my new project/goal

Hey everyone, I just thought I'd announce my new project.. goal thingy.

The idea just occurred to me, and it's a little ambitious, but it will (hopefully) vastly improve my composing skills. And I like to be ambitious.

So I had an idea, while playing a game (wesnoth..) to write a war, but in song. That sounds a little confusing.

Like I want to write a series of pieces that dipict a war scene, and each piece will depict a different battle. And this will be a made up war, and I was thinking that it would be different mythical races, not countries. Like ogres, dwarfs, elves, centurions etc. not Germany, France, you get the picture.

Each of these pieces will be of a different arrangement, the first one (the way it's happening in my mind) will be for full orchestra, and it will take the entire time to write, because it has little clips of each mini-battle in it. It will depict the entire war, and will just be entitled "war"

All of the other pieces will (as I said earlier) depict little battles within the war, for example the dwarves vs. elves (and will be entitled just that) and won't be for full orchestra, but like for bassoon, clarinet, violin and piano. (not that exact arrangement, but you get the idea.)

It's a huge project, and I'm not expecting to get it don any time soon, obviously, but I will set a due date of July 4th, that way it's easier to remember and gives me (hopefully) ample time. Depending on how close to being done I am by then, I'll reset it to probably August 15, the day school starts.

I just wanted to share with other young composers like me (just more experienced) my goal, now I'm going to go down, get some coffee and start on this beast.

-Mathieu

EDIT: I just had another thought- unrelated to writing the song- that I should make a journal in the forums. just so I personally can keep track of my progress, any for anyone else interested

That sounds pretty epic man, good luck to you.

I'm wondering how you're going to represent the different events in the story. Are you gonna use allot of motifs for the piece? like you could have violins represent the centurions, flutes for the elves, Trumpets for the dwarfs or something like that. Or maybe you could use different melodic themes. Just a suggestion though.

You should check out this piece be Prokofiev. It has to be the most epic battle theme of all time. Notice how Prokofiev establishes the motif for the German army during the scene where the priest is blessing the German troops in front of the tents.

clipser - Alexander Nevsky - The Battle on the Ice (Yuri Temirkanov)

Btw, your idea about the smaller pieces for each battle sounds cool. I bet you could weave main motifs from each battle piece into the war theme to represent different stages from the war.

yeah, I'm going to use motifs for each race like you said, like i've started writing the battle of ents vs. ogres (ents are trees, like in LOTR) and i'm having the ents represented by bassoons (and a contra! w00t contra ftw!) and the ogres by trombones.

I made a journal, it can be found here