Symphony No. 2

I had more ideas, so I put them together and created a second symphony. The instruments are the same as my first symphony: Vibraphone, Marimba, Crash Cymbals, Cabasa, Piano, Celesta, String Synthesizer, Jazz Guitar, and Acoustic Bass. I placed emphasis on establishing a melody and then having it reappear later. The piece lasts about 20 minutes, double the length of my first symphony, and was written in Musescore 2 using the Compifont soundfont. I worked on it for about a week and a half. Like my first one, the entire piece is of original composition, unless I somehow copied existing melodies without realizing it. Also like my first one, in the mp3, there are popping sounds that I believe are caused by an issue with Musescore and the guitars.

The first movement starts off slow, and then becomes more upbeat as it goes on. The second movement is austere and jazzy. The third movement, like my first symphony, is pretty much the first movement backwards with a few changes and additions here and there. This symphony serves as a sister to my first symphony, but it tells a different story. I feel like it also turned out sounding like the soundtrack to a video game. Indeed, there are parts inspired by the music of the Mario Golf series (especially Advance Tour), composed by Motoi Sakuraba. Other parts are made up of musical ideas that I've actually had for years. For example, the sixteenth notes in the first movement at measure 49 were inspired by a musical idea that I came up with more than ten years ago. I was at an amusement park we have here in Pennsylvania called Hersheypark, and I was in line to ride the ferris wheel. The ferris wheel machinery had this sort of hum to it that sounded to me like the notes C and G, and it stuck with me all these years later until I finally used it in a musical piece. In the end, I decided to kind of have fun with the instrumentation, and not really pay attention to whether or not it could be performed by a real orchestra.

The Good: I found your harmonic ideas beautiful. Also, before having read your post, I did get a sinking feeling that some ideas were reappearing in some guise, which was a great touch. The re-use is subtle because you seem to have so many ideas, but it was there and subtlety is cool.

The Bad: I was missing rewarding cadences and transitions to glue it all together, especially in the first half (but later I found it okay sometimes, which means either I got conditioned to it due to the piece's length, or you made it work.)

The Ugly: Nothing about it was truly ugly in my opinion. Try a little harder next time 

Love your rhythmic grooves in this. I agree with Hugget about the opening being a little stagnant harmonically, but 

You have a strength for fitting together inter-locking lines in really fresh and exciting ways! I'm thinking specifically about the ending of mvt. 2.

Overall a nice work! Sorry I can't give more feedback right now, I'm listening at work.

Cheers,

Gustav Johnson