Hi Muskego!

Before you go any farther check out "dandelion park" the tune I wrote from your essays. :)

Click here to listen.



MIDI Audio Drafts

Here is the latest Audio draft of the wind ensemble piece. Since these instruments are synthesized you'll have to imagine how it will sound once you guys put some life into it. :-) Also you'll hear other sounds in the demo... these are improvised moments in your piece. Since I don't have all your instruments handy I have to represent them in a number of ways, sometimes using my voice. Enjoy!

Click below to download/listen
Demo of Entire Piece (Edit 2) (10 min, 12 Mb)

Try and listen to how the motives relate to the Alma Mater. Basically for each minute that passes I explore a new melodic phrase. I divide the phrases of the Alma Mater in the same way we did on the super visit. About halfway through the piece I explore the alma mater in a minor mode as well.


Metric Modulations
This piece uses a lot of metric modulations (one of my favorite things ever). That's when there's a tempo change but the new tempo is related to the old one, for example, the quarter note triplet in the old tempo becoming the quarter note in the new tempo. It's tought to explain with words so click here for a recording of me performing one kind of metric modulation. Go ahead try it yourself, preferably in front of a mirror with a funny hat on. Then listen to the audio demo above and try to find all the metric modulations in your piece so far.


Motives
As we talked about during the super visit, a main source material for this piece is your Alma Mater tune. The tune has provided much melodic, harmonic and textural inspiration, however there are a couple of motives that I've pulled from the Alma Mater that will appear throughout the piece. They are derived from the first line and the third line of the Alma Mater.

Motive 1

Motive 2


Sketch
Here's a rough sketch I did of the piece. Sometimes I map out the piece ahead of time. Mostly it's just another tool... the piece tends to have a mind of its own once you get into the thick of it. Nonetheless I thought you might be interested so see this. It looks a little like wierdo-code. It's basically a timeline of the motives and concepts I am using. The time is on top (each line is one minute) and the instruments are on the left. Here are what the scratchings mean:

M1a, M1b, and M2 are the motives
A1-A8 are the 8 melodic phrases of the Alma Mater
The blueish horizontal wavy lines are harmonic support
The orange vertical wavy lines are pitched-textures
The yellow dots are non-pitched textures
J means Joy or something unique, or new or unexplainable
The words are concepts I'm exploring in those sections
There are also some notes about large-scale harmonic movement and when the full alma mater appears.

Click to View the Sketch

Again, don't hold me to the fire when you see the finished product... the sketch is just another step down the road, you never know what's around the bend.