The Orchestration Challenge III Entry Voting

[Stephanie Pray]

Bumping one more time!!!! Please remember to VOTE!!!

[southportJim]

Bumping one more time!!!! Please remember to VOTE!!!

Okay folks...

ONE LAST BUMP!

...if you haven't yet voted, Sunday is the LAST DAY to get your vote in!

;-)

[L0W]

It closes tonight. To get the vote - people chained themselves to fences once. Don't waste yours (vote, not fence).

[Richard N.]

I'll be confirming the winner in roughly 11 hours time (that'll be 9am GMT).

This has been a great contest, with a lot of excellent entries and quite a lot of votes.

Thank you all for your input.

[Richard N.]

36 voters so far.

That's good, but more would be better.

[Richard N.]

And the winner is.....

Entry No. 4.

Well done and thanks to everyone who entered.

So I now pass the golden challenge baton on to Entrant No. 4 to set Challenge No. 4.

Also, SouthportJim and Sean have come up with a good idea - it would be great if all those who entered could post a description of how they approached this challenge regardign choice of harmony, instrumentation, etc., etc. This could prove very informative.

[southportJim]

Congratulations to all! This was a great round and I hope we'll have even more entrants (and more votes) the next time around!

Now it's "fess up time"...when everyone takes credit for their submission. Of course, you can remain anonymous if you wish, that's totally up to you...but I think we had 6 good entries this time and hope everyone will "fess up". And, of course, if the winner doesn't "fess up" then we'll have a hard time getting a theme for the next round! ;-)

With that said, I'll fess up to Entry #6.

Sean and I have been exchanging PMs on the idea of giving everyone who wishes a chance to explain how they approached the writing of their submission, how they chose harmonies, developed the theme, decided on a structure, etc. Richard, as moderator of this round, agreed with the idea. We hope that this could become a regular feature of the Challenges. We also encourage more "constructive criticism" from the GPO community, especially after folks have posted their "explanatory writeups"...if, once you see what a composer was trying to accomplish, you have a suggestion then please speak up!

So since Sean hasn't yet posted his "writeup", I'll go first...hope this is not too long.

==============Writeup===========

One of the things that I like about taking part in these Orchestration Challenges is that they force me to work to a deadline and actually finish something, instead of endlessly tweaking per normal. After not finishing in time for the second round I was determined to submit "something" this time, even if it was embarrassingly amateurish. I figured if it was really horrible and folks posted pictures of skunks or something, then I would just remain anonymous during "fess up time" and try harder in the next round.

Now before people start throwing rocks, let me say that I know this piece is not "really" jazz, which is a genre that I know next to nothing about. But the theme sounded "jazzy" to me so I set out to learn something about it (plus I had been totally blown away by Joaz's "Go Down Moses"...WOW...you can do THAT with GPO?). One of my many weak areas is form, and after a little research on the web, I figured a jazz setting would help there too (intro, head, as many improvised repeats as you can come up with, another head, and then an outro)...seemed like a good idea at the time.

First Attempt - not knowing much about jazz progressions, and not finding anything I liked against this theme, the initial "fuzzy" idea was to use static quartal chords in the vibes, some kind of ostinato in the bass, and use some borrowed "brazilian rhythms" like bossa or clave in percussion instruments in an attempt to set brazilian rhythms against "straight" rhtyhm. So I grabbed a part of the theme (notes 10 thru 13) to serve as the bass ostinato, looked up some patterns on the internet, and we were on our way. Or so I thought...after three weeks, I still couldn't take it anywhere I liked. That first attempt is here=> http://home.comcast.net/~marbella01/...st_Attempt.mp3

Second Attempt - so in the final week I threw everything out and started over. I kept the idea of "static harmony" but switched to three minor 7th chords in the vibes, an actual clave pattern in the claves, and a slightly screwed up swing pattern in the cymbals...the handbells will fall wherever I think they fit, the bass will start out with a plain vanilla "dotted-quarter plus eighth" pattern and switch, at some point, to a walking line, flute and clarinet will either trade off parts of the theme, play harmony, octaves, or unisons.

The theme seems to me to break into a "3bar + 3bar + 1bar tag" pattern, so we lop off the final three notes for use at the end only. This works better for me than the first attempt...the intro just follows the minor 7th chords and the flute and clarinet do some tradeoffs in the first statement of the theme. In the second statement I switch to a walking line in the bass and repeat the intro (which I guess you shouldn't really do), but a third higher. I decided to modify the theme by extending it in length using some sequences and inserting a scale line between the first and second parts of the theme. The plan for the third repeition was to move the longer "modified" theme to the bass, but I never got that far since I was out of time...so we wrapped it up by finally stating the "1bar tag" part of the theme and pulled out the gong for a totally cliched ending.

Conclusions - My favorite parts are the trade-offs between flute and clarinet in the first statement (about 0:32 to 0:40) and again in the second statement (about 1:15 to 1:25). At times I like the pairing of flute with clarinet, but at other times they seem so close in tone that they are hard to tell apart. If I were to continue with this, the first task would be to find a real progression that I like, instead of just forcing it against a string of minor 7th chords. I guess handbells aren't very jazzy either, but I do *love* GPO's handbells...they are so crisp and have so many overtones hidden down in there that I can, and have, wasted entire Saturdays just messing around with GPO handbells. ;-)

Regards,
SouthportJim ;-)

[SeanHannifin]

Now that the competition is over, it time for revelations . . .

I will admit that I composed entry #3 !!

At first, I spend a while trying to decide how to harmonize the piece, but my attempts were horribly futile. So I basically decided to forget harmony and just have fun and experiment with the melody! I chose a rather strange ensemble with the instruments I've hardly ever used, like xylophone, vibraphone, hand bells, miramba, harpsichord, etc. and even threw in a double bass and bassoon

The first two notes of the melody became the beginning and ending motif, where the two note motif is simply echoed through the ensemble. Then the melody plays through a few times (sometimes overlapping) with some attempt at counterpoint until it gets to two notes, which become faster and faster. It then goes right back to the melody, only this time with a greater tempo and in parallel fifths (I think that's the right terminology) and again with some overlapping. At 1:11, the melody starts in one instrument, starts again in another instrument, but transposed down a second, starts again in another instrument transposed down yet another second, etc. until you have most of the instruments playing different parts of the melody at different times in different keys. Finally the xylophone starts play the melody kind of semi-backwards, when it turns into alberti bass. I can not help but be diatonic! The melody plays through, but this time some notes are changed so it stays within the key. Finally the piece ends again with the two note motif it started with.

And fortunately it seems it was tied for third! Thanks for the votes!

And congratulations to the author of entry number 4. I look forward to whatever kind of melody or theme you write to be orchestrated for Challenge IV

Thanks to all who participated and voted! It's been great!

[SeanHannifin]

Jim, so you were the one I was tied with! I loved your entry!

[southportJim]

Jim, so you were the one I was tied with! I loved your entry!

Thanks, Sean...and the same from me going your direction!

When I first heard the opening bars of your entry I thought "Oh no! Not handbells! Now I have to figure out some other way to be unique...I've been exposed!". ;-) I really liked the way you moved parts of the melody so quickly thru the different instruments...and the bassoon was a great idea.

I'm really enjoying playing with the pitched percussion in GPO...never knew much about percussion before, so it's been a real treat!

;-)