Leaderboard

YOUNG COMPOSERS COMPOSITION COMPETITION Summer of 2017 Welcome to the 2nd official summer competition! It’s a time to go outside and see the sun, concerts, murals, dance, and all things relaxing, and we’re hoping to capture the essence of that for this competition. Modest Mussorgsky famous wrote his piece, “Pictures at an Exhibition”, written after Viktor Hartmann’s paintings of travel were shown at an exhibition in his honor. While some are lost, we’ve been treated to many different musical renderings of different art in the past, including literature, art, and even dance, retrospectively. This competition will have composers engage in all kinds of art in new ways, and create new works that cross and defy different mediums and genres! GOAL: Create a suite of 4-9 pieces based on different works of visual art (painting, oil on canvas, sculpture, architecture, etc.), a la “Pictures at an Exhibition”. These works of art should be connected in some way, though this criteria requirement is arbitrary by design to encourage the creativity of composers. ENTRY REQUIREMENTS: *Be a member of YC. *Signal your desire to enter by September 10th by commenting on this thread. *Submit your entry by September 17th (11:59:59 PST), provided you signaled your desire to entry correctly. *At the time of submission, submit an audio mockup (MIDIs are acceptable). *We also want members of this site to volunteer their time to judge. If you do volunteer, I ask that you have some working knowledge of art and orchestration. *One piece per composer. SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: At the time of submission submit a PDF with: *all art works used, labeled with the artist and the date. *a short, written description of the criteria linking the art you chose. *a written description of the relevance of each artistic work to each movement. Your piece should include: *4-9 short movements all labeled with the titles of each work at the top of each. *Any ensemble you desire. *A run time of no less than 5 minutes and no more than 45. SCORING: Met the minimum/maximum art piece requirement (disqualification if invalid) Submitted a PDF with all the necessary materials (disqualification if invalid) Sound orchestration /15 Good art -> music relevance, according to the composer and judge, individually /15 Sound quality of recording /10 Score quality /10 Please let me know if you’d like to enter as a participant or judge in the comments. Good luck! For composers who want to compete but aren't totally sure about art, this is a good guide to start: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com Entrants: 1. Monarcheon 2. bkho (potential) 3. Gustav Johnson 4. punintentional 5. mikelee531 6. Austenite 7. Rowan Abrey (potential) 8. Ilyankor 9. Luis Hernández 10. tmarko 11. luderart Judges: 1. Maarten Bauer 2. Noah Brode

This is another little piece of the suit about my cat activities. This time about the hunting. Yes, I prevent them to do it, and kill little birds, etc... Nature. I've written more pieces but I won't upload them all. This is just one last example. It's funny to compose thinking of them.

Very cool competition. If I can find the right inspiration, I'd love to enter. If not, I'd love to judge .

Guess my vote

Hi Maarten and Luis, Thanks for listening and enjoying. Maarten, You are right about the interlude (waltz VI). I suppose I don't tend to write long melodies that aren't 'square' and got carried away in making people listen to it twice. Haha. When I say Viennese, I tend to look at Schubert and Lanner's waltzes and landler. I'm not a scholar about these things but I can definitely feel a difference between the Viennese waltzes from Chopin's which are more French with hints of Polish. I tried to bring out the 'starting slow and gradual rise to a tempo' effect which you will often find in Strauss waltzes when masterfully conducted. Sometimes Schubert's dances are performed like this too. Next, I tried to factor in the 'atempause' effect: a slight delay in the second beat of the waltz. Also, I tried to keep long stretchy melodies instead of flourishes in 8th notes like in Chopin waltzes. Of course, I didn't study much into it and wrote the stuff from intuition and learning by ear. ~Archis P.S. I use sibelius 6 for writing and Aria Steinway VST for execution. I try my best to modulate the tempo and dynamics but it is always a far cry from an actual performance. Why don't I just play them then? A bit out of my pianistic expertise. These waltzes I perhaps could play but I just don't have the time.

Hi Noah, Sorry I've not been around much lately. Between starting a new job and trying to wrap up my own music projects, it's been a couple of crazy hectic weeks. Anyway... Overall, I really like your revisions. The piece feels a lot more unified now. Since you're pushing for a May 1 entry deadline, I'm going to focus my commentary on getting the work cleaned up and ready to submit. 1. The balance of the opening section is off. The way I'm reading the score, all three trumpets would be playing the same notes for the first four bars. Likewise the three trombones. Those lines are going to be way more prominent than the others. Either split the trumpet and trombone sections into parts straight away or indicate one only for the first 4 bars. 2. I'd leave the euphonium out of the first 4 bars. The trombones will be clearer in the fanfare without the rounder tone and softer attacks of the euph. 3. I know you're kind of limited by the format of the score and what MuseScore will let you do, but ideally Trombones 1 and 2 would go with the trumpets on the fanfare line. Three trombones plus Bari Sax, Tuba, and Euphonium on that bass line is overkill. 4. In 4/4, the staccato half seems odd to me. Maybe a quarter tied to an 8th to indicate an off on 4? 5. Throughout the piece, it looks like there are only 1 or 2 trumpets. I never see the third anywhere. Third trumpet is very standard in a concert band or wind ensemble, so I think you need to go back through and look for places to do three part trumpet writing. Similar feedback on the trombones, although 3rd trombone will sometimes go off and double the tuba while 1 and 2 are doing something else. Also, similiar feedback on Clarinets. 6. Unison Alto Saxes cut through the ensemble a lot. The places where you have two altos on the top of a duet and the tenor on the bottom would likely be better served with the altos playing both duet lines and the tenor doing something else. 7. The chord at m. 24 is going to get muddy. Given the harmonies you're using the bar, the euphonium should be up an octave on the G at least. Also, this is a great spot to block out your trombones and horn in three- and four- part chords. Remember, things doubled at the unison and in octaves are always louder. 8. Your writing really shines in the sections where you're using less of the ensemble. I love the movement of the line through the different solo instruments at B. 9. When it comes to allocating solos, they should generally be placed in the first part for any section, regardless of range. The best players will be on that part. In the Horns, there is the additional aspect of managing fatigue for the player. In most bands and orchestras, the practice is to have two players on the first Horn part dividing duties. The principal will take solos and important lead sections while the assistant first will handle a lot of the rest. 10. Measure 93, great Bass Clarinet line! The player will thank you for that one. 11. I would leave the Bass Clarinet out of mm. 101-104. That gives the player a breather after the solo line and gives you a cleaner sound with just bassoons and horns. At 105, when the trombone comes in, it makes sense to add bass clarinet to thicken the texture. 12. At D, is the 6/4 grouped as three half notes or two dotted half notes? With all the syncopation in the accompaniment, it's going to be hard for the group to establish time. If it's grouped as half notes, use a 3/2. Also, for the players with the 8th note accompaniment, beam those by the half note beat so it's really easy to see. If it's grouped as dotted half notes, I'd recommend using a 3/4 so the players have more frequent barlines. 13. Also at D, the bass drum part should be: quarter note, 8th rest, 8th note, quarter rest, 8th rest, 8th note, half rest (or two quarters). This allows the player to see the beats better. 14. The high Cb in Horn 1 at m. 137 is in the extreme upper range of the instrument. If you know that you'll have a good horn player to do this, it's OK. Anything above top of the staff G is really risky to write for anything other than a professional group. 15. The key change from Cb to C feels unnecessary to me. It's a two-bar trip through the key. Probably better handled with accidentals. Likewise the three bars of E following. Also, the double bar feels misplaced. The trumpet fanfare is the end of the old section to my ear, not the beginning of the new section. Personally, this feels like a good spot to go keyless. The tonality is shifting so often I think you'll get a better result from E to F is players were just reading accidentals. 16. The Flute 2 solo at F should be a Flute 1 solo. It's technically intricate enough you want your best player on it. Also, it would be clearer to have Flute 1 play the lead in with Flute 2 holding the B below. Also, in the opening triplets, the F double sharp should be a G. 17. Rehearsal F is in C major, so it should get a key signature of C major. That will make the alterations in your exotic scale much more obvious. By the way, nice scale choice here! 18. At G, again the Flute solo should be in Flute 1. 19. At m. 194, I think F# major might actually be a better key for this. Your exotic scale is created by adding flats to a major scale, meaning Gb major starts picking up a lot of double flats. 20. The "Change to Tubular Bells" marking is incorrect. Harpists are specialists who do not double elsewhere in the percussion section. By tradition, so are timpanists. You need a single Tubular Bells staff in the score. 21. What sort of bass are you envisioning for this? With the marking "Electric Bass", you're going to get a fretted rock band bass plugged into an amp. If you want a classical bass, this should be marked String Bass, with the abbreviation "Str. Bs." (Why not just Double Bass, as in the orchestra? The tradition of calling an orchestra bass a String Bass in the concert band comes from the days (say through about 1940 or so) when the tubas were referred to as "Basses".) 22. On the last page, Horns 3 and 4 should be in unison on the upper line, not octaves. As written, Horn 4 is wasted on a note that the bass trombone is going to be belting out anyway. Also, that way you can get rid of the 8vb marking. 23. In general, I think your score would benefit from slightly smaller staves with more space between them. Right now, everything feels a little cramped. 24. I don't know how much of the staff grouping you can control in MuseScore, but I've attached an example document showing an example layout for Concert Band based on my usual practices. Regarding groupings, families of instruments (Flutes, Double Reeds, Clarinets, etc.) are grouped with winged brackets. Within families, staves with the same instrument (Oboe 1 and Oboe 2, for example) are further grouped with a hairline bracket. Curly braces are reserved for instruments where two staves are played by a single player, such as harp. Barlines run vertically through instrument families only. If you can, it's helpful to have a little extra space between instrument families. 25. Regarding staff sharing, no more than two parts can share a staff. My usual practice is to have the following share when possible: Oboes 1 and 2 Bassoons 1 and 2 Clarinets 2 and 3 - Clarinet 1 is usually the most distinct clarinet part, so it gets its own staff. Trumpets 2 and 3 - Same logic as clarinets. Horns 1 and 2, Horns 3 and 4 - This puts the horns into high-low pairs. Trombones 1 and 2 - This leaves trombone 3 or bass trombone (which should be called for if going lower than E natural below the bass clef) to be more independent or to double with the tuba. Percussion 1 - Snare Drum and Bass Drum sharing a staff. Percussion 2 - Other unpitched percussion sharing a staff. If the parts end up having highly independent figures, they should get their own staves.

Hi all, Here's a little vignette for solo piano. Hope you enjoy it! (Note: for those listening closely, the playback on the feathered beams is faked using tuplets.)

This is the wrong question to be asking. The question you should be asking is what do i want to write, a hollywood movie score or a classical work? Film composition and classical composition are two completely different disciplines and the music is structured in completely different ways. Several composers' work inhabits a sort of neutral zone between the two (e.g. Vaughan Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Tan Dun) but all of those composers started out in the classical world with rigorous training—their first loves were classical works or popular music, rather than film scores—and went on to write for film afterwards. Not many people ever seem to go the other way round. Writing classical music requires so much more knowledge and training and for most people it has to be training that starts very early. If you really want to write a classical work, particularly in a large form such as a symphony, you need several things. First of all an intimate understanding of every instrument you are undertaking to write for, its actual sound, capabilities, range and expression. Books tell only part of the story. Second the ability to create a musical argument. If you are working in a relatively traditional style (something i recommend for beginners) this means you must give the piece a focus—a key, a theme, a leitmotif, a twelve-tone row—develop it, depart from it and return to it. This is also rather vague, but dedicated analysis of major works of the symphonic repertoire from Haydn to Shostakovich (roughly) should prove instructive. Third and probably most important is the ability to visualise the entire structure in your mind—to give every sound a meaning in the overall direction of the piece. A film score is discontinuous, but in a classical piece each note must inevitably lead to the next, such that the piece could have been composed no other way. If you write tonal music a sense of key (or at least "grand cadence") is necessary—in a film score one can modulate up a semitone every time the suspense needs to be cranked up, but in classical music this palls quickly and makes all keys become more or less interchangeable (this is carried about as far as possible in pieces like Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande with tiresome results) to the detriment of the tonal hierarchy according to which the piece is organised. If your music is post-tonal in technique you are responsible for determining the musical logic that will be the generating entity of your composition. For some specifics—there is no fundamental difference in scoring or orchestration between film and concert music (a lot of film scores use orchestration clearly derived from Tchaikovsky & Wagner). There's nothing wrong with being linear—all music is linear; in fact it's much better to be consistently linear than to stop on a perfect cadence every eight bars. Keep your four- and eight-bar phrases for forms that do not exceed twenty-four bars in length. In a symphony you want to space your music in much broader phrases, and more importantly, elide the ends of those phrases so that the music never stops dead. Periodic phrase rhythms can still be used, but they should be alternated with phrases of irregular length to avoid monotony. If you want a locus classicus for this sort of thing in a symphonic context, this (large file) is probably it. (along with most of the other things i mentioned, although i wouldn't necessarily recommend it as an orchestration manual.) With all this said... if what you really love is film music, there's no reason to feel you need to write classical. It may help in some aspects—the way an english degree has a chance to improve your writing skills—but it's hardly necessary or even desirable. If you're passionate about both genres, you should definitely try doing both (i know much less about film composing but Max Castillo/Jem7/several other people can offer superior advice on the subject).