finish. I've listened to this piece I don't know how many dozens of times at this point (both my version and others), and I have yet to tire of it.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. I hope you enjoy the music, and feel free to point out any musical mistakes I might have made—I did have an experienced violinist friend look it over so I'm fairly confident the strings don't have any unplayable notes (he found those already), but I might still have made mistakes with the other instruments. A hui hou!
*The staccato markings were one of the few liberties I took with the original notes along with adding a few trills in places, though there are a number of trills in the second variation in the original. The dynamics markings and tempi are also mine.
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