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Hi y'all, feel free to listen and leave comments, appreciate it!!! >>> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxBUpbdLNDYPcgTa03Ckmfw >>> https://www.willykuomusic.com/ >>>

This is a song that I composed a while a go. The audio is live from a concert back in January. The poem is written by me and it's in spanish. Youtube: Tenor: Julio Cesar Betancourt Pianist: David Lopez

Hey! It's a pretty short improvisation but I hope you will get a kick out of it anyway. ;) https://youtu.be/zZMdt0NM6iA Have a good day! Thank you for watching! :)

The conductor of the my university's wind orchestra, who I've known (and played under) for many years, has been hinting for quite a while that he would be very interested in having me write something for the ensemble. I finally wrote something over the last summer holidays, and they premiered it in a concert a few weeks ago. It's my first piece ever written for wind band, and certainly my largest-scale work ever performed so far, but having played in wind bands and brass bands for the last 15 years I felt confident that I knew what traps to avoid. I didn't, of course - I met up with the conductor a couple weeks before the first rehearsal and he had a longish list of stuff I had to fix, including things you just don't do like writing the seconds above the firsts for any instrument, which as a percussionist was not something that had ever occured to me. The recording is actually taken from the rehearsal before the concert, as the concert performance itself came very close to falling apart - my piece wasn't the only one affected, people just weren't concentrating that night. It's not a perfect recording of course, but it was a relatively difficult piece, as well as being slightly differently written to most of what we were used to. For a no-auditions ensemble made up of a mix of music and non-music students, I felt we did alright. (I say 'we' because I was playing in it as well due to lack of percussionists.) The piece was not necessarily meant as any literal or metaphoric representation of birds themselves, but more as a way for me to explore flashes of the potential colours of the ensemble, as one might experience flashes of colour in an aviary. Colour is something that can be influenced both by instrument choice and by harmony choice, and I really enjoy just slightly changing one of those and seeing what the effects are. I also really wanted to rebel slightly against a trend I sometimes see in wind band writing, that of including an instrument (particularly percussion) just for the sake of it. Any time I included a percussion instrument, it was not just for rhythm or to bolster up the overall sound, but for its particular colour or effect. https://soundcloud.com/fotytoo/aviary-live In other news, I have been accepted into the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, in Glasgow, to start a masters of music in composition this September, which I am super excited about! I have started a GoFundMe to try and help very slightly with the enormous cost of being an international student - https://tinyurl.com/mkejaqg. If anyone is in a particularly generous mood, I would appreciate any small donation :)

As a few of you already know, my tone poem El Cadejos, Op. 38 (a work resulting of another YC competition back in 2013) was selected by Costa Rica's National Symphony Orchestra for a live reading (and possibly a premiere in the near future). I was fortunate enough to have recorded a few sections of the rehearsal - and since none of YC members have ever heard a live recording of any of my orchestral pieces, I wanted to thank the community for its continued support by sharing a short excerpt of it (about 1:30 minutes, close to the piece's end). So... here it is. http://www.robert-f-beers.com/426370041 (BTW, that's my "official site" in Spanish, and the recording is the first listed piece). Let me know if the link is fine. Thanks a lot!!

Maybe something slightly unusual for this site, who knows. I joined my university's handbell society a couple years ago, and eventually wanted to write something for us, so this is what resulted. Recording is live, taken from a rehearsal. I have also written an original piece, which they will be getting to in the coming months so there is no live recording yet. My composition process was pretty similar to the way I write most of my pieces - I started off with the idea for the introduction, and then just sat down at the computer and let the rest of the piece flow out from there. Writing for handbells does present some slight challenges not present with other instruments - for example, you can't write too chromatically, or too clustery in the bass, we only had a 4 octave range of G to G, and the amount of people in the ensemble (either 7 or 8, I can't remember) limited the variety of notes I could use in quick succession which was why I mainly wrote in pentatonic-like figures - but I love the sound of handbells, and you can write chords and passages that would be impossible for one person on piano. The score is slightly clunkily/lazily written at times in terms of specific instructions (handbell music can get VERY specific in its articulation), but I wasn't too worried because I was there at every rehearsal (I was playing the A and B below middle C, for the record) so I could let them know what I wanted. One problem which I hadn't anticipated was a few members of the group actually had trouble with the 9/8 time signature, although it's relatively slow. It seems that although 3/4, 6/8 and even 12/8 are common, 9/8 is relatively rare in handbell music, and those who didn't necessarily play orchestral instruments weren't used to it.

A short marimba duet I wrote a couple years ago. Recording is me (on marimba 2) and a friend, in a concert. The piece just started by me wanting to write a marimba duet, and I started each movement just by thinking about something I could do on marimba. Each movement/'sketch' ended up kind of short, and I knew I could probably extend any of them, but I only wanted a 5-6 minute piece for this particular concert. The first movement was very much inspired by the music of Nigel Westlake, which I had played some of in a percussion ensemble (See his 'Omphalo Centric Lecture' or 'Malachite Glass'). The second was inspired by Bach two-part inventions and trio sonatas that we also played in the ensemble. The third movement as far as I know is all me. It has probably one of my favourite musical ideas I've come up with. I had originally intended it to be slightly faster but my friend wasn't able to play it up to the speed I wanted, but I think it works okay as it is.

This was my final composition project for last year! The 7(/4) time signature was chosen from the beginning; being the number of days in the week it is meant to symbolise the repetitiveness of life during boring times, when every day feels the same: we feel trapped in the same dream -- everyday. No sadness, no happiness. Just a dream. We feel trapped, we try to escape, we get increasingly desperate... But in the end we all fall back down into our prison. The audio was recorded live -- I am the pianist; the performance was ill-rehearsed (we had very little time) and the higher-quality camera/micro ran out of storage mid recording so I had to upload the low-quality one :P Anyway, please don't get mad at anything different from the score or any mistakes or fumblings (there are many ). Any feedback welcome!! PS: the slurs were meant as phrase markings, not bow slurs. Violin and viola - Richard Tomes & David Wyn Lloyd, teachers at the Academia de Música de São João da Madeira, Aveiro, Portugal.