MisterWesley

I think some of the writing here could be produced with good effect using woodwinds, real woodwinds. These sounds don’t do the writing any favors.

It yields a nice unpredictable surreal effect. There is also the occasional allusion to Impressionism. And at times a layering of more than one, sort of, “style.”

Rhapsody in Blue

(I hope I'm doing this in the correct place. If not, apologies.) For those of you who're always on the path of expanding your orchestration palette and technique, you may be interested to check out the first volume of my Orchestration In Depth series of digital books, for Apple Books, which are viewable in the Apple Books reader on MacOS, iPad, and iPhone, and with a little extra effort, on Windows, too, according to my understanding. This particular book focuses exclusively on scoring and composing for Timpani for many types of settings and purposes. I honestly don't think there has ever been anything on the market for composers quite like this book or this series. If you click on View in Apple Books, you should be able to click the sample button to see some random pages. Here is the link: https://books.apple.com/us/book/orchestration-in-depth-timpani/id6502035004

Late to the thread, but in case you're still wondering, or in case anyone else is, what you're asking is possible, but with caveats and provisos too many to list here. These are called pedal accents. Samuel Barber did this in Medea's Dance of Vengeance, Wuorien in his Bassoon Variations, Carter in 8 Pieces for 4 Timpani, and John Williams in the original Star Wars main title. When it gets faster than (roughly) the Barber example, you're venturing into articulated gliss territory. (Pardon the shameless plug, but I wrote the book on scoring for timpani, which you can find in my signature below.) Check out Randy Max playing his timpani adaptation of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to get an idea of some possibilities. But again, you have to know what you're doing to write this and you have to be certain your timpanist is up to caliber, and you have to be certain that the part can be learned within the timeframe the timpanist is certain to have. So writing something like this for a studio session where the timpanist is only now just seeing the part would be a disaster. In the John Williams case, his brother played the timpani part, so he might've know about it beforehand, and it was just a descending F mixolydian scale across three drums (which, by the way, requires the timpanist to sit rather than stand). Anyway, the Randy Max piece has a series of articulated glissandos and pedal accents. You can buy the score from him.

Really good writing there! My one slight criticism is that I think it would better serve your music to use a higher quality organ sound.

Yes, the Oldroyd book is outstanding. The one by Hugo Norden, Foundation Studies in Fugue, is an excellent short book to get you up and running pretty quickly on your first fugue. After that the Oldroyd, and maybe the exhaustive one by André Gedalge, called Treatise on Fugue, of which there is a public domain copy you can download for free, though I forget where. Before fugue, if you really want to go deep into Canon writing, for your strettos and whatnot, Hugo Norden's Technique of Canon book is fascinating.

There is no standard, of course, but one minute seems like it oughta be about the shortest, and three minutes maybe the longest. It might be worthwhile to look at the durations of some of the more well known cadenzas in the repertoire.

Sibelius Symphony no. 7 The Shostakovich symphonies Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements