Here's a link to the score on musescore:
musescore.com/user/45506576/s...
Trying clickbait so that people will click the video. That is all true though. I'm also 20 now, sadly. Time flies. I learned piano at my church when I was 12, started composing at 15, and have written over 250 compositions since along with learning cello, bassoon, and violin. That being said, I'm actually a photojournalist. The extent of my music training was winning a scholarship that let me take fulltime music classes on top of my fulltime art classes at a community college. Mostly theory stuff and some piano lessons. I was taking 8 classes for two semesters. It was fun. 🙄
This is a culmination of a lot of work. A lot more work than normal. I have deleted more bars of music than I think I have ever deleted for a single piece. So, many failed attempts and failed motifs and ideas. There are probably like 20 3-minute long recordings on my phone of just ideas. And then shuffling through all of these and reworking things and re-orchestrating things. This has been, by far, the most tedious and time consuming and frustrating project that I have ever begun.
That being said, I have mixed feelings about it. I'm probably going to continue to make small changes to this, while mostly maintaining the general structure that you see here. But over all, I am pretty happy with what I have produced.
The first movement, which out of all of them was the easiest to write, came naturally to me. It was relatively straightforward to orchestrate, and aside from experimenting with trills, brass registers, and solo parts, nothing was really that challenging for me technically. From a harmonic standpoint, this movement frustrated me like nothing else that I have written. There are two central motifs of this first movement. The first motif, which continues to appear throughout the movement I treated more like an opening motif than an element of the symphony. So, it's use in development of the piece, for the most part confined to the first movement. The trill pattern that accompanies it is alluded to in the fourth movement and I believe the third as well. The second motif is the interesting one that forms the dissonant chord cluster. This essentially becomes the central motif of the entire symphony and is alluded to, at some point, in all of the movements, to add to the cohesiveness of the piece. My frustration came about after like two months of trying to write something that was even close to as good as this movement was. I was having a serious writer’s block.
The second movement is very self-contained. It has essentially one motif and it builds to a very specific point. There are some interesting chord progressions, which is honestly the only reason that I kept the movement instead of shifting gears. The diatonicism of this movement becomes a source of contrast as the piece continues. I did however slip certain motifs from the third and fourth movement into the inner workings of this movement, so if you really want to look for Easter eggs, this movement has a few.
The third movement was actually composed last. I was struggling with this movement because originally I was writing something that I didn't like. I actually don't remember what it was, but I ended up deleting it out of frustration. Then, I started writing an idea that was heavily inspired by the beginning of Korngold's violin concerto, which if I had dedicated more time to, might have been a viable solution, but I'm not sure whether it really would have gone. Anyhow, I completed the fourth movement recapitulation and in doing to came across this chorale idea for the French horns that I found interestingly chromatic. So, I decided to develop that into what is now the third movement. Slight changes in orchestration will probably eventually happen, especially to this movement.
The fourth movement is by far my favorite, and I didn't think that I was going to write something that I liked better than the first movement. But I'm really proud of what I made here. It's built basically off of extended harmony around minor7b5 chords, which produce an ambiguous sonority that allows me to experiment with tritone substitutions as well as some unusual cadences. This was a fun exercise in orchestration as well. If anyone is a percussionist and can tell me whether the part that I've written for glockenspiel is even playable, I would greatly appreciate it.
As always, I need your feedback. Suggestions, critiques, and I suppose complaints are all welcome. I feel like someone's going to take that seriously. Oh well. (Thanks so much to those who've already made some suggestions. I've made quite a few improvements already because of them.)
I. Quasi Adagio (0:00)
II. Allegro Molto (7:46)
III. Lento (13:57)
IV. Moderato (20:41)
#justiceforsalieri #music #classicalmusic #symphony #contemporaryclassicalmusic #originalmusic #minor7b5 #orchestra