golgicomplex

Delightful! Original in language, Adamsian in sound... are you familiar with Stravinsky's ballets Orpheus and Apollo? Didn't get to finish listening as I'm needed at a rehearsal at the moment, but great work!

I would suggest getting a copy of Vincent Persichetti's Twentieth Century Harmony and working your way through the exercises. Get some piano reductions of some of the ground-breaking works, too... Rite of Spring among them. It blew my mind when I realized the effects one could get just by stacking dominant 7th chords in different keys (RoS is "tonal," by the way--the last movement is clearly in D and the final chord is DEAD, interestingly enough)... the entire second half is based more-or-less on a five-note cell, too. Les Noces, Afternoon of a Faun, Schoenberg op. 11, Pierrot Lunaire, any Bartok quartet... And that was all... five years ago that I figured that out? Once you get Persichetti's teaching in your head, "any note can follow any other note, and any tone can sound simultaneously with any other tone..." oh, the doors that opens! It then becomes your job to figure out your own approach to arranging tones. I like to work with modes and jazz harmonies (not necessarily in jazz styles) as starting points from which I just take off. Nadia Boulanger taught her students, "write a lot of notes, keep the good ones." I agree with that, but I also caution you not to write dissonance just for the sake of writing dissonance, because then it runs the risk of obscuring what you are trying to say. Even RoS has moments of "consonance" (relatively speaking) that make it work. You're still young! Look to models, heavens yes, but don't force yourself into any kind of mold.

The Latin Wikisource (Vicifons) is a fabulous source of all varieties of Latin texts... hope you paid attention in high school Latin! Also often set by choral composers include: Te Deum, Quam Pulchra Es, Puer Natus, O Nata Lux, Stabat Mater, Salve Regina, Gloria, Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis... ordo per saeculas ambulat (that is, the list trots on.)

Ack! I've been outed! Hahah, yes, the reference is a little too obvious, but I was hoping that the modal counterpoint in the text setting would be enough to counterbalance it... you wouldn't believe the trouble we in the choir had trying to get the second block of polymetric fugal writing learned (at "felices ignes horum malachoth"). But hey, I liked how it sounded! I am indeed a fan of John Adams' music. Always have been, always will, and I admit that I think I could have handled the rhythmic drive in this section a little more creatively--but I'm at least proud of myself in that I've gotten out of the pattern of everything "edgy" I write turning out like some Rite of Spring redux, which was what most of my output for the first, oh, two years of my composing career turned out. I also admit that I could have handled the string writing differently, but here were our forces in our chamber orchestra: 6.5.3.3.2... Part of that may also be my wind band and choral background--I'm a saxophonist (I actually play the line at the beginning of the recording!) and a choral/opera guy. I've been wanting to write something exclusively for strings for some time now but I'm going for the most performance opportunities possible--so I've been focusing on piano music, art songs, and choral pieces. I am certainly planning to continue my work in music as it's so much a part of me and is decidedly one of my two vocations, but I don't take myself so seriously--especially after losing the honors composition competition to a non-major this past year. I'm working as a church choir director right now, so in a way I am following both of my vocations simultaneously. The added challenge of that kind of work is learning how to write interesting and engaging music for an untrained volunteer choir--they'd never be able to sing Paradiso. I love it, though.

Poulenc's "Ave Verum Corpus"--both of them, the one from Carmelites (act 2 sc 4) and the standalone for SSA Choir.

An important addendum to any composer's library is Nicholas Slonimsky's "Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns," which contains an exhaustive catalog of sets, chords, cells, embellished cells, octave divisions, twelve-tone arrangements, geometric music... it's a tremendous text and everyone who aspires to be a composer should have it, as well as anyone who wants to pursue virtuosity in performing 20th/21st century music. Here it is on Amazon. It's on sale, too! If you want to branch into commercial scoring as well, Henry Mancini's "Sounds and Scores" is an absolute requirement as well.

Well, yes... we could only perform a portion since my school was (and still is) fairly small (ca. 1,400 undergraduate students), so we started on page 8 in the score and continued until the end of page 31. I do wish we could have done the whole thing, though :\ I'm in the process of reducing the whole work (along with Inferno and Purgatorio) down to a piano four-hands arrangement to make it more accessible. Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

Did you spend much time listening to Ibert or Creston before writing this? Some echoes of the Persichetti parable too. Fantastic work for the saxophone, and if I had the time and a horn on hand I'd learn this (I only own a tenor, but I played alto throughout undergrad). Most of what needs to be said has been said... Wow. Let's have the piano reduction, please (maybe piano and drumset).

Hello all, I haven't been active on the forums for a while aside from occasionally popping in to listen to new works and avail myself of some hearty debate between the Know-God and No-God camps. Having just finished up my BA in composition at Asbury College I figured it would be appropriate to post the score and recording of my magnum opus for my undergraduate career (I'm in graduate school now in a field unrelated to music). A portion of the entire work was performed on my senior recital in May, but the full work is a larger endeavor. I've attached the program note from my recital along with a synth recording and a PDF orchestral score. The notes are centric on the pas-de-deux and glorification chorus since those were the excerpts performed, but many of the comments are applicable to the whole work. Enjoy! And yes, the quotations of the opening bar of movement III from Symphonie de Psaumes is completely intentional homage! Performance recording on Youtube . Starts at the Larghetto in the score and continues until the Lunga.EDIT: I just now noticed that the horn parts are only labeled "Horn in F"... there are supposed to be two of them and I'm just now realizing this proofreading error (among others). An mp3 is en route once I find a place to host it. EDIT 2: In the performance recording you hear an organ; it's not on the score but we added it a week before the performance to help the choir out (only about 25 voices as a goodly number of the singers were also in the orchestra). paradiso.pdf paradiso.mid

I quite enjoyed this. Here are some things to mention: - There is one fragment of a phrase towards the end of the soprano section that doesn't quite seem to fit, but it's just that one section. If I could open the .mus file I'd pinpoint it, but I'm running Finale 05 and couldn't open it : Such is life. - I liked how you brought back the rhythmic motif in the choir section towards the end. For the beginning of it, I was wondering if it was going to be completely different. It seemed like it wandered too long, too far away from the heart of the piece. You might want to tighten that up a bit--then again, I'm not looking at the text, so this is from a purely musical standpoint, literature aside. - You handled your harmonic language nicely and stayed within the sound world you introduced at the beginning. I detect a hint of Faure's influence--would that be an accurate assessment? - Just an aesthetic thing: I like the way the accompaniment sounds like chimes in the distance at the end, and I'd have ended it there (i.e. before the final triplet gesture) as it worked quite beautifully, but that's just my opinion. Good work. I think with a bit of tightening up and polishing, this could be a very successful work--it is already very accessible without being hokey, and I think you "got it" in working with sacred music, which requires a certain... touch, if you will.

Polymodal chromaticism is Bela Bartok's term for chromatically shifting between modes while keeping a somewhat constant tonal center. A picardy third is the simplest example. Bartok's preferred modes to shift between were lydian and phrygian, as that puts all twelve notes at your disposal. As with any technique, there's a certain amount of requisite finesse to make it sound well. As for my harmonic procedures, a lot of what I do is a synthesis of my formal training in Jazz harmony and Common Practice, along with my own study of twentieth century harmony and stile antico counterpoint (read Persichetti's "Twentieth Century Harmony" and the Fux book--those are by far the best primers in those styles). I'd definitely cite Poulenc, Ravel, and Stravinsky as my top three influences in this respect. My usual goal when writing is to achieve a "cool" sound temperature without it becoming blues, if that likening works for you, but I change the "temperature" to suit the piece. In cool music, I like to work with primarily consonant intervals and only the amount of tension needed to drive the piece forward. Close-set polychords are out of the question, of course. In hot music, I work more with rhythm and subdivision in addition to using more mode shifts. Mostly I try to make a fresh, new sound that the audience will be able to grasp while still being sophisticated to a degree. I'm not a fan of flaunting avant-garde techniques that one needs a DMA and a week alone with the score to understand, but I do like inventing new sounds and using old ones in refreshing ways.

Thank you (all) for your kind words. Also, I think the text is quite right for the music I wrote (and vice versa, as they depend on each other), and I've got no issue going there, if you will (if you'd like to know why I feel so, PM me and I'll explain). As for the voice crossing/doubling, I find that some degree of crossing adds a bit of variety and keeps lines more singable--I do agree that it should be used cautiously, and I will keep that in mind as I continue my choral work. I am somewhat experienced in writing for choir (and polyphony in general), but there's always room for improvement... I'm a counterpoint junkie, what can I say?

Hey y'all, thought I'd share a short motet I whipped together for a concert this coming fall. It's based on a Catholic exorcism prayer to which I added a couple of lines. I was going for something resolute and lively, a good "make 'em sit down and shut up" piece for the beginning of a concert. I mainly wanted to write something that would stretch my counterpoint and polymodal chromatic writing, so this is more of a choral etude, if you will. It's in a pretty rudimentary prelude-invention-recapitulation (ABA) form, and it's focused around a B minor tonality (B has a nice thick sound, which works well for declamatory music like this, I find). You'll hear three motifs: the Gloria rhythm, the "Crux Sancta..." phrase, and the "Vade Retro..." phrase, the latter two being the blocks from which I build the counterpoint in the invention section. Comments and suggestions welcome. I can't seem to find my Adobe Acrobat CD's, so I can't put together a PDF at the moment. The .mus file is Finale '05. exorcism-ro.MUS

That's neither here nor there. The point is that he wrote some amazing music after his re-conversion to Catholicism in addition the wonderful music he wrote beforehand.

I, too, am a Poulenc fan. Several points of fact: He was a member of Les Six, a coalition of French composers (the other two well-known members were Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud), who were all modernists and moved to reject the voluptuous romanticism of Wagner and the other romantics. They followed Stravinsky's example, and you can hear his influence in many of Poulenc's works (cf. Gloria) Unrelated, Poulenc quit being gay somewhat when he rejoined the Catholic church in the... 1940's, I believe. He was a devout catholic from then on to his death, and a Christmas-Easter sort of catholic before then. It was this conversion that led him to write his choral masterpieces Gloria, Stabat Mater, and the opera Dialogues des Carmelites (which was my first exposure to his music, and is absolutely divine--I saw it on Closing Night at the Chicago Lyric Opera this March, with Isabel Bayrakdarian as Blanche de la Force). Every Poulenc fan needs to listen to Carmelites, flat-out, in particular the third act. Kent Nagano directed a great recording that's available on iTunes. It too is like Poulenc's music in general--love it or hate it.