Faint hope for the faint of heart

Hey guys, been a minute, haven't really been composing. I broke out of my slump tonight after watching a good action film and drinking copious amounts of coffee. Hope you're all doing well. Any critiques are much appreciated, although not having a score kind of limits that in a lot of ways. Maybe there's a lesson in that.. I'll think about it. In the meantime, hope you enjoy my latest work. 

Nice work dude, good to see you still going at it.

Good piece - difficult to relate it to the title. Music to calm the savage beast or breast or whatever it is. Calm, pastoral, to me in the vein of modern traditionalists.

It flows nicely and with good orchestral balance. Nice touches as with for example the harp glissando. It has scope for development but you chose to leave it as it is which is about right for the duration. Only two things raised exclamation marks. 1) It was suffused with reverb that blurred clarity - very filmy - but leaving me to guess how you scored the accompaniment. It sounded like soft brass in many phrases; and 2) the closing IV-I cadence which came across rather cheesy, IV major 3rd dropping to the minor third before the tonic. The reverb works fine for this tempo and style, anything faster risks blurring the harmony.

Altogether a pleasant listen. Great.

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I really enjoyed the warmth of this work.  It reminds me of works by Vaughan Williams i.e., A Lark Ascending.  

17 hours ago, gmm said:

Nice work dude, good to see you still going at it.

 

thanks man

7 hours ago, Quinn said:

Good piece - difficult to relate it to the title. Music to calm the savage beast or breast or whatever it is. Calm, pastoral, to me in the vein of modern traditionalists.

It flows nicely and with good orchestral balance. Nice touches as with for example the harp glissando. It has scope for development but you chose to leave it as it is which is about right for the duration. Only two things raised exclamation marks. 1) It was suffused with reverb that blurred clarity - very filmy - but leaving me to guess how you scored the accompaniment. It sounded like soft brass in many phrases; and 2) the closing IV-I cadence which came across rather cheesy, IV major 3rd dropping to the minor third before the tonic. The reverb works fine for this tempo and style, anything faster risks blurring the harmony.

Altogether a pleasant listen. Great.

It was soft brass, French horns and trombone. I think I may have varied how much reverb was on what instrument which is kind of cheating but it makes things easier, at least to me as a mixer. 

Yeah I see your point about the ending being cheesy, I guess to me thats like my favorite easy cadence (minor plagal), but I could see how one could see it as ehh kind of a cop out? I'll think about it, thanks. 

1 hour ago, MJFOBOE said:

I really enjoyed the warmth of this work.  It reminds me of works by Vaughan Williams i.e., A Lark Ascending.  

Thank you!!

Very affecting music with lots of beautiful moments.  I love how you end up alternating between chords that are distant from the tonic making the music sound like it's totally ventured into foreign harmonic territory.  I think someone on the discord server said something about varying the textures a bit and I agree that towards the end I felt like maybe introducing some polyphony or canonic imitation in the inner voices or just more movement would have benefited this piece.  On the whole though the simplicity really works especially in the beginning.  Great job and thanks for sharing!

6 minutes ago, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

Very affecting music with lots of beautiful moments.  I love how you end up alternating between chords that are distant from the tonic making the music sound like it's totally ventured into foreign harmonic territory.  I think someone on the discord server said something about varying the textures a bit and I agree that towards the end I felt like maybe introducing some polyphony or canonic imitation in the inner voices or just more movement would have benefited this piece.  On the whole though the simplicity really works especially in the beginning.  Great job and thanks for sharing!

 

what is polyphony and canonic imitation? Also thank you sm, glad to see you're a moderator now, couldn't think of a better person for the opening. 

1 minute ago, Left Unexplained said:

what is polyphony and canonic imitation?

Fancy words for counterpoint - two melodies at the same time.  Polyphony is a term used in contrast to monophony which is just one melody at a time without any accompaniment, homophony which is when a melody is matched with an accompaniment that is secondary to it, heterophony which is when variations of the melody are all played at once, and polyphony which is when multiple equally important melodies are played at once.  And canonic imitation is when melodies imitate one another as if in a canon or a fugue (although usually not as strictly).

Ahhh ok.. Yeah that would be cool.. There's such a diverse range of options when it comes to composing and melody writing and I haven't even scratched the surface yet. Exciting time for me as a composer (having the opportunity to expand my arsenal), terrifying time as a human on planet earth (other arsenals being put on high alert). I'll ask you more about this later! Thanks