Thursday May 14th, 2022
About one year after finishing my first orchestration project, I finally managed to complete my second project: a small piece for Strings and Woodwinds.
This took me quite some time as I has limited availability for these musical activities over the past few months. But little by little, I managed to come up with something. There it is!
Strings and Woodwinds project - score (PDF file)
Strings and Woodwinds project - music (DAW-produced MP3 file)
This is a piece of music written for the following instruments: Violins 1, Violins 2, Violas, Violoncellos, Double-basses, and also for Flutes, Oboes, Clarinets in Bb and Bassoons. Like with the previous project, I composed a piece of music that has an intro and a theme played twice (I revised my previous expectation to compose a Rondo pretty quickly, as it actually was a pretty ambitious goal haha).
I'm pretty happy with the end-result, I think this piece is a bit richer than the previous one, more exploration was made possible because I had to deal with two instrument families this time, and I had a longer theme here to play with. I also encountered some challenges, I asked myself a few questions when orchestrating. I'll go through some take-away items.
I wanted to come up with a longer theme compared to what I had composed previously, mostly because I wanted some room to create opportunities for counter-melodies and other motifs.
I think I managed to achieve this by playing the same note over a couple of measures, at some point during the theme. For example, whenever the violins play a whole-note as part of playing the theme, there's room for the Woodwinds to take over for a bit there. I think Woodwinds can really shine when they play a sort of counter-melody, even when it is for a short amount of time. That creates an interesting dynamic, an interesting mix.
The theme includes some triplets as well. Before introducing them, I was using half-notes, justified by the fact that I wanted to create space for experimentation, as mentioned above. But this setup was detrimental to the overall dynamic of the theme: the melody was feeling bare, a bit boring. So I thought mixing some ternary over binary rhythm could fill this gap, and that's why I went for some triplets here and there.
Towards the end of the course on Woodwind orchestration, there's a small module on instrument combinations. I leaned on this first to have an idea about which among the Woodwinds and the Strings I could have played together. I also referred to the Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL) website which I had mentioned in a previous post.
VSL - Violin sound combinations
I just like how the timbre of the Oboes sounds when playing a melody against violins playing a counter-melody (or a background). This is a personal preference, but this may be the point actually: one's vision of how a melody should be interpreted will be reflected by one's feeling or tastes. It will depend also on what one has in mind when wanting to describe an emotion or a scene: for example, should the melody of a theme from a piece titled "Returning home" be played by a Clarinet or a Cello?
I need to understand how to see a melody through the lens of each instrument, and check for each of them if related feelings come out accordingly.
After experimenting with this music piece, I noticed that more Woodwind instruments are generally more suited to play a melody (or a counter-melody) than Strings. For example, if we consider low-register instruments only, I feel like bassoons are more suited to play a melody that double-basses.
There was an interesting element that I had to pay attention to, when I wrote a melody for Woodwinds (namely, the theme played by oboes): I had to make room for breathing. This is something that I tried to do, I don't think it was too detrimental to the theme itself.
I tried to use some Woodwinds as background when the theme was played by the violins, the second time around. This was tricky, I tried to use the bassoons to double/complement the double-bass, but I think I got this wrong. And that's may be the biggest take-away for me here: the more instruments, the trickier it gets to get the balance right.
My course instructors had warned me: the one thing beginner orchestrators will get wrong is balance. I'm one of them, but I'm starting to see it now and I'll do a better job next time. :)