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Ideas for music/opera librettos just come to me out if the blue. As soon as I get struck with an idea I go write it down on manuscript as a short one to four bar sketch. I then pace around the house frantically humming to myself and waving my arms about until I develop the idea. Once I am happy with what I have developed, I write those things down so I don't forget them. After that I usually go into some incredibly strange dance sequence while reciting nonsense poetry and muttering to myself about whether I drink too much black coffee.

A solo violin will eventually have to change bow (turn the bow to the other direction). Some great violinists have been known to do that so well, so as the public could not tell when it actually happened. But it's there alright and there's nothing wrong in asking for that. For a violin section, however, things can be a little different. If you have 10 violins, for example (or 18 for that matter), and each one change bow at a different time, it goes completely unnoticeable, and thus one could assume you get an indefinite... legato (or tenuto). Same goes for a choir. A human must breath, but a choir can breath unsyncronized, thus retaining the sense of continuity. Moreover, for the strings there are other techniques which will allow the violin to play longer sustained notes, sort of... For example the tremolo (tremoli in plural). You don't get long bows, but very short ones, so you can sustain that for as long as you want (of course it becomes tiring if you over do it). The 5th Symphony by Beethoven, has a long sustained note after the first three notes. If you're referring to that, I believe that it can be done with a single bow, assuming everything else is a different bow, or a detached bow.

There we (hopefully) go. I've included the motifs at the top. As you can see, I used one for the melody, and one for the accompaniment, just to fit the requirement that everything in the music must be derived from that material. The main motif is based on how the sellers in the market in Moore Street, here in Dublin, shout as they try to sell their fruit, veg, flowers, &c. When they shout, they always seem to do it in a variation of that rhythm, and they drop a major second at the end, for some reason. One of the developments of the motif (the one with cross-barline beaming) is based on an actual variation that they seem to throw in every now and then. On the whole the piece is meant to portray the YC user johnbucket walking down the cacophony and confusion that is Moore Street, with the sellers shouting on all sides of him, hence both the repetition and stretto of the motif, and the use of something in-or-around JB's style of writing, including some neoclassical things and a bit of Bach. PDF MP3 XML

Orchestra warming = love.