Orbes, for Orchestra (Spitfire audio samples)

Good morning everyone,

Orbs is my last composition of the summer. Symphony Orchestra, presents itself as a long adagio between post tonal, post romantic... Exceeded... As you are now used to.

Here again, fragments of my manuscript illustrate the music for the Youtube video.

My wife finds this composition boring, I don't know if she's right (because I'm not of this opinion, how do you want me to be objective? Especially since these Orbs giving the title are also an allusion to a problem that has just happened to me with an alteration of my left retina... Who makes me see fantastic halos before my treatment! Blinding orbs or jellyfish. Very pretty and spectacular but not necessarily reassuring!)...

Good listening, then, and a thousand thanks in advance for your comments.

First, I love the samples here.  I am saving money for VST set.  Now, on to the piece at hand.

Tonal colors: the atonalism with in this piece creates rather dark, mysterious setting setting. Each orchestral choir has its tonal color! and that is just amazing.

Orchestration: I have nothing negative to say about this. The textures are done well. 

Overall, well done. 

Hello, thanks for your listening and comment.

Hi,

I've been instructed/advised to always bring the listening along ... to have reference points ... rhythmically/thematically/harmonically to give the listener a "road map" along the journey.  If a work is continuous texture/color as in a kaleidoscope ... then one can get lost in the waters.  Now if the music was accompanied with an animation(s) I think it would be more accessible ... since the musical material is grounded with the illustration(s); however, as a stand along work ... I found the theme elusive. 

An excellent work. Music I find easy to listen to (and get transported by). The fact of ordinary chromatic notes/intervals is enough of an anchor for me, plus a generally slow to moderate tempo allowing easy assimilation of events. Unlike MF Oboe's advisers, I need no further bringing along! It happens.

I particularly liked the wide variation of dynamics and your use of the brass.

I WOULD have liked a score so I could have mentioned points of interest - but then as the work seems pretty-well done and dusted you probably aren't interested in such comments.

Altogether good; worthy of live performance this one. 

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I like it! It kind of reminds me of Mahler's 10th. I would love to see the score but I understand if you prefer not to share.

8 hours ago, gmm said:

I like it! It kind of reminds me of Mahler's 10th. I would love to see the score but I understand if you prefer not to share.

 

I was wondering when some one was going to say that...

We all know Malher never really 10 sympbonies. 

6 minutes ago, Kvothe said:

I was wondering when some one was going to say that...

We all know Malher never really 10 sympbonies.

I think he finished the 1st and 3rd movements though, right?  Still, my favorite is Mahler 10th Scherzo... Although the 1st movement is like something from an alien world.

Hey Jean!

I think this work is more dissonant than your previous works posted here. They are more impressionistic but this one is more spicy, no doubt @Quinn will like it. It's only in the middle section the music starts to become more impressionistic and Mahlerian as @gmm noted, but it melts away in around 4:10. I also agree with @Quinn that the music is quite easy to follow. The orchestral color is perfect, but it's really your standard to do this and what I expect from your excellent works. The D major in 6:58 and the ending is very surprising yet especially beautiful for me due to the overall more post tonal and dissonant nature of the piece; it's more like a salt-coated sugar when at the end the sugar appears extra sweet.

On 10/2/2023 at 11:12 PM, Krisp said:

My wife finds this composition boring, I don't know if she's right (because I'm not of this opinion, how do you want me to be objective? Especially since these Orbs giving the title are also an allusion to a problem that has just happened to me with an alteration of my left retina... Who makes me see fantastic halos before my treatment! Blinding orbs or jellyfish. Very pretty and spectacular but not necessarily reassuring!)...

Maybe your wife find you yourself much more interesting than your works!! 😛😜🤪😝

Thx for sharing your wonderful works to us again!

Henry

Oh, thank you all, and delighted that my play arouses your curiosity. However, it is only a modest exercise in style, which I am far from daring to bring closer to the immense statue of the post-romantic god that Mahler is in my eyes (and for whom I have condemned myself since my childhood).

His 10th is a symphony ghost. Only the adagio is original. The scherzo, I think, is also quite complete. But the other movements are more fragmentary (but we know that they are still quite successful for some passages). All this deserves to be checked, (I'll see what HL de la Grange says).

Dying at 50 and letting us glimpse these worlds that have been open to his genius since at least the 9th or the song of the earth. 50 years may seem quite old to you, you young people, but I, who am 52, can tell you that we do not want to give up life at all and that we do not yet feel a foot in the grave, even if the health glitches are starting to annoy you.

So, out of pity, don't say the obvious. It looks a bit like Malher, it's quite right, like an allusion, like a wink, but it's a hobby on my part, as we play with his electric, miniature, simplistic train, at the opposite of the demiurge world builder who is the great Gustav. I also believe that it is useless to make this precision because your ears know it. We can think of this or that composer, but everything remains in its place.

Unfortunately, I can't give you an orchestral score since it doesn't exist. I usually write on 3 lines (or even sometimes 4) and then I orchestrate directly afterwards. I sometimes annotate the manuscript, for some orchestration ideas but quite often I already have the idea in mind of the desired mixtures.

Here, the overall trajectory was therefore a brutal attack, like blindness, then its slow and progressive 'hemorrhagic' consequences, before letting the echo of a tonal world win, open to an already distant past. I am immersed in the reading of Thomas Mann's huge book, which is an absolute jewel of literature. No doubt, this too has contributed to some shades of what I have in mind at the moment...

EDIT. At the rereading of this answer I really appear very pedantic. A thousand a thousand excuses. And again, thank you very much for listening and comments.

23 minutes ago, Krisp said:

Oh, thank you all, and delighted that my play arouses your curiosity. However, it is only a modest exercise in style, which I am far from daring to bring closer to the immense statue of the post-romantic god that Mahler is in my eyes (and for whom I have condemned myself since my childhood).

I won't comment except I found your work most engaging which is more than I can say for ANY Mahler I've heard - and I've been put through a lot of it over the years.

As for Deryck Cooke's 10th Symphony...I heard he borrowed quite a lot from Mahler to write it. 

Edit. I do think Mahler was at last getting somewhere with what he completed of his 10th but not in the direction Cooke took it.

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For those interested in Mahler's 10th, I came across this very well done and interesting article (unfortunately in French, but google translate is your friend, like mine often here in my answers) (Thus, you often forgive my misinterpretations and my misunderstandings)...

https://www.espritsnomades.net/musiques/gustav-mahler-symphonie-n-10/

I meant to ask what samples you are using? You mention Spitfire, but is it the Symphonic Orchestra? Or BBCSO? Or Abbey Road Orchestra?

2 minutes ago, gmm said:

I meant to ask what samples you are using? You mention Spitfire, but is it the Symphonic Orchestra? Or BBCSO? Or Abbey Road Orchestra?

 

It's BBCso pro for the ensemble.. I also use here the passionate string set for passages in reduced numbers single strings as well as solo string samples for some solo passages (viola violin and double bass)

I like the way your music seems to flow naturally, and yet still go to surprising and unexpected places.

You definitely know how to get the best out of your sample libraries.

I have a condition where I occasionally see bright white and black strobing patterns filling my field of view.

Apparently it's a visual migraine (without the headache).

Perhaps I should write a piece called "Strobe"!