The Six Adventurers - No. 1: Bery, The Huntsman.

Howdy there! I've worked on this piece for a while now, but only uploading it here today. This piece is supposed to be part of a suite - hence "The Six Adventurers" - but the other pieces are still in the works. 

"The Six Adventurers" is a suite which took characters from a role-play story to a musical level of interpretation. Each pieces are named after the characters. The suite is dedicated to a part of a role-play storyline from a role-play server called "Wild West RP" set in 1899 from the game Red Dead Redemption 2 with modded servers from the mod RedM. Here are the titles for each pieces:

No. 1 : Bery, The Huntsman. (https://www.youngcomposers.com/t41558/the-six-adventurers-no-1-bery-the-huntsman/)
No. 2 : Susie, The Gunslinger.
No. 3 : Calvin, The Carolina Ranger.
No. 4 : Enola, The Nightstalker. (https://www.youngcomposers.com/t41611/the-six-adventurers-no-4-enola-the-nightstalker/)
No. 5 : Shadow, The Chief of Wapiti. (https://www.youngcomposers.com/t42316/the-six-adventurers-no-5-shadow-the-chief-of-wapiti/)
No. 6 : Eva, The Mysterious Herbal Wanderer.

The piece itself involves a character named Bery Quigley (the character is played by Bizcotto on Twitch), and his journey towards finding his true purpose on life, with many life and death experiences, friends and company he made along the way, and his true lover and fiancé, Susie Quincy (character played by PeachTreeMcGee on Twitch).

The sheet music has been updated. The detailed explanations now include No. 4 : Enola, The Nightstalker. Feedback is always appreciated!

I think this is a delight! Your control over jazz harmonies and rhythms is quite impressive. The pianist is really talented. This reminds me in many ways of Liszt (especially around 2:22), if Liszt had had a more expansive jazz vocabulary. It also reminds me of Japanese jazz (especially around 1:42), like it belongs as background music for an anime movie. But this is quite virtuosic at times, and evocative! Great job using harmonic motion to tell a story.

Your return to the main theme gives this piece a hint of form, which helps prevent it from feeling like a stream of consciousness improv. Some listeners really need to hear a strong form in order to feel comfortable with a piece of music. You may lose some people that want to hear music with a more cohesive, linear quality and clearly defined form. I am not one of those listeners however; I enjoy pieces that wander and search and quest, and I appreciate the artistic potential of such a set-up. The fact that you are portraying a character, in my opinion, gives you total leeway to follow the concept to its end and invent your own forms to suit the character. My only recommendation would this: don't allow every movement in your planned suite to wander too much without a solid form. Give the listener a couple movements interspersed throughout that are anchors, something more predictable to give their ears a rest in between more frenetic movements like this first one. That way you can strike a balance between chasing your concept and creating a piece of art that is actually enjoyable to listen to all the way through. Too much chaos can wear out the listener after a couple movements of it. Thta's my two cents. (I have always struggled with this very thing as a composer).

What you start at 4:52 is delicious. 

Cheers!

On 12/7/2020 at 1:11 PM, Seni-G said:

I think this is a delight! Your control over jazz harmonies and rhythms is quite impressive. The pianist is really talented. This reminds me in many ways of Liszt (especially around 2:22), if Liszt had had a more expansive jazz vocabulary. It also reminds me of Japanese jazz (especially around 1:42), like it belongs as background music for an anime movie. But this is quite virtuosic at times, and evocative! Great job using harmonic motion to tell a story.

Your return to the main theme gives this piece a hint of form, which helps prevent it from feeling like a stream of consciousness improv. Some listeners really need to hear a strong form in order to feel comfortable with a piece of music. You may lose some people that want to hear music with a more cohesive, linear quality and clearly defined form. I am not one of those listeners however; I enjoy pieces that wander and search and quest, and I appreciate the artistic potential of such a set-up. The fact that you are portraying a character, in my opinion, gives you total leeway to follow the concept to its end and invent your own forms to suit the character. My only recommendation would this: don't allow every movement in your planned suite to wander too much without a solid form. Give the listener a couple movements interspersed throughout that are anchors, something more predictable to give their ears a rest in between more frenetic movements like this first one. That way you can strike a balance between chasing your concept and creating a piece of art that is actually enjoyable to listen to all the way through. Too much chaos can wear out the listener after a couple movements of it. Thta's my two cents. (I have always struggled with this very thing as a composer).

What you start at 4:52 is delicious. 

Cheers!

 

Well, thank you!

There are reasons about why the piece wander so much, and quite virtuosic at times. Bery has gone so many, I mean SO many phases throughout his life (Almost a year worth of story, almost everyday something new was happening). The fact that one time he was an detective wandering to a new place, to having a crazy childish girlfriend that lasted only about 3 months, then joining a criminal gang that was formed because of an accident, followed by having a ritual performed on him some natives to get rid of an evil spirit that had controlled him since he was a child, to having another girlfriend that is really naive and nice (the scenes created from them were really wholesome) but a company trying to kill her parents and demolish her tobacco business, is really crazy.

Not sure if you noticed, but there is a second theme (Susie Q's theme) that goes along with the coda, that is also scattered throughout the piece. At the end of the story, before Bery and Susie left the country by boat to flee from the evil company, Bery proposed marriage to Susie. That is why the coda, when the main theme returns, is very triumphant and virtuosic. It's almost like "Finally, we are out of these problems and have a normal life together at least".

The other pieces from the suite will be slower, have more solid form, and less chaotic from this one for sure, but a piece like "Shadow, The Chief of Wapiti" will almost be like this piece, but less chaotic. 

And also, it is funny that you said "The pianist is really talented". It's really just me messing around with dynamics and tempos on the midi xD.

It's also funny that you said the part around 1:42 sounds like it belongs to an anime movie. Well, the player of the character (Bizcotto) said that Bery is like an anime protagonist, so yeah.

👀 Still waiting for the score to come out

7 hours ago, PaperComposer said:

👀 Still waiting for the score to come out

 

score added 😄

I'm going to agree that you scarcely seem to allow the listener to latch on to a melody or sufficiently fleshed out phrase in this.  Overall it seems like an overly complex show-piece.  While it is great that you can write for piano virtuosically, the great composers of piano music like Chopin and Liszt managed to do that while still writing great themes and melodies which is the whole point of music.  This seems rushed.  You didn't have time to properly expose the listener to the thematic material and allow them to really absorb one idea before overloading it with virtuosity.  Usually the melodies that really grab a listener and stay stuck in their head are relatively simple though.

There are some places where the way you notate things could be improved.  The figure you have in meas. 35 and 37 in beats 1 and 2 in the right hand should be notated so that the last 16th note of beat 1 gets tied to an 8th note in beat 2 to clearly delineate the groups of four 16th notes in each beat.  The right hand in meas. 128 - couldn't that just be quarter note triplets, accented and staccato?  Meas. 129 would ideally be notated as one long fioritura including both the right and left hand notes in one beam. Measures 86 - 90 are so muddy as to hardly be able to be called music.  I don't know what kind of impression you could expect the listener to have of those bars.  I can't make anything out of it.

In summary I think you have a common problem that composers encounter which is that you don't give your music enough space to really speak.  Thanks for sharing!

43 minutes ago, PaperComposer said:

I'm going to agree that you scarcely seem to allow the listener to latch on to a melody or sufficiently fleshed out phrase in this.  Overall it seems like an overly complex show-piece.  While it is great that you can write for piano virtuosically, the great composers of piano music like Chopin and Liszt managed to do that while still writing great themes and melodies which is the whole point of music.  This seems rushed.  You didn't have time to properly expose the listener to the thematic material and allow them to really absorb one idea before overloading it with virtuosity.  Usually the melodies that really grab a listener and stay stuck in their head are relatively simple though.

There are some places where the way you notate things could be improved.  The figure you have in meas. 35 and 37 in beats 1 and 2 in the right hand should be notated so that the last 16th note of beat 1 gets tied to an 8th note in beat 2 to clearly delineate the groups of four 16th notes in each beat.  The right hand in meas. 128 - couldn't that just be quarter note triplets, accented and staccato?  Meas. 129 would ideally be notated as one long fioritura including both the right and left hand notes in one beam. Measures 86 - 90 are so muddy as to hardly be able to be called music.  I don't know what kind of impression you could expect the listener to have of those bars.  I can't make anything out of it.

In summary I think you have a common problem that composers encounter which is that you don't give your music enough space to really speak.  Thanks for sharing!

 

Thank you for the criticisms! But I do want to address some things.

Yeah sure, maybe some parts of this is very virtuosic, but then again, it is intended to be like that. I don't think it is "overloaded" with virtuosity either. Bery is an adventurous person who goes to places all the time, trying to figure out who he really was. That's why the exposure of the theme felt rushed or unproper. He was very unsure about himself. He did not know the purpose of his life. And at the coda, the full theme finally introduced properly, that's when he finally discovered his true self. I want the listener to actually looking for the theme as same as Bery looking for the purpose of his own life. And yes, this is the first piece of this suite, so don't expect all the pieces to be virtuosic and have no musicality.

And I disagree with this being rushed. I've actually entirely rewritten this piece twice now. If I actually don't like this piece or I feel like it felt rushed, I would've rewritten the entire piece again.

For those muddy parts. Yep, that's actually intentional. Again, I like to experiment on my piece. They say like "It's too muddy to hear anything, It's not music at all", well, why not embrace that. This muddy part actually creates this uneasy, unsatisfying feeling, and it perfectly fits what Bery had felt after the ritual. For some context, Bery had a ritual to remove an evil spirit that has been on him since he was a child. This spirit has wrongly guided him and has been on him for so long, it almost feel like they are one. But the spirit's intention were not good and it has to be removed from his body.

And for the score, yeah I know, I suck at writing those, but I am trying my best.

The things that give this piece, or heck, even this whole suite life is the context behind it, so if you really don't know the context, you're gonna have a hard time understanding them.

56 minutes ago, TCGFerrum said:

The things that give this piece, or heck, even this whole suite life is the context behind it, so if you really don't know the context, you're gonna have a hard time understanding them.

You're right that I don't fully understand the context but you could have made it easier by labeling the sections in the score with their programmatic meaning and more extensive program notes as you have responded here and to @Seni-G's post.

As for the complexity - I always try to find the simplest version of any given idea and work from there but I do agree that your piece sounds like it's trying to find itself so since you say that was intentional - well done!

3 hours ago, PaperComposer said:

You're right that I don't fully understand the context but you could have made it easier by labeling the sections in the score with their programmatic meaning and more extensive program notes as you have responded here and to @Seni-G's post.

As for the complexity - I always try to find the simplest version of any given idea and work from there but I do agree that your piece sounds like it's trying to find itself so since you say that was intentional - well done!

 

I agree, I should probably label the sections of the score with more extensive program notes. I think that was my original intention too, to like explain what each sections meant, but I guess I forgot about it. whoops.

Thank you for the advice! 

1 minute ago, TCGFerrum said:

I agree, I should properly label the sections of the score with more extensive program notes. I think that was my original intention too, to like explain what each sections meant, but I guess I forgot about it. whoops.

Thank you for the advice!

Well - you still have 5 more adventurers to go!

I used to write programmatic content for some of my music too (not on this website) and I usually included timestamps in the description of the piece for what each section meant (for more casual listeners who won't necessarily look at the score) in addition to labels in the score.

You're welcome and I'm looking forward to the rest of the suite!