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Frosty

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Posts posted by Frosty

    Piano Composing

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    The problem with not learning the instuments and propper orchestration and solely relying on samples is that a solo flute sounds as loud as 6 horns with the samples. It's a dangerous road to take and rely on without knowing yourself what the instruments are really like.

    I call that MIDI-itis.

    Sure you can get things to sound good, but balances and streghths and weaknesses of instruments in that context are not there. You can get a flute that is written in the treble staff (most of the time flutes ae written above the staff) to sound very big. Well, if you know about flutes at all, any note IN the staff is going to be airy and a bit weak, and weaker the lower you go. In a real orchestra, Flutes plaed in the staff are not going to be heard with a lot of other things going on around them. You can put an oboe five lines above the staff and have it play back beautifully through a sampler or synth or whatever. In real life, you are going to have an oboe player give themselves and anneurism and blow out certain parts of their anatomy to even get close to that, and not hit the actual note.

    A big inside joke with bassoon players is the opening to the "Rite of Spring". They have made up lyrics to it: "I am not an English Horn" Only very talented players can play the opening effectively.

    Avoid MIDI-itis.

    Study...listen...write.

    Piano Composing

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I will also add that that you should not force yourself to compose the same way someone else composes. Sure Williams composes at the piano because that is his medium, and maybe your as well. But a lot of his composition takes place away from the piano, which could be very helpful as well. Use the piano, but don't use it to influence your ideas initially. Get away from the piano and compose. I'm not talking about perfect pitch or anything like that. Let the ideas flow while you are away from the piano, and then let the piano double check your ideas, and then let it also help you develop ideas. This might sound like I'm contradicting myself. I am not. These ideas are lightyears apart. Do not rely on the piano to give you ideas, it will become a crutch. Let the piano be the tool of gettting your idea out.

    This part makes the assumption that you want to use the piano to compose, or the instrument as an integral part.

    Rule #1: (not a rule, but a very strenuous suugestion) DO NOT ORCHESTRATE PIANO MUSIC. If you want to make an orchestra sound like a piano, save yourself a lot of time and just write for piano. Learn the instruments, look at scores. You can tell the writers who are writing for the instruments and not translating from the piano. Prokofiev is notorious for the latter. Sure he could orchestrate, but his orchestrations are insanely difficult and counter-intuitive, because he came from a piano version of the score. Although Shostakovich, also very difficult, but easier to assimilate becuase he was writing FOR specific instruments when he was writing it.

    Study scores. As many as you can get your hands on.

    What's the most difficult instrument to play?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    The instrument with the greatest octave range is the organ, I believe it spans 12 octaves.

    To an extent I'll agree with this. But instruments of that size and magnatude are few and far between, and it also can't be considered a "practical" instrument because of its size and relatively uneasy manner. They can be designed to have a huge range, but only to a certain extent.

    Although this might surprise some people, the two instruments with the widest range (besides keyboard instruments) are...the French Horn and Tuba. Because there is so much tubing involved with each, it makes the overtones very close together and makes the range very wide. You look at a lot of classical score, the FHs were used as bass instruments. The tuba, although a younger instrument, has a phenominal range. Here is an example: In Star Wars (original soundtrack), in the cue called "The Little People" where the Jawas take R2, there is an a part starting at approx. 1:39 where what sounds like a French Horn has the melody. But it is not a French Horn, it is a Tuba. The part starts on a G in the TREBLE clef (second line). Because the mouthpice and tubing are so big, it allows for extreme ranges.

    Frosty

    What's the most difficult instrument to play?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Double reed instruments are difficult because the reeds themselves are so finiky that it makes them difficult to control. A reed might play beautifully one minute, and then are crap the next. Most professional double reed players make their own reeds because mass produced reeds rarely work for long.

    The French Horn in extremely difficult because the overtones are so close together that tuning them becomes musch more technical. All horn players play with their hands in the bell to help tuning as well as help control the tone color. You can playt any scale with an open fingering on a French Horn, but because of the over-tones the valves help in tuning of a particular note. Modern day FHs are actually two horns in one. There is Bb side of the horn, and there is also an F side of the horn. When trained as an FH player, you are taught to use both sides as one horn, therefore deciding which side to play isn't an issue. Classical horns used crooks, or replacable tubing, to play. That is why in classical scores you have FH parts in every key imaginable. When the player sees a piece and what horn to use, all he does is replace certain tubing in his horn and plays the appropriate part. There were no valves. All valves did was make more convenient to switch crooks.

    Orchestrations and sound

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    What is the difference between good orchestrating and bad orchestrating?

    How do you know what Herb Spencer whould have done different had he been around for Episodes I-III?

    Williams controls every note. Even his concert works sound very much like Williams. The orchestrating for the Bassoon concerto is phenominal. You don't get that by having other people do the work.

    I think that the turning point was with Schindler's List. Not diminshing Jurassic Park at all, but Williams became extremely subtle with Schindlers List and it has crossed into his other works as well.

    Williams has had many orchestrators, including the late, great Arthur Morton who did all of Goldsmith's orchestrations. You would be hard pressed to find where Williams left off and Spencer and/or Morton began, or Conrad Pope, Alexander Courage, John Neufeld. they all work as orchestrators for Williams, but can you tell the difference?

    No, because Williams controls every note.

    Williams style has evolved considerably. If you take Star Wars, Williams had just come off of Jaws, disaster films and comedies. Nothing subtle there. Now you take take him 25+ years later, scoring all sorts of genres of pictures, something is going to change.

    Even concert works have progressed. He has revised his Violin and Tuba concertos many times because he wasn't happy with the orchestration. Does Olympic Fafare and Theme have the same orchestrations as Summon the Heroes, the Olympic Spirit or Call of the Champions? Even if you compared them among themselves you can tell they were written by the same guy with drastically different effects.

    Whatever opinions may be, I think Williams power as an orchestrator have increased staggeringly since the 70's, with and without Spencer's help. You can hear the influence Spencer had on Williams, but he took it and made it his own and has become a phenominal writer and orchestrator, since they are one and the same.

    Frosty

    De Meij

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I really like De Meij's "Lord of the Rings". I have played the entire symphony and it is a juggernaught for any wind ensemble. The orchestration played by the LSO is extremely faithful to the original wind band orchestration.

    De Meij's second symphony is kind of a mixture of John Adams, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. Very minimalistic but enjoyable, not as melodic or expansive as Symphony #1. The Symphony #2 is called "The Big Apple" and was written in the early 90's, so it is not an memorium of 9-11. I do recommend a listen, although some people might be put iff by it's minimalistic style.

    Frosty

    Tonal vs. "atonal": What is the difference?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    North isn't really popish, although that is one element of his style. And North definately doesn't only use tonality.

    North most definitely does use tonality. He's more tonal than he sounds. Again, the key to the discussion is the difference between "atonal" and "dissonant". Listen to some of the examples of "atonal" composers mentioned above. You will definitely hear a difference.

    Tonal vs. "atonal": What is the difference?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    :mrgreen:

    Yes, all of the above is true, but I'm trying to make a long story short and not blow out anybody's brain cells and try to give simple answers to big questions. (Although I do disagree about 12-tone because of the fact that the matrices they used they fooled around with. I hate Webern, but Berg at least tried to romanticize 12-tone music. They weren't using a strict form of 12-tone, but the fundmental principle of using all tones before repeating them was rampant. It'd like saying Bach never used parallel 5ths or octaves when he did, if you look at some of his music, does that mean he just threw his own little rules out of the window? No. The ear is the best judge.)

    Free atonality? I'm not quite sure what you mean but I assume you mean "aleatoric" music or "chance" music that was John Cage's M.O. A good example of "aleatoric" music can be found in Williams "Close Encounters". more specific: Barry's abduction. Williams wrote out notes (he probably had a system, I haven't looked) but told players to play them as fast as possible, not anybody playing the same tempo as the person next to them. The result is a cacophony of sound, slightly improvised, but given a definite roadmap (Alan Hovhaness does this as well). Another good example of this is Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" where special instructions are given to string players to play their instruments in various ways to produce a sound. All film composers have studied that piece.

    John Cage's form of aleatoric music doesn't really define music in a strict sence. Cage wrote a piece called "4:33". In the performance, a piano was suspended above the stage. A person in a tuxedo comes out, takes a bow, put music on the piano and slams the cover down. This marks the beginning of the piece. All ambient noises from the audience then make up the music of the piece, the piano does not play at all. At the end of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the man slams the cover on the piano again and stands up to receive thunderous applause. A jazz group from (I think) the Carribean invented a form of music called "Free Jazz" (Sun Ra was the leader, who died a few years ago). All they did was improvise, nothing written down, no melody. It was a big hit. Sun Ra yelled at the players to start and stop and that was about it.

    Hopefully that clears up somethings.

    Tonal vs. "atonal": What is the difference?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    The difference between tonal and atonal is that atonal music lacks harmonic direction. The term has changed slightly over the years. Wagner's music was once concerned atonal, and now it is considered tonal.  

    People confuse atonality with dissonance. There are tonal pieces that are consonant (Mozart Symphony No. 40), tonal pieces that are dissonant (Crumb Black Angels), atonal pieces that are consonant (Schoenberg Verklaerte Nacht), and atonal pieces that are dissonant (Boulez Structures I). I think that is the misunderstanding.  

    And there there's serialism, which is a specific type of atonality. It too can be consonant (Berg Wozzeck) or dissonant (Schoenberg Klavierstücke).

    Then there is modalism (tonal center around a scale that is neither major nor minor: Gregorian Chant, Debussy Voiles, Stravinsky Petrushka and Davis Kind of Blue are all modal) and polytonality (Bartok Violin Duos), but thats a whole seperate discussion.

    I would include Rite of Spring as modal, although the Augurs of Spring is definately polytonal. There are also some tonal and atonal moments as well, but overall it is still octatonic (the melodies based on minor tetrachords in the octatonic scale).

    Hope this clears everything up!

    Brilliant!!!!

    Very well put.

    Composers of "dissonant" music are not straying far from tonal influences, that is a key or pitch center. A thing to remeber is that the key relationships might be very close together, or very far apart depending on the composers intentions, but they still have a pull or a "place to sit down" (as one of my composition teachers put it). Composers like Bartok, or Stravinsky or even Debussy have taken cadential (musical phrases that resolve) and have turned them around so as not to indicate a Dominant/tonic resolution (cadence). Even late romantic composers such as Wagner (mentioned above) and Mahler and Richard Strauss have done away with a dominant/tonic relationship. By definition alone, a tonal piece can only be termed "tonal" if there is a cadence (resolution). Mahler and Wagner were brilliant at stretching out a dominant sound, but never quite resolving (cadencing) to the expected chord until the very end of the piece. Yet we regard them as tonal because of the use of "traditional" harmony.

    The "atonal" composers were doing everything in their power to avoid any type of "traditional" harmonic treatments. In other words, every note of the chromatic scale was in and of itself as powerful as any other note of the scale. The 12-tone system created by Schoenberg is a rigorous system of composition where no note can be repeated until the other 11 notes of the chromatic scale was used. This system was used by Goldsmith in his "Christus Apollo" and "Music for Orchestra" concert works. Webern and Berg were the chief proponents of this system with radically different results. Next is the "serialists" who used extremely rigorous and mathmatical ways of compostion. An example of this is a composer might have a collection of 3 or 4 notes called a cell. Instead of drawing any tonal implications from these notes, he might use just the intervalic relationships between notes, i.e C-G-Bb-D. A perfect fifth exsists between the C and G, a minor third between G and Bb, a major third between Bb and D. The composer can then take these intravals (and their inversion) and devise a system that takes into account harmonic structure, rhythm, intervals, etc.

    Without going into a doctral thesis here, tonal composers might be dissonant, but still have strong ties to traditional "triadic" harmonies.

    "Atonal" composers try to break all "triadic" or "traditional" and eleminate any "tonal" relationships between notes, using very rigorous and mathmatical approaches to note relationships. Hell, even people are applying fratcals to the 12-note chromatic scale with some very interesting results, although, to me, it is a novelty.

    If anyone has any questions, post and we will try to resolve them without turning this into a text book.

    Thanks all

    Frosty

    :roll:

    Tonal vs. "atonal": What is the difference?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    From reading posts from all over this board, I think that some people aren't quite sure what the difference is between "tonal" music, "Dissonant" music (for lack of a better term) and "atonal" music.

    Tonal music is just that: Music with a strong push or pull to a specific key center or structure.

    Let us clear up a misnomer right now: There is a huge difference between "dissonant" music and "atonal" music. Even the term "atonal" is misleading. It's meaning is "without tone" wich is hardly how you would describe the style of music.

    "The Rite of Spring" is NOT an atonal piece as some people believe. The majority of Williams concert works are NOT atonal.

    In order to understand atonal, you must listen to the music of the following: Webern, late works of Schoenberg, Stockhausen, later works of Elliot Carter, Ligeti (mostly), Charles Wuorinen, certain works of Stravinsky and Copland, Oliver Messiean, Milton Babbitt, George Crumb, Harrison Birtwistle, even Jerry Goldsmith has written purely atonal concert works.

    Listen to these and compare to Williams.

    Although I haven't given you an expanation, try some of the above composers and compare. You hear what I mean

    Frosty

    Williams does use orchestrators -- here's my proof

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Copland used orchestrators, but that doesn't mean that Copland couldn't orchestrate.

    I know Barry Kopetz. He had an orchestrator job on some other movie and it blew up in his face, I couldn't fish any details out of him. He couldn't orchestrate his way out of a paper bag, which leads me to believe that only way he got a gig with Williams is because he is a good copyist. His area of expertise is conducting, he's even conducted some of my pieces, (he got his doctorate in music education), his hobby is writing band pieces. He's had a lot of them published, but they are the most derivitive, boring pieces you could play. I know Conrad Pope as well, and that man can write.

    FYI!!!

    Frosty

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